The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom review – It’ll be one of the best games EVER

It’s been an era. In fact, six years since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released and became the defining game of Nintendo’s Switch console and, for many people, the greatest game of all time.

And almost four years since the sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was first announced.

But now, finally, that sequel is just around the corner – it’s due out on May 12.

I even played some of it. A small group of Princess Zelda’s fun-loving subjects, including myself, were invited to a hush-hush event at Nintendo’s European headquarters in Frankfurt last week, where we spent about an hour and a half with controllers in our hands and Tears of the Kingdom on screens. for us.

The addition of things to do in the sky manages to surprise and delight

In fact, the whole event was so secret that, after I mentioned it to my wife, she was taken away by two burly, mustachioed men in red and green plumber’s outfits. I’m only now allowed to talk about it in public.

And what I have to say is: wow!

There’s been some concern, in the moodier parts of the internet, that Tears of the Kingdom will be too much like Breath of the Wild to really count for much.

And while it’s true there’s a lot here that will be familiar to BotW veterans – you’re still (at least in what I played in Frankfurt) the wide-eyed warrior Link, sliding and scrambling through Hyrule’s open fantasy world, fighting against Moblins and solving small puzzles along the way – TotK is also very different. So exciting.

Many of these differences we’ve known about for a while, from previous trailers and official statements, but they’re still surprising and delightful in hand.

The addition of things to do in the sky – hanging rocks and platforms far above the land you and Link previously trod – is a good example of this.

The first time I was flung there, clinging to Link’s trusty glider until a safe perch presented itself felt just as new as BotW did all those years ago.

TotK is absolutely going to fizz, once millions of players get the chance to apply their own lateral thinking to the vast expanse

And it was perfectly smooth too; proving there’s still a lot of life in the Switch’s aging hardware.

Then there are Link’s new powers. The old set of BotW – including the water-freezing Cryonis and the metal-shifting Magnesis – has been jettisoned as far as I could tell from this demonstration.

Instead, there’s a new set featuring Recall (which pauses projectiles in mid-air and sends them back to where they came from); Ascend (which transports Link up to the next available level); Fuse (which combines several items together); and Ultrahand (a souped-up version of Fuse, which allows Link to create large new objects from things lying around on the ground).

These are all pleasant things, but the dual powers of Fuse and Ultrahand in particular are, well… groundbreaking.

In one encounter I came across a fortress on a hill, full of bad guys. How do you get in? There was the option to walk through the front door. Or I could fuse a missile to my shield and go flying – whoosh! – over the walls. I chose the whooshier approach.

Elsewhere, a broken mine cart hindered my progression to a higher level. Instead of two rails, there was only one, so I couldn’t drive along it in the normal way. My solution was to fuse a hook to a cart, hang it on the solo rail, then fire a missile at the back. Again: whoosh, exactly where I wanted to get to.

I did well, right?

Actually, there is no right or wrong. When we discussed it later, it turned out that some people had put together several minecarts into a sort of caterpillar across the opening. Others had used more and more rockets to fly over. There were almost as many solutions that day as there were players.

And that’s just one small puzzle, in one short afternoon. TotK is going to be absolutely buzzing online once millions of players get the chance to apply their own lateral thinking to the vast expanse – and then show off the results in video form.

As for the all-important Zelda lore – the story and world details that fans care about – there wasn’t much to tell about my time in Frankfurt that Nintendo hasn’t already told.

The Zonai, an ancient tribe whose ruins were present in BotW, are much more present in TotK, or at least their technology. I didn’t see anything else that confirmed or denied any of the wilder theories circling the Zeldasphere.

No, this event was much more about the gameplay. And that gameplay, as far as I know, is fantastic.

Part of me wonders if there are one or two too many new systems for people to struggle with – but then again, that’s how BotW felt at first, until everyone got used to the richness of its game. I’ll have to spend more time with TotK to be sure.

In the meantime, I hesitate to say that one of the greatest games ever made is about to be improved. An hour and a half is not long enough for that kind of judgment. But I’m pretty sure TotK won’t embarrass its predecessor – far from it. What I’ve been through has only made me more excited about what was already the most exciting video game release of the year.

Can I have my wife back now, please, Nintendo? You can take all my waking hours instead.