[Review] Age of Calamity: Pulse of the Ancients DLC

Nintendo released the first wave for its Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Expansion Pass. This wave, Pulse of the Ancients, brings a plethora of new content to the action-packed prequel spinoff to the Breath of the Wild.

But even with all of the new features, the first thing you need to wonder is if you’d enjoy everything this wave offers. Age of Calamity is already such a blast to play and offers the player a lot to do. Is this first half of the expansion pass a worthy addition to the main game?

Age of Added Content

Expansion passes seem to be Nintendo’s favorite downloadable content (DLC) option nowadays. It’s hard to say if that’s a problem or not. The concept seems like a perfect fit for Age of Calamity though. With the amount of content already in the game, adding a bunch of new features is a great way to keep players invested for a long time. Probably not as long as they’ve been playing Breath of the Wild, but it’s still enough time for a spinoff to share the limelight with a mainline Zelda adventure.

What Wave 1 Offers

Pulse of the Ancients loads the game with hours of new material:

• The Royal Tech Lab: Players can visit this location to unlock upgrades to various tools and weapons. It’s also where players can unlock the new character.
• New weapons: These are new weapons that Link and Zelda can use. They are unrelated to any weapons already found in Age of Calamity.
• A new character: The single addition to the game’s character list is the Battle-Tested Guardian. After years of the Guardians giving players anxiety, it’s the player’s turn to be a heart rate-spiking monster.
• Stronger enemies: Levels with new Vicious Monsters randomly generate throughout the game map. Defeating these powerful enemies earns new and important rewards.
• Additional missions: Dozens of new missions with far stronger enemies appear as you progress through the DLC’s content. These take place in existing stages found in the base game.

There’s a lot to experience with this DLC pack, that much is clear. But it’s important to understand each addition in-depth to know how much fun you’ll have with it all.

A Tremendous (though tedious) Tech Lab

The Royal Tech Lab is the core of the DLC, and that’s a good thing and a bad thing. At the surface, the lab looks like a typical skill tree that players have seen in dozens of other games. The difference is that it’s the core of the content rather than being supplementary.

Every bonus, item, and character you can unlock in Pulse of the Ancients comes from the lab. And to unlock everything, you need to pay for it all. You pay by offering materials, handing over rupees, and clearing certain combat achievements. You’ll complete many of the achievements as you play the new levels, but others will require you to revisit older levels to find specific materials and defeat enemies with specific weapons. Yes, like it or not, you’ll need to do a lot of grinding.

Are some of the unlockables worth it? Yes, absolutely. The Ancient Flail is the best example. Are all of the unlockables worth it? Absolutely not. For example, I never saw a need to upgrade Magnesis. It’s nice to have, but it didn’t make much of a difference. The problem is that many of these upgrades need to be unlocked before the lab will allow you to move onto the next one. And that next upgrade might be the actually useful thing you want.

The Tech Lab’s design is intended for very dedicated players. I am not one of those players. I love Age of Calamity, but I never even bothered completing the game 100%. Completing every last mission and playing with every character held no appeal for me. The lab basically forced me to play the game the way I didn’t want to.

Wondrous Weapons

The Ancient Flail is, in my opinion and from my experience, the best part of the DLC. The attacks are strong, the attacks are fast, and the attacks have a fantastic range. This is very much so an “I paid good money to be overpowered” kind of weapon, and I respect it.

The developers could have left it at that, but they chose to go the extra step by introducing weapon durability to Age of Calamity. Yes, that’s a good thing. The reason it’s a good thing is because the flail can create copies of enemy weapons. Link can then use this copy in tandem with the flail to deal greater damage and perform new attacks. The weapon copy will eventually run out of power and break, but you can simply throw it at an enemy before that happens. It’s an extra dose of variety to make the Ancient Flail the best option for overwhelming your enemies.

The Master Cycle is great, even if the Ancient Flail is still a better tool. It might seem a bit odd to see Zelda on the bike instead of Link, but the rider honestly doesn’t matter. They just need to know how to operate the thing, and Zelda, being the tech nerd that she is, is adept at it.

