Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Fans primarily looking for a meaningful addition to Breath of the Wild’s canon can skip this game. It wastes the opportunity to establish the deep connections present in Breath of the Wild, instead serving only as a vehicle for beating up bokoblins as your Breath of the Wild fave. In the absence of other payoffs—for example, I’d forgive every sin named here if, as is typical for the Dynasty Warriors franchise, each character got their own story mode—not even my ardent love for these characters was enough to sustain my interest over the entire, artificially padded game. Again, you can play as Lady Urbosa. That’s it. That’s the game.

Even with a couple of major missteps, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is a welcome excuse to return to one of the most beloved video game worlds of the last decade and spend some quality time with characters who were already dead by the time Breath of the Wild started. There's an irresistible charm to making Mipha annihilate dozens of monsters at once with a cartoonishly large water tornado.

The game never fully embraces the potential opportunities of its time-traveling premise, but I was still hooked throughout. Possibly it helped that Breath of the Wild already did such a good job of establishing the stakes. Age of Calamity didn’t have to do much to pull on the same heartstrings. Sometimes, a short cutscene with a pained glance or a wavering voice was all it took to reinvigorate the drama of it all.