I must admit I'm hooked. Totally, irrevocably hooked on TOTK. For a game I wasn't even considering buying, I've found myself spending more and more time playing this and though I was never really a fan of the Switch and though I own "Breath of the Wild" and didn't even get off the first plateau, I've found myself juggling the two games. But it's TOTK that keeps dragging me back.
I covered the game in a previous article where I'd just played a few hours and already liked the 'fuse' and 'ultrahand' stuff. The more you play though, the more you realise there's so much more to the game and it's easy to see why it's getting such rave reviews - even from folk like me who weren't exactly massive fans of the series.
In short, TOTK is looking dangerously like it's going to be my game of the year (unless something truly spectacular tops it - and at the moment that's looking unlikely!).
Fighting Looting, Gliding Shooting
As soon as you start to get your head around the admittedly complicated control schema for Zelda, and then start to dig into the main quests, it all starts to make sense and you realise that what Nintendo have created here is a "soulsborne" that is every bit as tough as the games that spawned that genre. You will die in TOTK, a lot. You'll die in fights (most boss enemies seem to take all your hearts out in one hit, regardless of how many hearts you have - and trying to upgrade your armour isn't exactly intuitive!). You will die in the air, as your stamina runs out mid-glide. You will die on the ground as those nasty little goblin things mass against you. You will die in the water, in the desert, in the ice as the enviroment takes its toll on you. Heck, you'll even have trees killing you. In short, there's very little in this game that doesn't fancy itself a nice piece of Link pie.
Fusing stuff to sticks and weapons becomes your best strategy as this is the quickest way to build something truly devastating. Realising that you can also fuse stuff to arrows fired from your bow is also a win.
Then there's that whole business of building crazy contraptions. I would say that I've build stuff more to get from A to B than I have to deal death from above or to use in battles, the battery power doesn't last long enough and most contraptions are a bit on the fragile side, though it is quite satisfying to build a jumbo tank with big wheels and just run your enemies over.
Cooking is one of the most satisfying things in TOTK. I realised I'd never done this at all in BOTW, the mechanic to do so is the same in both games (complete with that cool 'cooking' noise) so how I missed that I don't know, but cooking up potions and food to protect you is a great strategy.
Shrine to genius
I also rather like the Shrines. They're like a cross between a puzzle and a tutorial with some shrines being so fiendish I still haven't completed them. Usually everything you need to solve a puzzle is laid out fairly regimentally within the shrine, it's up to you to use your knowledge of the game to solve that puzzle using what you've been given. In most cases Shrines won't let you use your other abilities much but some do, and you can really come up with some great solutions once you start attacking these. They are the key to increasing your hearts and stamina, so are definitely worth investing the effort in. Be warned though, some shrines will have you tearing your hair out (this is where having no hair comes in handy!)
Nintendo has got away with a bit of a swizz at times though. A lot of characters, environments, villages and baddies are re-used from BOTW so if this is to be the pattern for all Zelda games ongoing, I wonder how long that formula can last before people get tired of it. The fuse powers are fantastic fun but I'd love to see this expanded on and I'd love to see the series move on in terms of 'go here, do this, go there, do that' and I would dearly love to see an end to the boss battles as they're my least favourite part of any game (I'm just too much of a crap gamer to love them but at least they're better than quick time events which I really hate).
Tears of the Kingdom is great though. A wholly absorbing game that I feel like even after a week's worth of play I've barely scratched the surface of. And have to say, the art team really know how to design gorgeous thicc female characters. Just sayin'!
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