3/5 ★ – avocadan's review of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

A very controversial take but I did not enjoy breath of the wild. As a long term Zelda fan it exited me that they were taking the series in a new direction but when I sat down and played the game there were too many things that irritated me or I just didn’t like and it eventually led me to abandon the game entirely. 1. Survival mechanics: BOTW’s survival mechanics feel entirely needless and only served to annoy me throughout my playtime. I found the item durability to be partially annoying and jarring, as to me Zelda is all about collecting items and filling in the inventory (especially since my favourite games in the series are majoras mask and wind waker). The item durability killed that sense entirely and only annoyed me as having to carry about 7 bokoblin clubs at the beginning of the game was not fun, it truly added nothing to the experience (also was it necessary to have to charge the master sword? It seems just as useless and tedious as the fuel mechanic from days gone). When you unlock a weapon for completing a quest it doesn’t feel like a reward because you know it’s going to break in like 15 minutes. Stamina is a fine addition it’s fair enough it feels like a true upgrade however I feel they start you off with not enough. 2. The open world: I love the open world in BOTW, truly it is beautiful and while it feels completely different from anything else that came before it it still retains the charm of other Zelda games. 3. Mobility: mobility in this game feels so good. The wall climbing is fun, the gliding is fun and some of the stuff you can do with the runes to get around is crazy. Overall I don’t think botw is a bad game it has a lot of things I like about it but I cannot get past how intrusive the survival mechanics are to the gameplay and how annoying it all is, it truly spoils the experience for me.