The Legend Of Zelda BOTW Review

 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s sheer freedom and sense of adventure is a remarkable achievement. Right from the start, the vast landscape of Hyrule is thrown completely open to you, and it constantly finds ways to pique your curiosity with mysterious landmarks, complex hidden puzzles, and enemy camps to raid for treasure and weapons. The fact that you can tackle any one of these things at your own pace and almost never get pulled to the main path is liberating, but the way all of Breath of the Wild’s systems fit elegantly into complex light survival game is even more impressive. I’ve been running around for over 50 hours and I still have plenty of mysteries left to track down and lots of wonderfully crafted puzzles to solve. I’m in awe of the scope and scale of this adventure, and I often find myself counting the hours until I can get back in.

The untamed, post-apocalyptic, techno-fantasy land of Hyrule is the main character in Breath of the Wild. Not only is it vast, beautiful, and filled with a diverse set of locations from grassy fields to craggy alpine mountains, but it follows surprisingly realistic rules that let you pull off solutions so intuitive that you might be surprised they actually work. The trees bear fruit, grass fields can be set ablaze, and even enemies and animals behave in a believable manner, based on the skittish and aggressive reactions I’ve seen in the wild. But the realistic touches don’t end there. Each object you encounter, from sticks to apples to rocks and metallic blocks, is made of a material, and those materials usually respond to forces like fire and magnetism as you’d expect.

Autoplay setting: On

It all sets up a surprisingly fun and responsive sandbox to interact with, and one I’ve rarely seen executed so well in an action-adventure game. If you think something should work, it usually does, and that led me to all kinds of fun and hilarious experimentation. You can stand under an apple tree with a torch and bake the fruit into a quick-healing snack before you even pick it, or drop a metal sword in front of a weaponless enemy and watch it get fried by a bolt of lighting. Meanwhile, Link needs warmer clothes to survive the cold and flame-resistant gear to near the volcanic Death Mountain. It’s consistently amazing to learn how all of these systems interact with each other while you play.But what elevates Breath of Wild above its open-world contemporaries is its sheer freedom, both in its non-linear questing structure and in your ability to climb almost any surface and travel in any direction once you leave the starting area. It is the heart of what makes this action-adventure game truly special and addictive. Like many open-world games it delivers on the implied promise that if you can see it out in the distance, chances are you can eventually reach it – but here, figuring out how to get there is more often than not a satisfying puzzle in itself, and one that never gets old. For instance, a tantalizing island far off the coast of the mainland was just out of my paragliding reach for the first several hours until after I’d upgraded my abilities. When I finally did, what took place when I finally reached my objective was a great twist that blew my mind – including finding an easier alternate route I’d missed.

That paraglider is easily one of the most useful tools in Breath of the Wild because it's so versatile. You can use it to effortlessly glide across lakes and gaps or ride updrafts into new areas, and I often used each long trip across the map as a way to scan the marvelously lit horizon in search of clues or meditate on what I need to do next.