The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild Switch Hands On

For a Nintendo fan, there is no bigger event than the release of a new title in The Legend of Zelda series and while I may have missed out on playing the game until now on Wii U, sitting down at the Nintendo Switch Media event and playing there, was amazing.

The little section of the venue that Nintendo had setup for The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, was in a replica of the Temple of Time, but here at the front of the section was the Master Sword. Once inside though, a comfy chair and a large screen tv were calling my name, so I sat down and started up the game. What struck me was just how nice the game looked while running on the Switch, videos have come out comparing it to the Wii U build from E3 and it looks sharper, which is a nice thing to see, but enough of that, it is all about the gameplay.

Running around with the Switch Pro Controller was very nicely done, with the button placement working well for the game, even better than the JoyCon. Which is strange really, because the JoyCon has the same layout, but after a while, I swapped from TV Mode to Handheld mode, removing the Switch from the dock and then enjoying it that way. The problem I found there is that the right stick is slightly out of whack from the level it is on the Pro Controller, which takes a bit of getting used to, it’s not a large amount to be sure, but it feels wrong to begin with.

As for the game, itself, it ran well, some minor pop up issues for objects out in the distance, but it never really had any issues when there was a lot going on, multiple explosions included. Perhaps the part of Breath of the Wild that left me really impressed, was simply that the game is going to be massive and with Switch, it’s something you can play no matter where you are. The demo build itself was the one that was at E3, but now on Switch, so I had an idea of what to expect, The Great Plateau was the area I had to explore and it was massive, thankfully I knew that going in. For the most part I just followed along with the instructions that the game was giving me, purely because in a 20 minute demo, there is little time for investment. However no matter what I saw, it still did not prepare me for just how big the world was, which means that with less than seven weeks to go, this game is going to absorb all of my time.