Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment Review

Here’s an unfortunate admission – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the KIngdom never really landed with me. I loved Breath of the Wild, but to this day I’ve still got an incomplete save file for its sequel sitting there, waiting for me to pick it back up. So with that in mind I couldn’t be sure that Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, the third entry in the Hyrule Warriors series, and more importantly a direct prequel to Tears of the Kingdom, would fare any better.

Turns out, I’ve enjoyed my time with Nintendo, Koei Tecmo and AAA Games Studio’s musou-based prequel so much that I’m reinstalling Tears of the Kingdom as I write this.

Set in the far-flung past of the Imprisoning War, Age of Imprisonment fills in the blanks of Zelda’s story in Tears of the Kingdom, giving us a more complete depiction of her time-travelling adventure to the founding era of Hyrule. It’s hard to go into too much detail without potentially spoiling two games at once, but the important thing to know is that this is the best treatment Zelda’s gotten in just about any of the games bearing her name – and it rules for that.

Age of Imprisonment has an interesting challenge in that it needs to carry a compelling Zelda game set in a reality where Link isn’t due to appear for a good 10,000 years or so (maybe it cheats at this a bit, maybe it doesn’t, I won’t tell you). But it rises confidently to that effort with an incredibly well-rounded depiction of Zelda, complete with her own self-realised purpose and genuine relationships. And unlike something like 2024’s Echoes of Wisdom or even Age of Calamity, she fights like a total badarse. The other characters and events along the way are equally great, but for as long as I feel compelled to keep the details hush I will happily gas this version of Zelda up.

Slotting into the modern Legend of Zelda story canon, in a very specific time and space, makes Age of Imprisonment the most focused and cohesive Hyrule Warriors entry so far. It’s a change in direction from the two previous entries, which definitely came across as sanctioned homages to Nintendo’s storied franchise. This one instead feels inseparable from Nintendo’s own output, both semantically and from the quality bar it achieves in plot, play and presentation.

I’ve admittedly not played many recent Warriors games outside of Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, but for my money Age of Imprisonment features the most satisfying and reactive combat the franchise has seen. Mindless button mashing still forms a crucial and comfortable core, but there’s so much here to nudge this ever so slightly into the territory of a great character action game. Mixing up light and heavy attacks to form character-specific combos, performing perfectly-timed dodges, unleashing special attacks and team-ups, and even countering enemy moves and elemental weaknesses are all important avenues to victory and keep things feeling interesting well into your 20th hour and 100,000th KO.

The action is also full of nods to Tears of the Kingdoms’ defining features, most prominently its Zonai devices and contraption construction. At the cost of a familiar battery meter you’re able to wield things like flame, water and shock emitters, use powerful fans and even throw time bombs – preferably straight into the gaping gob of a giant Frox. Mineru, who quickly became one of my favourite characters to take into battle, comes with a plethora of moves that see her rapidly summon Zonai vehicles and devices that seem lifted straight from the wildest player-made machines of carnage.

I’ll avoid giving too much away for the sake of those reading this who’ve avoided spoilers so far, but the roster of 19-odd characters is generally quite good with a nice amount of mechanical variety between them and some entertaining synergies. It’s very heavy on ‘new’ names, or at least names only hinted at in Tears of the Kingdom, with a trio of each of the world’s factions making for the bulk of the lineup, but the clear stars should please modern Zelda fans and lore-heads.

All of the hacking and slashing goes toward more than just seeing the next bit of story as well, with progression and extracurricular activities similar to Age of Calamity. A world map (not unlike the one in Tears of the Kingdom proper) offers up a littering of icons leading players to optional challenge stages, shops for upgrading weapons, folks in need of material donations that pass on stat and moveset buffs for you characters and more. There’s a satisfying cadence to the gradual filling out of the map and the stream of completed goals that comes with every stage finished, enough that my play sessions quickly ballooned out in length just about every time I fired the game up.

A big question leading into the release of Age of Imprisonment has naturally been, how does it run? Given its status as a Switch 2 exclusive – technically the first Zelda game built specifically for Nintendo’s new hardware – this is a valid line of enquiry. The great news is that this game performs shockingly well, managing a respectable visual presentation that looks rich and modern while handling seemingly hundreds of mobs on-screen at any one time with very few performance concerns. The action occasionally wanders from the intended 60FPS target, sure, and the sub-1080p resolve isn’t always ideal, but it’s leagues ahead of its predecessors.

The team has done quite well to capture the look and feel of Tears of the Kingdom and retrofit it within the usual Warriors trappings, with UI elements lifted right out of that game, a familiar and similarly fantastic musical score and some lovely character models. 

The only off spot is the game’s cutscenes, which are almost all done through pre-rendered video playback – presented in 30FPS and noticeably compressed. For some of the more intense scenes I can see this making sense, but often it’s fairly sedate stuff, and the difference to gameplay is jarring. It also means the game’s install size is north of 40GB, a hefty chunk of your Switch 2’s base storage.

Final Thoughts

There’s certainly an argument for keeping a game like this, a spin-off of a niche series from an external publisher and studio, at a cautious arm’s length from arguably Nintendo’s most revered property. But I think that Age of Imprisonment could be one of the best counters yet to that argument, and hard proof that some of the company’s most precious virtual worlds could do with a few more visiting creatives.

Reviewed on Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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