Platform: Switch 2Age: 12+Verdict: ★★★★☆
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment – Mineru, Zelda and Rauru are among the broad cast
You wait decades for a vehicle enabling Princess Zelda to be the lead hero of a Nintendo game … and then two surface in the space of barely a year. After the splendid Echoes of Wisdom in 2024 comes Age of Imprisonment, the third in the series crossing Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda with Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors.
Unquestionably, the Zelda franchise stands leagues above the rather monotonous hack’n’slash of the Warriors games in quality. But Japan seems to love them both, which to a degree explains the cross-pollination.
Age of Imprisonment proves the best effort yet to imprint Zelda’s genealogy on the signature Warriors gameplay – a genre known as musou involving one-versus-hundreds battles in which a powerful hero mows down weaker enemies by the truckload.
The most recent attempt to fuse the two games – 2020’s Age of Calamity – struggled to impress in large part because the original Switch wasn’t up to the taxing job of rendering the spectacle of hordes on-screen.
Age of Imprisonment fixes that thanks to the horsepower of Switch 2 while introducing a host of enhancements that elevates the gameplay beyond its previously limited vocabulary of hack-slash-repeat.
Despite being developed by a new Koei Tecmo studio mostly separate from Nintendo, this new Hyrule Warriors strongly evokes the look of Zelda instalments Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of the Kingdom (2023). It tells a story only briefly outlined by the latter title during flashbacks, in which Zelda and a broad cast of others including King Rauru and his sister Mineru fought a rearguard action against evil demon king Ganondorf.
In common with practically every game linked to the Dynasty Warriors series, however, narrative and lore come second to the frequent battle sequences in which Zelda and two other companions set about felling dozens, frequently hundreds and sometimes thousands of enemies. In predictable fashion time after time, you’re funnelled along corridors by snatches of dialogue until you reach an arena space where a throng of hostiles awaits.
Zelda and pals can easily cut a swathe through the massed rabble of foot-soldiers but their leaders – familiar big brutes such as stone golems, giant centaurs and outsized ogres – pose a different challenge.
Here, the Age of Imprisonment demonstrates its evolution. Much of the combat still relies heavily on mashing the X and Y buttons in barely varying combinations – sending lightweight cannon fodder flying. But the leaders require smarter tactics and new special abilities and gadgets draw on innovations from Tears of the Kingdom. Zelda might wield a flamethrower in a devastating circle or lob a bomb into the greedy gullet of a boss. Rauru can launch a piercing sword thrust from underneath an enemy.
Specials and gadgets can be combined – flamethrower plus tornadoes equals a rolling maul of fire, for instance – by fluid switching between the three members of your party. Meanwhile, button prompts encourage you to land glorious finishing moves. This tactical variety adds up to an interesting palette of options that distracts from the essentially rote nature of the one-versus many genre.
You’d never mistake Age of Imprisonment’s gameplay for the mechanical ingenuity contained in Tears of the Kingdom. But this Zelda adventure jailbreaks itself from the constricting conventions of its musou prison.