How do you follow a game like Breath of the Wild? We've waited years to find out Nintendo's answer to that key question and now Tears of the Kingdom, a direct sequel, is finally upon us.

Expanding upon the last game's already extraordinary scope, the answer is a stunning success. This is a game of enormous freedom and constant invention that feels every bit as essential as its predecessor.

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Editor's Choice

Tears of the Kingdom is a ridiculous triumph, offering a suite of tools that will continually surprise and baffle you with how much control it cedes. Hyrule is busier than ever, even before you consider a sky full of intrigue and the dark and yawning chasms below. The definition of a must-play on Switch, it also pushes Nintendo's hardware to astonishing new heights technically. Platform tested: Nintendo Switch

Pros
  • Astonishing roster of abilities
  • Hugely engaging world
  • Soaring soundtrack
  • Visually splendid
  • Simply huge amounts to see and do
Cons
  • Some may find it too similar to Breath of the Wild

Direct sequels aren't too common a thing in the timeline of The Legend of Zelda, but when they do happen you tend to get something fairly memorable - think of Majora's Mask, for example, and its noticeably creepier tone compared to Ocarina of Time.

There's perhaps less of a jump between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, though - this isn't a new, skewed look at the same landscape, so much as it is a re-exploration of it.

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Nintendo

We pick up some time after the Calamity of the first game has been defeated, with Zelda and Link exploring a cave below Hyrule Castle before discovering a creepy mummified corpse that twitches into life and explodes with malice.

Link is blasted into the sky along with huge chunks of Hyrule, Zelda is zapped away in the blink of an eye, and Link awakens not with amnesia this time, but similarly stripped of his power.

Where Breath of the Wild saw you piecing together Link's absent memories while gathering allies, Tears of the Kingdom instead has you figuring out what's happened to Zelda by discovering snippets of a now-ancient past - still while gathering allies.

This is one of many ways in which the game heavily mirrors its predecessor, to the point where you could almost feel as though Tears of the Kingdom is a flawless, triple-A execution of the sort of huge fan expansions that have graced games like Skyrim in the past.

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Nintendo

It takes what was good about Breath of the Wild and effectively just expands on it, happy to re-use elements that don't need much improvement, but with plenty added into the mix where refinement was welcome.

A case in point sees Hyrule become a far more bustling place, with more NPCs making their way through it and more side quests than ever before. This is a kingdom under siege, rather than one that's been ripped apart, so it's much more alive than in Breath of the Wild.

That means some of the last game's totemic solitude is traded away, which is amplified by the presence of spectral companions that you'll collect in the game's first half. This isn't a net loss, though - it's just a difference, one of many ways in which we have a feeling that these two Switch Zelda games will stand shoulder-to-shoulder in many people's minds.

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Nintendo

We're extremely reluctant to say much more about Tears of the Kingdom's storytelling, though - it's textbook Zelda, right down to an inescapable melancholy, and once again a real pleasure to uncover piece by piece.

Technical triumph

There's no disguising or debating that the Switch is now long in the tooth, with the Switch OLED's lovely upgraded display doing nothing to change the internals behind it.

It feels something like a miracle, then, to play Tears of the Kingdom on it - to see an open world this detailed, but also with such a sense of scale.

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Nintendo / Pocket-lint

Where Breath of the Wild had you largely moving around on horseback and paragliding off taller bits of the landscape, Tears of the Kingdom takes that nascent verticality and ramps it up to the extreme.

You can now start at a point wildly high in the clouds, exploring an ancient ruined sky island for some resources or a rare item, then swan dive off it and skydive all the way down to Hyrule's surface hundreds of metres below. If you're careful, you could aim for one of many gaping chasms in the ground and actually punch through, falling even further into a yawning underworld - dark and full of dangers and almost as big as the surface world again. All of this, from the sky's top to the darkest depth, without a loading screen or a hitch of any sort.

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Nintendo / Pocket-lint

Wherever you stop along the way, you'll find lush grass, looming architecture and geology, enemy encampments and hidden secrets, all beautifully designed and with enough detail to impress.

