This article is spoiler-free!
“The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” the long-awaited sequel to “Breath of the Wild” released on May 26, and the positive reviews are already flooding in. The game brings all sorts of new aspects never before seen in a Zelda game. From the long-time fan to the first-timers, the game is widely being regarded as a successor to its prequel.
“Tears of the Kingdom” received a 10 out of 10 on IGN, a well-known news site for video games, and they praised the game highly for how well it lives up to “Breath of the Wild,” which was was very well-received, so Nintendo was expected to really catch the ball and run with it for the sequel, but no one could have anticipated just how much the game has taken off.
“It presents a wonderful sandbox full of mystery, dangling dozens upon dozens of tantalizing things in front of you that just beg to be explored. I’ve had so many adventures in “Breath of the Wild,” and each one has a unique story behind what led me to them, making them stories on top of stories,” Jose Otero said, in a review of Breath of the Wild in 2017.
A key feature in “Tears of the Kingdom” is its massive open-world map The map is actually the same as the Breath of the Wild map, and critics worried it would make gameplay repetitive. Some even went as far as calling it an “overpriced DLC,” or downloadable content, usually an expansion upon an existing game. Fans were instead pleasantly surprised with the amount of content added into the existing map of Hyrule.
“Tears simply send you along unexpected paths and to unfamiliar locations. That made me constantly see parts of Hyrule I knew and loved from a different perspective, breathing plenty of life into a map that clearly still had more than enough to give,” Tom Marks said in an IGN review.
On the topic of the map of Hyrule, the main area of the game, which has been celebrated for its size and beauty since Breath of the Wild, fans and critics alike seem to think the same in Tears of the Kingdom.
“You’re always gazing farther afield, though, scanning for points on the map where you’ll die exquisitely, valiantly, hilariously and embarrassingly on the way to success. ‘Tears’ is tapping the ceiling of what the Switch can do, like Ghost of Tsushima left us wondering if it represented the peak of the PS4’s capabilities,” Craig Jenkins of the New York Vulture said in an article on the game.
With the newest gaming craze being the freedom to do whatever you’d like, whether it’s actually playing through the storyline or spending time building ridiculous machines, “Tears of the Kingdom” is being enjoyed by fans far and wide.