The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I've put somewhere between 50-75 hours into this game and I have to say that I just don't get the gushing, unqualified love for this game. In fact, after about 10-15 hours, I was pretty close to just giving up on it, but I kept playing it expecting for it to click. It never did. In my view, it's a OK game, but that's it. It's not the best game on the Switch, and it's not the best game in its genre. The good: - The developers obviously put a lot of time into the game, and it shows. There are a lot of different landscapes, the artwork is interesting, and I can only remember one bug in all the time that I played. It is a polished, finished game. Especially with large, open-world games, that's pretty rare, and I appreciate that. - The controls are solid, although there is some awkward button-mashing required in spots that can be frustrating. This is particularly true for the dodge mechanic, which requires a three-button combination that, if not executed just right, will just result in a crouch that gets you clobbered by a bad guy. - It's suitable for children, which is nice. Few of these types of games are. The not so good: - The game is awfully repetitive. There is a really big, open, world, and that's great. Many of the areas have different artwork and are pretty to look at. But really, most of the territories are basically the same with different artwork layered over the top. -With a big, open world, you would expect that there would be a lot to do. There's really not, at least as far as I can tell. There is a main quest and there is discovering shrines. There are a handful of side quests, but they're pretty one-dimensional and involve either discovering a shrine or running an errand for someone. Other games like this (Fallout, Skyrim, Witcher, Horizon Zero Dawn, GTA, etc.) have some pretty involved B stories that can be just as good as the main game. -BOTW is full of some interesting ideas that are executed in a way that just makes the game too tedious and downright boring in spots. For example: - There are something like 120 shrines to discover. That sounds like a lot, but all the shrines fall into one of three categories: a fight, a platformer, or a puzzle. Every shrine is a variation of one of those three, and with 120, that gets pretty old. In Fallout 3, a much better game, each Vault had a different story and was relatively unique. Because of that, they were quite fun and interesting to explore. There's nothing interesting about the shrines in BOTW once you play the first few. Beating the shrines is important to level up your character, though, so there is a lot of repetitive grinding. - There are a lot of mountains and cliffs in the game. It makes for interesting landscape, and you can climb them, which is a cool and different idea, but climbing is very slow, and some of the cliffs are quite big. It's just boring to sit there for 45-60 seconds doing nothing but holding the climb button. Worse, sometimes it rains and the cliffs become too slick to climb. But if you need to go up the cliff to get where you're going, there is nothing to do but stand there and wait for it to stop raining. I've actually just put down the controller and left to make myself a sandwich while I waited for it to stop raining. What's the point of that? -Speaking of rain, the weather changes. That's neat I guess, but they've messed it up by making it a game mechanic. Sometimes it will storm, so if you are holding a metal weapon or a metal shield, you'll get struck by lightning and die (this also causes an inventory management problem, which I discuss below). It rains a lot in the game but doesn't always storm, so it's easy to miss when it starts if you're not paying attention. You'll just be wandering around and then get struck by lighting and instantly die. That's annoying. It also goes from extreme hot to extreme cold rather quickly. If you don't have the proper clothing, you will die very quickly. So for example, in the desert, the daytime is very hot and the nighttime is very cold; each require special outfits. This might be realistic, but time passes quickly and it gets old to have to keep changing outfits every five minutes. Again, how is this a fun game mechanic? -There is a big, open-world map, so getting from place to place can be tedious. Other open-world games, like Fallout or Witcher, solve this problem by being able to fast travel basically anywhere. You can fast travel in BOTW, too, but you are limited to being able to fast travel only to two types of locations: towers and shrines. That means that after you fast travel, you often have a lot of walking (or worse, climbing) to get to where you want to go. That's boring. You can also get a horse, but because so much of the map is mountainous, their utility is rather low. - Your weapons and shields deteriorate. That's fine, plenty of other games have done that. But in those games, there is a way to repair your equipment. In this game, there isn't, and most of the weapons will deteriorate very quickly--just a handful of fights with monsters. So you have this perverse incentive when you get good weapons to not use them because of a concern that they will break and then you won't have them later for the boss battles or occasional more powerful monster that you run across. - By itself, the deterioration issue probably wouldn't be terrible. When it is combined with a limited inventory and specialized weapons, it becomes downright awful. You only have a few weapons slots, but you have to horde weapons because you never know when they might break. Worse, some monsters a particularly vulnerable to a single type of weapon--ice sword, fire sword, etc. So you always want to make sure you have one of each of those. And, when it storms, you can't use a metal weapon, so you have to keep a wooden weapon, too. You wind up always fretting about what weapons to keep and which to drop, and when. It's frustrating to drop a weapon that you need later because you didn't have room for it at the time. It's just unnecessary. -To recover health, you have to cook meals in a pot. That's fine, but it takes a lot of time and clicks to gather items out of your inventory and then a few more seconds for them to actually cook. It doesn't sound like much, but if you want to prepare 10-15 meals to prepare for a boss battle (or because you don't have the proper equipment and need the temporary boost that a meal provides), it's really tiresome to sit at the fire and do stuff over and over again. - There are really only a handful of different monsters you fight. The monsters that you meet in the first few minutes of the game will be seen through the rest of the game, except more powerful. When you go to a new area, it's basically the same monsters, except there is an "ice" version, a "fire" version, or a "skeleton" version. In sum, the bones are here for a good game, but it's just not a good game. I can tell they put a lot of work into the game, and for that I am appreciative. But gosh, shouldn't the game be fun? Three stars is as high as I can go, and that might even be a bit generous. If you like the open world game, you've probably already played many of the games that are far and away better than BOTW. Fallout 3, New Vegas, Skyrim, GTA and Witcher (available on Switch) are clearly better. If you are looking for an open world game that is suitable for a child, Lego City Undercover (available on Switch) is better than BOTW, and usually half the price. If you also have a PS4, Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that has the same motif as BOTW, but is much, much better in nearly every way.