Third time the charm?
I’ve played Hyrule Warriors on Wii U and 3DS a lot, spending many, many hours going through the story quest and hunting down collectibles and tackling tough objectives. The Switch version gives you all the content from both games and even adds in some Breath of the Wild costumes for Link and Zelda, but how does it run? The Wii U version had some framerate issues, while the 3DS had less enemies on-screen to compensate.
The Switch version is definitely the best version of the game technically, the framerate rarely drops, enemy count is up and visuals don’t take a nose dive if you play it split-screen like it did on Wii U. The framerate does tend to drop every now and then in handheld mode, but I think that’s the price to pay for having the game run at 1080p even in handheld mode. Despite that, it’s still more consistent than the Wii U version.
It’s hard to recommend this version if like me, you’ve played the other 2 versions to death since the only new content is the BOTW costumes and improved performance, but still I found myself still putting in countless hours on the whole. I always enjoyed playing split-screen with my partner and now it runs and looks even better while doing so, something I thought would be a big ask after seeing how much of a hit it took to performance on Wii U.
The Verdict
Despite not having any new content besides some costumes and improved performance, this is still the best version of the game and it comes with all the content previously released. It’s hard to deny how addictive Hyrule Warriors is and even after going through it for a 3rd time on a 3rd different machine, I’m still not sick of it. Though I wouldn’t mind a sequel…