Eurogamer revisits some of its favourite games from 2024, and what makes them great. Here, we look the transformative water block in Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.
My main problem with this game is how it has maybe six or so useful things you’ll be spamming most of the time for convenience.
I was on board with the concept, but they didn’t carry it far enough. There were simply not enough situations requiring clever use of items, and most items/monsters felt useless compared to a few that just worked better in most situations.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom did a really good job of creating open-ended problems and letting you experiment with all the tools you got. I think Echoes of Wisdom should have focussed more on that.
The fact you can at any moment trigger a time-limited Link mode which is basically standard LoZ combat and makes the game ridiculously easy is a sign they did not believe in their concept enough. If your main gameplay loop becomes so tedious you implement shortcuts to avoid it, you’ve done something wrong.
Yeah, some battles got really tedious. Additionally once you have a couple key echoes there wasn’t really much puzzle element anymore, everything felt solvable with two or three echoes.
Never even finished it because it felt so repetitive. Personally I think the “openness” of the world was a detraction. Part of the fun of zelda/metroidvanias is finding out how new skills expand the map and also help make puzzles progressive. By opening up the map all puzzles default to generic solutions.
Fair criticism. I try to avoid using Link mode, but boss fights are so tedious without it.
That said, I actually prefer Echoes of Wisdom to BotW because it has actual dungeons again, but it does feel a bit lazy to drop into slashing and shooting.
My main problem with this game is how it has maybe six or so useful things you’ll be spamming most of the time for convenience.
I was on board with the concept, but they didn’t carry it far enough. There were simply not enough situations requiring clever use of items, and most items/monsters felt useless compared to a few that just worked better in most situations.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom did a really good job of creating open-ended problems and letting you experiment with all the tools you got. I think Echoes of Wisdom should have focussed more on that.
The fact you can at any moment trigger a time-limited Link mode which is basically standard LoZ combat and makes the game ridiculously easy is a sign they did not believe in their concept enough. If your main gameplay loop becomes so tedious you implement shortcuts to avoid it, you’ve done something wrong.
Yeah, some battles got really tedious. Additionally once you have a couple key echoes there wasn’t really much puzzle element anymore, everything felt solvable with two or three echoes.
Never even finished it because it felt so repetitive. Personally I think the “openness” of the world was a detraction. Part of the fun of zelda/metroidvanias is finding out how new skills expand the map and also help make puzzles progressive. By opening up the map all puzzles default to generic solutions.
Fair criticism. I try to avoid using Link mode, but boss fights are so tedious without it.
That said, I actually prefer Echoes of Wisdom to BotW because it has actual dungeons again, but it does feel a bit lazy to drop into slashing and shooting.