3/5 ★ – QuickPlay's review of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Echoes of Wisdom is weird. It doesn’t really feel right. There was a fan game online that let you play Super Mario Bros. as other NES characters (like Link or Samus), and it just broke the game. This feels like that. It’s very obviously a top-down Zelda game, but having a character other than Link makes it feel foreign. It’s a mixed bag at first (some things are great, some things just feel off) and never totally clicked. The middle hours are the best: you’ve wrapped your head around the game, and it hasn’t overstayed its welcome yet. There’s an initial hurdle of not having a one-button attack, especially in a game that feels so much like a traditional Zelda game. Zelda is over-powered but doesn’t feel that way. Having to pivot and use echoes as drones to fight for you demands a tactical approach, which is fun but time-consuming. Combat has never been the Zelda franchise’s strongest suit, and the extra layer adds complexity but also friction; adding an extra step or two makes combat a chore, but also reveals that it always has been. This criticism also applies here for the UI: Zelda has always been an in-and-out of menus game, but it’s made all the more apparent in Echoes of Wisdom. It starts slow (like all Zelda games), but rather than a slow start because of the story, it’s a slow start mechanically, though I also often forgot that Zelda has more than just making echoes, like Bind and Swordfighter form. However, if you’re a fan of top-down Zelda, Echoes of Wisdom has what you love. Dungeons are a highlight, and exploring Hyrule is still engaging. Anything and everything requires imaginative solutions, but the smaller funnel of dungeons really helps get those juices flowing. It’s a *good* game. It’s top-down Zelda but cracked wide open (in that you can kind of go anywhere if you’re creative enough). But being open-ended, it comes at the cost of “aha” puzzle solutions, falling somewhere in the valley between the clever high of figuring out the intended solution and the unorthodox workarounds of Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom. “I can’t believe that worked!” turns into “I guess that worked.” But one thing the “anything goes” approach from BotW and TotK does allow: being an absolute menace (realizing this as I summon six crows to pelt my enemies).