As you might expect, the Master Cycle’s attacks are over-the-top and flashy. The bike is also fast and covers a lot of ground. The attacks, mixed with the bike’s mobility, allows Zelda to literally mow down fields of enemies faster than any other character.

The only real issue with the Master Cycle is the handling. It’s a motorcycle, after all, so some training is required to fully master its controls. It’s also better in open areas. Being in confined areas and trying to turn around or navigate tightly packed obstacles can be cumbersome.

A New Battling Buddy

Everyone would have been disappointed if the first wave of DLC didn’t feature any new characters, so Nintendo and Koe Tecmo did the right thing by going big with their newest addition to Age of Calamity‘s roster. The Battle-Tested Guardian is indeed very big. Big and powerful.

Playing as the Battle-Tested Guardian is how anyone should imagine it’s like to play as a Guardian: You’re a dominant, deadly force on the battlefield, and your goal is to find every target and blast right through it. It has the firepower and melee attacks to help slay any and all monster types. And if it wasn’t for its modest movement speed, it would have the same wide-spread destruction capabilities as the Master Cycle. But being a literal tank does give it a different advantage.

The only downside to this beast of a character is that its massive size can work against it. Being big means being an easy-to-hit target. This weakness won’t matter much when dealing with weak enemies, but taking on a group of powerful foes could lead to you being cornered.

Vicious Little pieces of “Korok Seeds”

The noteworthy addition to the game’s foes are the Vicious Monsters. A few other enemies were added, such as the Moblins that throw explosive barrels and the massive Chuchus, but those get pushed to the side pretty quickly. The Vicious Monsters stand at the core of Pulse of the Ancients‘ most intense action.

I’m almost certain the Vicious Monsters were inspired by the Dynamax Pokemon from Pokemon Sword and Shield. They are Moblins, Taloses, Lynels, and all other forms of stronger enemy types. The only difference is that their health, attack, and defense are all drastically better. They glow with a menacing and Malice-inspired red aura to signify that they are not to be taken lightly.

Vicious Monsters are fought in special missions that show up on and leave the map at seemingly random intervals. They are also the final challenge for these missions, and defeating them can take longer than completing every other part of their missions combined. Having stronger enemies is fun, but these fights can be tedious. And when other normal enemies show up to help the Vicious Monsters, the task becomes even more grueling.

Quests Galore

There are no new stages in Pulse of the Ancients, but there’s definitely no shortage of new missions. Dozens of missions are included in the DLC, and they are split up into both the regular missions and the special missions where you encounter the Vicious Monsters.

To put it simply, both types of missions are similar to the ones in the main game, only harder. It’s like going from Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels in some cases. And for many of them, if your characters’ levels aren’t in the high 70s or 80s range, you won’t have any real chance at completing any objectives.

This difficulty was both a good thing and a really bad thing. New challenges are fun, but your characters need to be strong enough to take on the new threats. And if they aren’t, then you’re going to need to replay missions to power them up. You’ll need to do this a lot. When I first started Pulse of the Ancients, my best characters’ levels were in the low 60s. When I saw that the levels with the lowest level requirements were in the high 70s, I knew I had no option but to get comfortable and start playing every stage I could to level up quickly.

It has a pulse, but it could be stronger

Pulse of the Ancients definitely brings a lot to Age of Calamity and does so for a fair price. At $19.99 to get both halves of the expansion pass, it’s not what anyone can call a ripoff.

As good as additions were, however, the issues one can deal with to unlock them cannot be ignored. As I mentioned before, I was painfully under-leveled when I started playing the DLC. I had to put in a lot more time than should have been required for me to get everything.

I love Age of Calamity and I appreciate what Pulse of the Ancients added to it, but getting to the core of its content should not have been the hassle that it was. This wave operated like it was meant for the players who completed every aspect of the main game and wanted additional and challenging objectives. That may have been the point, but it still would have been nice if it was more accessible to players who aren’t as dedicated. Hopefully the next wave will accommodate that need.

SCORE: 7.5/10