joe dillon

43 year old Zelda fan since the OG, and had my reservations about botw. Took me a bit to warm up to the way hearts were acquired and boss battles were fought, but eventually, it won me over, and I continuously played that game for longer than any other game in my life. ToTK was long awaited, and never had I thought a regression of botw was possible with the timeline given for totk combined with the feedback from millions of botw fans on the nuances at the time. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Botw was different. Gathering and cooking different food ingredients for dishes that helped you as a player in different ways, buying and selling, building using materials found throughout the map and lots more. All of this was different but was learned in a way that made sense and provoked curiosity about the games potential. The gameplay also flowed in a way that taught you conveniently on how to use the advancements you just acquired, making the game cohesive, and increasingly more exciting. After tens of hours, totk has none of these qualities. From the start of the game, it looks like a continuation of the primitive nature of botw, but then goes in the complete opposite direction and gets all techy with with an unimpressive replacement of ancient weapons in the form of boring robots whose only purpose are to explain technology that we already use in everyday life. Use of color in the maps and environment are boring and depressing, and the rate at which you find upgrades to your current weapons is slow. Totk lacks continuity, and offers zero opportunity for the excitement and intrigue necessary to keep wanting to come back to play the game. After all these hours of play I think I’m just done. I have no interest in spending the time necessary in this slow moving dumpster fire of a game. This game was a massive disappointment. I hope the next goes back to the linear path to completion formula that was so successful long ago. Botw strayed away from the traditional formula but was a pleasant surprise, and earned the chance for totk to build on the success of botw, but was a massive disappointment.