This review is spoiler-light, alluding to mid and lategame story elements without going into detail. Gameplay elements discussed should all have featured in promos and trailers. I share some details about a specific gameplay sequence from the first dungeon.

In 2017, Nintendo published The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, representing a landmark take on the open-world genre and a radical shift in direction for the larger Zelda series. I’m not much of an open-world, make-your-own-fun kind of gamer – I tend to prefer a more curated experience – but I was still enchanted by BotW’s adventure and spent the weeks following its release playing it to death. More than the marketing buzzword it can often be, BotW’s open world justified itself with a truly freeing climbing mechanic and a series of interlinked, systemic material interactions that applied universally. It wasn’t just a big map for a game, it felt like a world unto itself with consistent physical laws. Wood burns and floats. Metal conducts electricity but can be manipulated with magnetic powers. Hot things raise Link’s body temperature and cook foods, cold areas chill the body and freeze foods. Hot air rises. Rising air lifts light objects. None of these things were ever one-off scripted puzzles or set pieces, they were simply The Rules, just like we know flammability and conductivity apply in real life. And BotW gives the player a whole kingdom to use as its physics testing ground, daring them to find something that doesn’t follow the rules, asking them to experience its systems from every angle as they forage, fight and survive.

A linear game, even with the exact same systems, would leave the player second-guessing if it was scripted, if it was all made for them instead of being its own space existing on its own terms. It would have players looking for intended solutions rather than going at a puzzle from whichever direction they spotted it, with whatever bits they have on hand.

While I’m sure BotW was a long way from being the first to try most if not all of these things, and probably wasn’t even the first to combine most if not all of them, it felt to me like a truly new experience.

And I wasn’t alone in feeling that! Overwhelmingly positive review scores across the board cemented BotW’s status as the next big thing of open-world games.

So how do you top that?

Worse, how do you top that a year after Elden Ring presented another critical darling super-influential new take on open worlds?

And hell, how do you do it using the same map and core systems as BotW, with six years of anticipation to live up to and concerns of being “glorified DLC” to beat?

You may think it’s unfair of me to get nearly 400 words into a Tears of the Kingdom review without even mentioning the actual game. I get it, but this is a game too strongly tethered to its context to not talk about it. Its use of the same overworld and systems can’t help inviting comparison between TotK and its predecessor. And emphasising the extent to which BotW was lightning in a bottle in its time only makes the ways in which TotK managed to improve on it (to the point of BotW honestly feeling like a worse game in retrospect) all the more impressive. This doesn’t just feel like Breath of the Wild again, it feels like the newness of BotW’s launch all over again. And that is truly a feat.

Tears of the Kingdom expands on its inherited overworld with two new layers to the map, a suite of new abilities and a greater focus on story.

I was sceptical of the new core powers, Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend and Recall, from the early reveal trailer, but within the opening hours I found myself using them far more often and readily than BotW’s comparatively contextual Magnesis, Cryonis and Stasis. Rather than needing specific materials like Magnesis and Cryonis, Ultrahand and Fuse are useful universally, on basically everything not nailed down. Recall ditches Stasis’s painful cooldown and momentum-building requirements. And Ascend just makes me wonder how I ever put up with climbing to high places the old-fashioned way.

You don’t even think about how little you used anything other than Bombs in BotW until you feel how seamlessly TotK’s powers slot into its world.

And the benefits are two-pronged, because the Fuse ability almost completely mends the issues with BotW’s weapon durability system, which was a point of contention even in the game’s immediate post-launch honeymoon period. By shifting the power behind a weapon from the weapon itself to the stockpileable materials dropped by enemies, TotK ensured I almost never broke a weapon without having the means to make something comparable or better immediately on hand. It was only toward the end of my playthrough that I found myself hesitating to spend weapons made from rare miniboss and boss-dropped materials on minor enemies that wouldn’t replace them.

Being able to use anything to build a weapon or as part of a contraption made the world feel so much more alive and interactable than it had ever ben before, and had me looking at it in whole new ways. Where BotW reached a point where gathering materials began to feel pointless, TotK makes sure there’s something you can do with everything you find.

TotK’s also splits the difference between BotW’s hands-off approach to story and a more traditional Zelda adventure. The final boss is still in the same place the whole game, challengable at the player’s leisure, but while you can probably guess where he is, the game withholds confirmation until you’ve seen the plot play out. The main beats of the four regional phenomena can still be done in any order, but TotK is much more firm in its suggested order, and unlike BotW, has a pleasantly surprising second act to go through between the phenomena and the finale. The midgame twist probably won’t shock anyone who’s been paying the least bit of attention, and is spelled out especially hard if you pursue the geoglyphs sidequest, but still brings a welcome bit of drama.

