Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment Review

When I started Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, I dove in headfirst. I’ve played every musou-flavored Zelda crossover since the original Hyrule Warriors on Wii U, the one I devoured over a single weekend while my newborn son sat in his rocker watching me cleave armies apart. So there’s a weird nostalgia imprint on this whole spin-off line for me. Age of Calamity tightened the formula, for sure, but Age of Imprisonment arrives with the heavy promise of being fully canon, tied directly to Tears of the Kingdom, and set during the earliest days of Hyrule’s founding. It’s a strange combination: a high-stakes lore chapter wrapped inside an intentionally chaotic hack-and-slash playground.

Right away, the game drops you into the exact era Tears of the Kingdom kept teasing in scattered cutscenes. Zelda is flung back thousands of years to the formation of Hyrule, right into the lives of Rauru and Sonia, and into the shadow of Ganondorf’s rise as the Demon King. The game fully retraces the big events we already saw in Tears of the Kingdom, the infamous murder of Queen Sonia being one of them, and I felt that steady déjà vu because the most impactful story beats already exist elsewhere. The game follows the same trajectory: the founding of the kingdom, Ganondorf’s creeping ambition, the slow march toward the Imprisoning War, and the ending that funnels directly into Tears of the Kingdom’s opening. I wanted it to dig deeper into the Zonai, the Sages, and the Secret Stones, but the plot never wanders far from the established blueprint.

What felt strange was the emotional core of the story, as it doesn’t belong to Zelda at all; it belongs to the Mysterious Construct and its Korok partner Calamo. The Construct feels like a Link stand-in, and Calamo steps in to speak and interpret the world around them. The game keeps pulling the camera back to this duo so frequently that Zelda often ends up feeling like a supporting character in a story with her own name in the title. That’s not inherently bad, but it constantly reminded me that this was a prequel that had more interest in new faces, as opposed to exploring the unanswered lore that the Zelda community has argued about for a year.

That said, I had an absolute blast playing the game. If nothing else, Age of Imprisonment gave me the cleanest, most energetic musou combat the series has ever had. Because Link can’t logically exist in this timeline, Zelda takes on the all-rounder combat role, and I genuinely found her moveset satisfying. My favourite weapon is by far the Zonaite sword; it flies out, cuts through packs of Bokoblins, Lizalfos, and Keese, then returns to Zelda’s hand while glowing with light energy. Once she learned Recall-based techniques that send projectiles out and then reverse them back across the field, I was fully locked in.

Mineru, though, completely stole the show for me. Her dedication to Zonai technology translates into some of the wildest actions I’ve used in any Warriors game. At one point, I was riding around on a giant spiked two-wheeler, plowing through entire formations of enemies, and then seconds later, she was deploying a spinning paddle that thwacked massive orbs into Construct squads. Her weak point attack, where she summons spear-bearing Constructs to hammer away at enemies, made the whole battlefield feel like a machine-powered carnival.

Qia, the Zora queen, fights with torrents of water and whirlpools. Agraston, the Goron chief, rolls across the earth like a volcanic bowling ball while summoning flames. And Calamo, this tiny Korok, uses fruit to blast enemies with elemental effects. I didn’t expect that little guy to become one of my favorite picks, but every time I used him, the battlefield erupted into absolute chaos.

The Zonai devices, which all characters have access to, are the real glue that binds the combat together. Flame emitters torch groups of Chuchus, frost cones absolutely shred anything susceptible to cold, hydrants wash sludge off enemies in Zora’s Domain, and fans reflect projectiles right back toward the source. Time bombs remain hysterically useful, especially when you hurl one into a Frox’s gaping mouth to stun it. Since battery power drains quickly, you really need to think about when you deploy these tools, and I appreciated that tiny bit of resource tension in a genre built around overwhelming power.

Unique Skills offered some of the most satisfying moments. Countering a lunging Construct with a perfectly timed dash, cracking open a weak point gauge, and unloading an extended combo never got old. And when my cooldowns weren’t ready but an ally was standing nearby, they automatically jumped in with their own counter, saving me more times than I can count.

Then came the Sync Strikes. Every time two characters linked up for a pairing-specific special attack, for example, Zelda and Qia dropping exploding water bubbles, or Ardi and Raphica whipping up electrified tornadoes, or Zelda and Rauru firing twin light beams I controlled independently with each thumbstick, I laughed. These scenes do not change the strategic fundamentals, but they absolutely elevate the sheer style of the game.

The missions themselves lean heavily into repetition later on, and I definitely felt the cycle of sweeping corridors, clearing strongholds, and bouncing between high-threat enemies. It’s musou DNA through and through, so I didn’t expect reinvention, but I did hope the Sky Islands or the Depths would offer more than they ultimately did. The game includes only a handful of Flight Mode missions, in which the Construct becomes an aircraft, and only a few story battles truly happen underground. When locations like the Depths and Sky Islands were such major parts of Tears of the Kingdom, their limited presence here felt noticeable.

Performance, interestingly, is one of the game’s biggest triumphs. On Switch 2, the game maintains a steady 60 frames per second during main campaign play, even when the screen is drowning in enemies. I never saw dips that affected my flow. Co-op mode halves the framerate to 30, but even that looks smoother than some older Warriors games on single-player mode. The only annoyance is that opening the special abilities menu freezes the action for both players, which is a clunky choice in a game where your fingers are constantly dancing over those inputs. And bizarrely, despite the rock-solid gameplay performance, the cutscenes stutter and appear noticeably blurrier. It’s such a contrast that you feel it every time the action fades out.

I put over 20 hours into the game and finished the campaign, yet all the reviewers consistently point out that doing so still leaves you sitting at roughly 35 percent completion, simply because of how many optional challenges, upgrades, and side battles populate the map. You navigate it via the Purah Pad interface, deliberately styled after Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and as the quests pile up, the whole thing becomes a dense sea of icons.

Voice acting in the English dub is consistently strong, and the soundtrack is robust enough that the game includes a music player to freely replay tracks. Cooking is also present, integrated into camps that support your team during long missions, and Zonai device dispensers are scattered across the world, offering traps and parts in an almost ceremonial nod to Tears of the Kingdom’s resource economy.

Where the game stumbles hardest and the thing I felt the most conflicted about is the story. Ganondorf hardly shows up outside of the major moments we already knew. The Zonai lore barely expands. The Sages appear in recognizable form but never become as memorable or distinct as the Champions were in Breath of the Wild. The Secret Stones remain surface-level details. And ancient Hyrule itself ends up looking so much like the present-day world that, visually, it feels like we’re simply being told it is old rather than shown. After seeing four different games take place in versions of this same setting—Breath of the Wild, Age of Calamity, Tears of the Kingdom, and now Age of Imprisonment—I felt that creeping sense of déjà vu settle in again.

And yet, despite all of those issues, I couldn’t deny how much fun I had carving through armies, swapping characters mid-counter, detonating Zonai devices, watching Sync Strikes explode across the screen, and absolutely flooding the battlefield in chaos.