Caliban Zaxx Caliban Zaxx

I loved the first Hyrule Warriors game and Zelda is, by far, my favorite franchise. I had high hopes for this. That being said; This is just a poorly executed game. The pacing is bad, the story is bad, the characters, plot and dialogue is bad, the graphics are bad and the execution is bad. The plot: It spends a lot of time in cut scenes over-selling the one-dimensional aspect of each character. Every last character is an exaggerated trope of a single personality type. The plot can't decide if it wants to be canonical or do its own thing. So it tries to split the difference and fails. The gameplay: Maps and missions are slow paced and a drag. Rather than well placed, well timed events or open maps with multiple routes and keeps to capture to keep the action dynamic and rolling like in the previous Hyrule Warriors game, this one trades that in for long, narrow routes with the occasional keep along the way that basically amounts to a hack-and-slash on rails where your objective is almost always "Go from point A to point B to fight a captain. Now go all the way back to point A and fight the same type of captain again.. Mission over." The Controls: The controls are clunky and jerky. The attack animations are so erratic that you resort to blind button mashing rather than a skilled execution of play. They removed the feature to choose between the Warriors control style or the Zelda control style and, instead, hand you a counter-intuitive control scheme. One which also has you stopping the action frequently with the L and R menus to select powers that are required for winning captain and boss fights. Both of which stop the action dead in its tracks. Much like the original Hyrule Warriors game, you stop to wait for a specific attack which prompts you to attack with a certain power to weaken the enemy. But this game over does it. It has that feature on every. single. captain and boss. If it isn't a basic mob then you're playing a long defense game waiting for openings that come at random. The Graphics: They're cel shaded, of a lower rez than one might expect for the switch and, frankly, are so full of bloom and lighting effects that the game will frequently drop to 10 or 20 frames per second during attacks. Wizzobes are the absolute worst offenders of this. None of this addresses several fun features removed from the game. Alternative costumes for anyone other than Link, Easter egg references in collectible items, items actually worth collecting, different modes such as Adventure Mode, the ability to examine character models.. The list goes on. This game is basically a "How-to" on taking two good games and poorly mashing them together in a rushed out mess of bright ideas with no cohesive design direction. It feels like none of the devs even played the game themselves. It feels rushed, incomplete sloppy and empty.