All this runs about as smoothly as Breath of the Wild did - so there are occasional frame rate drops and slowdowns, but given the world is far more busy and vibrant than the last game, to match its performance while upping its density is a superb result.

Lighting and environments are staggeringly good the majority of the time, character models are all so impressively quirky, and over the top of it all soars a simply magnificent soundtrack.

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Nintendo

Knowing when to fade into the background and when to accent a sight with an extra tint of magic, its melodies are powerful and subtle in equal measure.

Invention is the name of the game

If Tears of the Kingdom polishes Breath of the Wild's presentation and remasters its storytelling, its gameplay systems are perhaps where the biggest upgrades have been implemented.

To cover off what hasn't changed, combat is largely as you remember it, with a fairly simple but satisfying system of dodges and parries that can be chained satisfyingly or ignored in favour of just gobbling food to heal every time an enemy smacks you. Weapons still degrade a break, too, making for a constantly-revolving roster of options to be snaffled up when the opportunity arises.

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Nintendo / Pocket-lint

Link also still collects new armour as the game goes on, with passive effects that'll help you deal with areas of extreme heat or cold, swim faster, climb better or skydive more freely, but meals and elixirs can easily be crafted to help with all these effects, too.

You'll slowly explore Hyrule, pulling at threads to find allies from some of the world's main tribes and gaining new powers as you do so, making navigation and exploration progressively quicker and easier as you get more tools.

If that feels familiar to a fault, though, don't get us wrong. Playing its first 10 hours or so, let alone the rest of the game, feels a bit like playing an interactive gameshow of Nintendo's own design, all centred around a repeating question - "What if Breath of the Wild had let you do this?"

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Nintendo / Pocket-lint

What if, for example, instead of letting you freeze an item in time, the game let you rewind time for that item entirely? Or, say, what if its fast-travel towers, instead of just being high points to base jump from, were actually giant cannons that fired you up into the stratosphere?

What if the massive underworld that's been added was pitch black, forcing players to drop light sources and pick their way through it or become completely lost in its darkness? What if you had a single power that could fuse any loose loot item onto weapons, shields and arrows, each one giving a different boost or effect?

Now let's get really crazy - what if you could pick up and join together a raft of in-game structures and items to create steerable vehicles across land, sea and air, powered by a portable recharging battery pack you can upgrade?

Less ambitious designers could easily construct whole games around any one of these elements, but Nintendo just stuck the whole lot in here, just to see what players do with it. While, in your first few hours, the answers will largely be in the realm of "Why, I'd use that power to build the worst raft anyone's ever seen, of course", in time you'll start piecing together janky little masterpieces.

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Nintendo / Pocket-lint

You'll begin to see opportunities for rewinds all over the place, sending projectiles back at enemies; you'll graft boulders onto any and every weapon to create huge wrecking balls; you'll barely remember what your horse looks like because you're too busy wingsuiting everywhere you can at maximum speed.

With challenge shrines once again littering the world, each offering a discrete and satisfying puzzle that will generally teach you a new way to use a given power, the amount of player freedom these systems come together to create is just staggering.

When we finished Elden Ring, we rightly had the sense that a lot of game worlds were going to disappoint us tonally in the next few years by comparison. Finishing Tears of the Kingdom yields us that same peerless feeling of apprehension - games with this much polish just don't let you do this much very often, sadly.

Verdict

Tears of the Kingdom feels like something of a crowning glory for the Switch - a testament to its staying power and a demonstration as powerful as any before it that Nintendo knows how to craft truly great games. It doesn't need a hardware upgrade to deliver improvements, and it doesn't need to ship a new console until it's damn well ready, because it can craft something as wonderful as this on hardware as old as you like.

If you have a Switch, this is a must-play by any measure, but if you have fond memories of Breath of the Wild then it's even more essential, and we honestly cannot wait to see what myriad secrets we haven't yet found, and what truly insane feats players will achieve with the many systems it generously offers up in the years to come.