REVIEW: Hyrule Warriors

by Meghan Duffy

Nintendo is no stranger to doing crossovers with other companies. From Pokemon Conquest to Super Smash Bros, they always put care and quality into making a game that stands out while still retaining the integrity of both series. Hyrule Warriors is no different. This Dynasty Warriors styled beat-em-up with some of Legend of Zelda’s most popular characters delivers an exhilarating experience.

One of the most enjoyable experiences in the game is saving up your special move to decimate multiple targets. But instead of using Lana’s special move, which summons the Great Deku Tree on a group of enemies, singling out one enemy in particular provides a great deal of satisfaction. The array of different characters and weapons keeps the game fresh. I ended up preferring the melee weapons to the magical ones because they have a different feel to them and are slightly easier to target specific enemies with. This can make things a bit frustrating, however, when the recommended weapon for a section of the game is the element of one of the magical weapons.

Sending waves of enemies flying back is always fun to do.

It’s also an incredibly nice looking game. While not quite at Mario Kart 8’s level of pure beauty, it really shows the power of the Wii U's processing power. The textures in game are the high quality that should be expected of this generation as well as the general style which strikes a good balance between the character designs of Dynasty Warriors and traditional Legend of Zelda games.

Although the game is enjoyable, it’s also extremely frustrating at times. There is an element of micromanaging in it that gets frustrating when playing for extended periods of time. When tackling the Death Mountain level for example, having to make sure that I had both of the boulder bases, clearing the allied base of enemies, and tackling Darunia all at the same time was awful. I had to shut off the game and take a break because of how frustrating it was. I’m fine with games that have micromanagement elements to them, but when I’m focusing on large scale tasks, the little things start to add up and make for a less enjoyable experience.

It's great to see old characters brought back to life with modern aesthetics.

The game also suffers from escort missions. The AI is finicky and while they can fight for themselves, getting them to move from a spot can be annoying. You have to clear all of the enemies with health bars above their heads from the area. Yet the AI can become stuck in fighting the smaller enemies without health bars that should have no effect on it staying there and won’t move on. Without the escort missions and the micromanaging, the game would have been a lot more enjoyable.

Although it’s fun to play in short bursts, Hyrule Warriors can get tedious when playing for longer periods because most of the missions feel all too similar. The characters are fun to play as and give something different to play, but many of the levels follow a similar pattern. Capture base, fight miniboss, capture more bases, fight boss, fight boss again, make sure your base doesn’t get captured. It’s always fun to play the levels, but the amount I can play in a single sitting is limited due to the pattern it follows. However, it still has a large amount of replayability despite theses setbacks. The levels are enjoyable to traverse and the combat system shines through and makes every playthrough fun.

Overall, Hyrule Warriors is a great experience. The characters and weapons kept the game feeling fresh and tackling the waves of enemies is incredibly satisfying. But the micromanaging and escort missions break up the fun and the game would have been better without them. There's plenty of replayability and the promise of DLC in the future leaves hope for more characters who were sadly left out