Age of Calamity demo preview: Even after over 230 hours, I’m ready to do it again in the new Hyrule Warriors

If you haven’t downloaded the new Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity demo, you should. I’ll be happy to explain all the reasons why this new game is already doing so many things better than the original Hyrule Warriors while it’s downloading. Early impressions of this game are giving me “more of the same, but better,” vibes pretty much from top to bottom.

I was honestly surprised at how hard I fell for the original Hyrule Warriors, having never touched a Dynasty Warriors/Musou game before. I enjoyed running around, vacuuming up forts, thrashing hundreds of Bokoblins at a time, and then moving in for that final strike on a commander or boss. It’s repetitive, sometimes to the point of being a chore, but something about it all clicked and I had a great time leaning back and hacking up monsters on the battlefield.

It should be no surprise that the announcement of a second Hyrule Warriors game was welcome news, even after hundreds of hours of the first one. The fact that it was a canonical prequel to my favorite Zelda game only bolstered my excitement. I was ready to just plunk down in my chair and do it all again. I’m happy to say that after my time with the demo, I am excited at all the new possibilities, mechanics, and improvements.

First of all, presentation-wise, this is just more Breath of the Wild in all the right places. While being completely steeped in the game we love, it also maintains just a hint of its own personality. I find that welcoming, and really shows that this is being taken seriously by all parties for the role it plays. I loved that the original Hyrule Warriors delivered a shameless fanboy rush, but it’s great that we’re not just getting “more of the same” with that.

Even systems that were new from the Hyrule Warriors half of the equation are back, but re-dressed to be more like Breath of the Wild. In the previous game, you collected random materials off of enemies to fill out a fairly limited talent tree or to make potions for buffs while also stapling weapons together to make them better. This was all incredibly menu-dense, but it did the job. However, in Age of Calamity those things are now presented as side-quests on your overworld map of Hyrule.

Rather than just dumping resources to earn a point and gain additional combo abilities, you now get a little story that explains why you’re getting what you are, and then you are given a reward that takes the form of additional combos. Similarly, cooking earns you potions in the form of the very familiar recipes we spent hours crafting in Breath of the Wild. The long and short is that the systems feel more “in-universe” in a way that will be welcoming both to veterans of Hyrule Warriors and newcomers who only played Breath of the Wild.

The blacksmithing system received a complete overhaul this time around, and I’m eager to get deeper into that. In the previous game, you had specific weapons that each had ranks to dictate their effectiveness. You couldn’t improve a weapon beyond its rank, so you would end up using lower-tier weapons as fodder to fuse skills into the better ones. Now you can effectively merge a bunch of weapons to empower another one. If two weapons have the same bonus type (denoted by the icon’s shape), the new weapon will have both attributes strengthened. You will still collect a ton of random weapons, but at least you don’t have to worry about breaking anything. Feel free to sell or fuse them however you want. For the record, I wish this exact system was in Breath of the Wild as a way of repairing and maintaining weapons so you didn’t have to constantly deal with breakage.

The story mode also seems to be presenting an openness of choice with where start segments of missions. Upon reaching the conclusion of the demo, you are greeted with the option to visit any of the four Divine Beasts to recruit your champions with no sign of being forced to do one before the other. There’s also plenty of side missions to go for at your leisure.

One of my favorite things about Hyrule Warriors was all the unlockable goodies. You unlock better ranks of weapons, characters, costumes, and new content; there was always something you were working on. We haven’t really seen anything like that for Age of Calamity, though that could just be because that’s not what you focus on leading up to the new game’s release. Hopefully, there will be a lot of fun surprises buried in there, as it helped pump some longevity into the game. Adventure Maps, where you went through a grid doing challenges to unlock more stuff, really stacked the content. I also can’t help but be curious about DLC characters later down the line. If that’s how I can get my Linkle back, then shut up and take my Rupees already!

Seeing the best of Hyrule Warriors retrofitted into Breath of the Wild has been incredible, even for my short time with the demo. Everything about the former just plays better, inspired by the latter. It feels fantastic, and I look forward to losing another couple hundred hours all over again.