3.5/5 ★ – JaredJDub's review of Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity.

Even though I'm not a fan of hack'n slashes, I still enjoyed this game. Nothing about it really stood out to me as being amazing, but it was still a fun experience. Game play wise, it was okay. You were able to use the shiekah slate as well as magic rods to slow down time and pick what rune or rod you'd like to use. Certain actions from certain enemies had you using different runes at different times, and upon successful execution of the rune power on the enemy, you were able lower the enemy's defense gauge little by little. Once the gauge was depleted, you were able to perform a weak point strike to deal massive damage. The game play wasn't really about killing a bunch of enemies, though there were sections for that, it was more about wearing down bosses and dealing major damage through weak point strikes multiple times. You also got to play as different characters, but I'll touch on that in a second. I had a few issues with this. One is that it became insanely repetitive. You'd fight the same enemies over and over and over again, and in the later stages of the game, one weak point strike wasn't enough. I also wasn't a huge fan of the camera. If you targeted a strong enemy, and you end up near a wall of anything, you'd need to get yourself out of there because the camera isn't going to let you see anything at all. You could, however, jump on the wall and attack your enemy's head, depleting their gauge, but it came with the risk of usually not being able to see. Some of the characters like King Rhoam were also very big, and the camera didn't compensate, so I found myself getting hit from attacks I honestly didn't even see. Otherwise it just became boring over time because the game was just the same thing over and over and over again. There were also parts of the game play that made the game run...not so well. Characters had certain moves that would cause immense frame drops and terrible lag spikes. But even without any special abilities, the normal attacks plus the characters on screen and their animations were a lot for the Switch to handle. It wasn't insanely terrible, but just some moments where the game was a little advanced for its hardware. The game did a great job of creating Breath Of The Wild's world pre-Ganon. It was interesting to see all the characters and how the world looked before the Calamity. Everything was bright, colorful, and amazing. We also got to meet and even play as all the champions as well as some characters that we didn't expect to see. They all had their own weapons and fighting abilities which was really cool. *SPOILER WARNING* I'm gonna discuss the story a bit here, please be advised: The story up until you had to rescue the champions was really great. After that, it felt incredibly phoned in. The descendants or relatives of the champions that you meet from BOTW come back, as they traveled through time. When the game was advertised, I thought it was going to be a telling of how the calamity actually took place, but it wasn't. I guess Nintendo didn't want to tell a Zelda story that actually ended in defeat? I'm not sure, but it was a let down to be sure. I assumed something would be different at the beginning of the game when the little robot jumped through a time portal, but I honestly wasn't expecting how everything would play out completely. This game is NOT a prequel to BOTW like a lot of people thought it was.