The game’s dungeons and bosses – though I will outline some issues with them further below – represent a definite improvement in visual appeal and spectacle from the previous game. While the size of BotW’s Divine Beasts was impressive the first time, the uniformity of them and the ultimate enemies inside them wore thin by the last one. From an enormous flying ark to an underground temple veiled by lavafalls, there’s a lot more worth remembering from TotK’s temples. The Wind Temple (which will be the only one I’ll spoil, given that it’s the first one) has the player first do an extended platforming sequence across floating ruins and the masts of a fleet of flying longboats to gradually ascend around the outside of a raging blizzard before leaping over the top of the stormfront and through the tempest’s eye onto the ark that forms the main temple. It’s thrilling and inventive and aesthetically stunning.

The game’s ending is particularly satisfying. While some will lament that the final gauntlet can’t be approached in same variety of ways as BotW’s Hyrule Castle, I thoroughly enjoyed being tested by the gauntlet of high-level enemies. I won’t spoil the tricks and forms old mate Gannondorf employs, but there’s more than a few fun surprises in there. And the game’s ending calls back to its prologue in a way that makes a for the feeling of a completed character arc for its mute protagonist.

All up, TotK is a wonderful experience that takes everything its predecessor gets right, adds a bunch of seamless improvements and new highlights and sets another new benchmark for the sterling Zelda name.

But it’s not perfect. No game is. And frankly you don’t spend 115 hours doing something in a single month without finding something to complain about.

As thrilled as I am with the dungeons’ visual upgrade from BotW, there is a disappointing lack of traditional Zelda complexity in their navigation and puzzle-solving. Even if you choose not to cheese the more open ones with Ascend or a flying contraption, there’s rarely a barrier that stops you cold. It’s probably the thing I’ve missed most from old Zelda in these new open-world entries.

The dungeons’ difficulty scaling is also a little odd too. You’re pushed toward the Fire Temple as a second stop, and it’s actually one of the more challenging ones, forcing you to open the map and trace mine cart rails between rooms and plan your way to your destination, but the intended third stage, the Water Temple, feels painfully simplistic by comparison.

More broadly, there’s a lot of clunkiness in the game, most of it left over from BotW. It’s in menus, in activating the sages’ powers, in the sheer time it takes to do things like upgrading clothes and batteries and item slots. Just finishing a shrine alone you have the animation of Link activating the terminal (unskippable), the animation of the Rauru altar thing opening up (skippable), the item get window for the blessing fading in (unskippable) and a final outro from Rauru (skippable). It’s ridiculous. Just make the whole thing skippable!

The game’s economy is also pretty rough for all but the most hardcore of completionists. Being too short on rupees to afford a full armour set and having to weigh up what bits you can mix and match with clothes you already own and food you know how to cook to get resistances to the level you want is a fun problem to consider in the earlygame, but it’s an issue when you never naturally get rich enough to go back and full equip yourself, let alone pay the exorbitant cost of the Great Fairies’ upgrades. I rarely saw a sidequest award more than 100 rupees, and things that aren’t gems sell for a pittance (presumably to encourage you to keep them on hand for fusions). In normal gameplay you’re going to maybe be able to afford one set upgraded to withstand endgame enemies and a lot of situational outfits to change in and out of. It discourages experimenting with armour and outfits the same way you get to with weapons and contraptions.

I also found that while using Fuse with your weapons was well-thought through and always fun, defensive fusions on shields were far less useful. The best things to put on them – Bombflowers, Puffshrooms and Muddlebuds – are all single use with no easy way to reapply mid-battle, and can be more conveniently and safely deployed on the end of an arrow.

And while this might just be my own playstyle, I don’t feel like I was ever strongly incentivised to push the limits of Ultrahand crafting. Often, building a cart or flying contraptions takes substantially longer than just riding a horse, Ascending, or even walking or climbing normally to your destination. And with the knowledge that anything you build will be despawned after you enter a shrine or even pass beyond a certain range exploring a cave or town, it just doesn’t feel worth the time it takes fighting the controls to make something flashy. But its hard to deny the strength of the underlying systems when looking at the kinds of crazy things people online are able to make with it.

But all these little annoyances don’t add up enough to overtake the joy of exploration and discovery. For a month, nearly all my other hobbies dissolved in the face of Tears of the Kingdom, and that on its own speaks to the game’s incredible strengths. There’s room to grow further, with streamlining and quality of life upgrades and new approaches to the bits that don’t fully fit in yet, should Nintendo attempt a third run at an open-world Zelda, but for now I’m happy to just enjoy this new peak the series has climbed to.