Hyrule Warriors: Hack and slash with a heart

Financially, of course, it makes sense but doesn’t help to broaden the appeal to the wider gaming world fatigued by endless instalments of Mario and Zelda.

If only Nintendo would essay something new, something different … Hyrule Warriors grants this wish – well, sort of anyway. In possibly the year’s, nay the decade’s mostly unlikely mash-up, Hyrule Warriors inserts the heart-warming characters and feel of the Legend of Zelda into the ferocious if repetitive mass battles of Dynasty Warriors.

It shouldn’t work, this crazy melding of two disparate franchises, only one of which is owned by Nintendo. But strangely it does, by assimilating the best of two worlds.

Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto was quoted as promising: “What we're doing here is grafting Zelda onto the Dynasty Warriors experience.” However, the final game contains the DNA of both in equal measure, the whimsy of Zelda leavening the po-faced violence of Dynasty.

If you’re unfamiliar with either (where have you been hiding all these years?), Hyrule Warriors pits you as diminutive hero Link (and, later, one of 12 other characters) in a hack and slash against waves of enemies. Like Dynasty Warriors, you fight tens if not hundreds of soldiers at once, your sword cutting a swathe through them, tossing them aside like confetti.

But their sheer numbers can prove overwhelming unless you learn the elaborate combos and choose your special weapons wisely – including Zelda trademarks such as bows, boomerings and bombs. The battles are usually contained in one area but at certain points you need to decide which of the simultaneous skirmishes you join – do you save an ally or push ahead with your current mission?

Even better are the rolling boss fights, which challenge you to expose weak points before inflicting heavy damage. They’re typically epic, giant in size and requiring some Zelda-esque lateral thinking.

When the campaign has been conquered, Hyrule Warriors keeps you going with Adventure mode, a challenge-based series of battles with variable parameters. You might have to kill only one type out several kinds of enemy during a mission or slay hundreds within a time limit.

Don’t be confused here, though, this is not a traditional Zelda game, nor as good as any of them. But it’s probably the best of instalment of the slightly peculiar Dynasty Warriors series we’ve ever seen.