Undocking The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild On Nintendo Switch

There’s an awful lot of reasons to be excited for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, whether you plan to play it on Nintendo Switch or on Wii U. This is still Zelda; you still find yourself as a lonely beacon of light in a world transformed by the forces of evil, you still have bosses, dungeons and Ganon to defeat, but there’s a revisionist streak to how the game will actually play.

This is a game that really takes to heart the need to shake things up within the traditional Legend of Zelda formula, taking inspiration from other games in the action RPG genre and bringing more contemporary ideas into the fold. The Hyrule that’s presented to you in this game is more open than ever before, giving you more control over how the adventure unfolds, whether you decide to follow the main path of the story and take on each dungeon in turn – how you traverse the landscape to get there or scour the world for demi-bosses and clear out all of the Bokoblin camps that dot the plains.

Link’s an ever-so-slightly more versatile character as well, with the ability to jump for the first time, as well as clamber up walls, trees and cliffs as long as his stamina lasts. There’s meaningful inventory management as well, letting you change Link’s outfit for various character benefits, swap out your main and ranged weaponry, and check out what food you’ve been able to forage and hunt for – cooking these up can boost their restorative properties or give you certain perks, depending on the recipe.

And then there’s the Sheikah Slate that will allow for even more unusual and varied magical abilities, like forming solid blocks out of water, making objects appear in the world, and more. Alas, being able to really explore all of this will have to wait for another time, as the demo playable on Switch was from the very start of the game, presenting the same opening area and 20 minutes of play time, as was demonstrated at E3 last year on the Wii U.

This was, however, our opportunity to test out the Switch’s ability to hop back and forth between playing on TV and playing on handheld. The grand plan? To capture directly from the Switch while it’s on TV and then switch to the over-the-shoulder view when pulling it out. Sadly, our capture gear decided it didn’t want to cooperate, despite appearing to do so – this is also why you’ll miss out on seeing me quite simply obliterate the opposition in Splatoon 2. You won’t get to see the opening to Breath of the Wild here, but can get a glimpse of how easy this transition is.

It’s an impressive trick that the Switch has up its sleeve, going one step further than the ideas at the heart of the Wii U, which can also play off screen on its Gamepad, and it is effectively seamless with a few seconds wait that can likely be ironed out by launch and having to tap buttons on your chosen controller.

If anything, the game looks better on the Switch’s screen than it did on the TV. It looks less refined on the bigger screen, I feel, with some noticeable aliasing at times and texturework that’s been inherited from the Wii U, but that shrinks away when the game is blessed with a higher pixel density on the Switch itself. While a much smoother experience than when I played the game on Wii U last year, there are still noticeable hitches and stutters, though this will have been an older build and Nintendo will be in the final throes of optimisation. Regardless of the platform, Breath of the Wild looks gorgeous, with a vibrancy to its use of oversaturated colour.

Given the rather slim pickings available at the Nintendo Switch launch, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is sure to be on almost every early adopter’s wish list, and rightly so.