re: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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Enemy artificial intelligence is also very impressive, as groups try to mob you or run back to claim dropped weapons. One fight with a giant in a forest saw a tree get knocked down with an errant bomb blast, at which point the monster decided to pick up the fallen trunk and start using it as a cudgel.

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These are the big takeaways from the game’s opening hours, but as impressive as the scale and rejection of formula is, it’s the little details that really stick in our minds. For example, when it starts raining it becomes much more difficult to climb because it’s slippery, while campfires go out because of the rainfall. You can judge which way the wind is blowing from the grass, and if you have an Octo Balloon (from killing an Octorock) you can tie a bomb to it and have it float towards higher up enemies – and use a Korok Leaf to waft it on its way.

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Having just completed it, we couldn’t help but think of Horizon Zero Dawn while playing Breath Of The Wild, and how simplistic it now seems compared to Zelda. You also have a bow in Breath Of The Wild, but you have to account for how arrows arc through the air, rather than it just acting like a low-tech sniper rifle. Boomerangs have to be caught manually on their return and the best way to defeat the skeletons that appear at night is to chop of their head and punt it into a river, like a goalkeeper trying to make a clearance.

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You always expect a Zelda game to be good, but the attention to detail and willingness to innovate in Breath Of The Wild is well beyond our expectations. We wouldn’t suggest that any of this necessarily has anything to do with the Switch though, as the game was originally designed for the Wii U. As such the graphics are certainly not a match for the likes of Horizon, with often very simple geometry and textures. The frame rate sometimes becomes a little syrupy too, and there’s obvious object pop-in if you look for it.

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We’re doing our best to find faults here but the truth is we’re hugely impressed. We already know some things we can’t talk about here, and other secrets that have been hinted to us by Nintendo. At this stage we’d shocked if this didn’t turn out to be the best Zelda since Ocarina Of Time. It may even surpass it, and since many still regard that as the best video game ever made it becomes almost impossible to overstate just how good Breath Of The Wild is.

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