The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Ultrahand is the whole review. Everything else — the sky islands, the depths, the temples that finally act like temples again — is built on top of a single system that lets you glue almost any two objects together and expect physics to cooperate. It works so consistently that within ten hours you stop thinking of it as a mechanic and start thinking of it as a right.

The game refuses to have a solution

Breath of the Wild let you climb around problems. This one lets you build past them, and it never once acts surprised. A gap you were clearly meant to cross with a raft can be crossed with a plank, two fans and a control stick, and the game does not have a hidden preference. There is no scripted version waiting to correct you.

That sounds like a small thing. It is the hardest thing in design, and almost nobody does it, because it means writing systems that hold rather than sequences that play. The proof is that no two people describe the same solution to any given shrine.

Shrines

87 of 152

Vehicles built and abandoned

Dozens

Times physics did something wrong

Fewer than five

The temples are back

Breath of the Wild's divine beasts were four variations on one idea. Here there are five distinct dungeons with their own visual language, their own traversal gimmick and their own boss, and the fire temple in particular is the best thing Nintendo has built in this style in fifteen years. The approach to each is also a set piece in its own right, which quietly fixes the old complaint that Zelda dungeons start at the door.

Where it slips

The depths are enormous and mostly empty. They are atmospheric on the first descent and repetitive by the tenth, and the map's one-to-one mirroring of the surface means exploring them is closer to filling in a grid than to discovering anything. I spent perhaps fifteen hours down there and could not tell you about more than three specific places.

The Switch is also plainly finished as hardware for this. Docked performance in the busiest areas drops noticeably, and menus for a game this dependent on inventory management are slow enough to be a genuine cost across a hundred hours.

The verdict

The best sandbox anyone has shipped, attached to a world that had already been explored once, which is the only reason this is not a straightforward ten. If you bounced off Breath of the Wild's emptiness, this fixes about half of it and doubles down on the other half.

Play it in short sessions and build stupid things. The game is at its best when you are not trying to be efficient.