Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Review: Hyrule Reimagined

Tears of the Kingdom rebuilds Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule with sky islands, underground Depths, and four new abilities that replace the Sheikah Slate runes. The result is a construction sandbox layered on top of an open-world adventure, where the answer to every puzzle is limited only by your engineering creativity.

How We Reviewed: Our assessment is based on attention to mixing choices and how they shape the listening experience and assessment of the artist’s artistic growth relative to prior releases. Ratings reflect extensive playtime, community consensus, and mechanical depth analysis. These recommendations reflect our independent assessment, not paid partnerships.

The Four Abilities

Ultrahand lets you grab, move, and rotate any loose object, then glue objects together. This single ability enables building vehicles, bridges, catapults, and siege weapons from found materials. Zonai devices (fans, rockets, wheels, steering sticks) snap onto structures to create functional machines. A platform with four fans becomes a hovercraft. A minecart on rails with a fan becomes a train. A raft with a sail and steering stick becomes a sailing vessel.

Fuse attaches any material to your weapon, shield, or arrow. A rock fused to a stick creates a hammer. A Keese eyeball fused to an arrow creates a homing shot. A ruby fused to a shield creates a fire-burst when you parry. This system solves Breath of the Wild’s weapon durability problem by making disposable weapons part of the crafting system rather than a frustration.

Ascend lets you pass through any ceiling directly above you, emerging on top. This recontextualizes every structure in the game. A cave ceiling becomes an exit. A bridge becomes a shortcut upward. Enemy camps built on elevated platforms become vulnerable to a player ascending through the floor.

Recall reverses an object’s movement path. A boulder that rolled down a hill can be reversed to ride it back up. A piece of debris falling from a sky island can be reversed mid-fall, letting you ride it upward. Combined with Ultrahand constructions, Recall enables launching vehicles in creative trajectories.

The Depths

Below Hyrule lies a massive underground area equal in size to the surface map. The Depths are pitch-dark, requiring Brightbloom Seeds to illuminate paths. Lightroots (underground equivalents of surface Shrines) permanently illuminate surrounding areas when activated. The Depths contain Poes (currency for a unique vendor), Gloom-infected enemies that permanently reduce your maximum hearts until you reach sunlight, and the game’s rarest crafting materials.

The Depths map mirrors the surface map inverted: where there is a mountain above, there is a valley below. Where there is a lake above, there is a peak below. This relationship rewards players who study both maps to predict underground landmark locations.

Shrine and Temple Design

The 152 Shrines focus on Ultrahand construction puzzles rather than combat. Most present a physics problem solvable through building. Developers placed “intended” solutions throughout each Shrine, but the physics engine accepts any functional construction. Speedrunners have completed Shrines using a single rocket attached to Link himself.

The four main Temples replace Breath of the Wild’s Divine Beasts with larger, more traditional dungeon designs. The Wind Temple aboard a flying ship and the Spirit Temple involving a time-split dungeon are the standouts, offering multi-floor exploration with interconnected puzzles.

Autobuild and Quality of Life

The Autobuild ability, unlocked in the Depths, saves your previous constructions as blueprints. Select a saved blueprint and the game automatically assembles it from nearby materials, or from Zonaite if materials are unavailable. This eliminates the tedium of rebuilding a favorite vehicle from scratch every time, and it encourages experimentation since successful designs become permanent templates in your catalog.

Verdict

Tears of the Kingdom transforms an already excellent open world into a creativity sandbox where physics mastery replaces combat mastery as the core skill. It is the rare sequel that makes its predecessor feel incomplete by comparison.

For combat build strategies, see our Best Elder Scrolls Builds: Skyrim. For open-world comparisons, check Best Open World RPGs for Exploration.