Nintendo took the same map and made it feel new again by handing you the tools to take it apart yourself.
The first time I fused a boulder to a stick and swung it into a Bokoblin camp, I laughed out loud in my living room, alone, at eleven at night. That's Tears of the Kingdom in one dumb sentence. Nintendo took the same Hyrule from Breath of the Wild, added a sky full of floating islands and a whole subterranean layer called the Depths underneath it, then handed you four new abilities that let you build, glue, climb through ceilings, and rewind time on individual objects. It sounds like a lot. It plays like exactly the right amount.
Ultrahand is the one that ate my weekend. It lets you grab objects and stick them together, springs to planks to fans to stone slabs, and the game just trusts you to figure out what a vehicle is. I built an ugly raft with a fan bolted to the back to cross a lake I probably could have swum. Other players built working cars, cannons, even a functioning crossbow turret, and the game never once told any of us we were doing it wrong.
“Nobody told me I was doing it wrong, because there wasn't a wrong way to do it.”
Fuse solves the durability complaints from Breath of the Wild without removing durability entirely, which is a smarter compromise than it sounds. Weapons still break, but now you can staple a rock, a fan, or a monster part onto a stick and get something usable out of nearly anything in your inventory. My favorite combo all game was a boomerang fused to a Keese eyeball, which let me knock enemies off ledges from across a courtyard. It turned weapon durability from an annoyance into a puzzle.
The map itself is now three layers deep. The sky islands are small, deliberate puzzle boxes best explored early. The surface is the Hyrule most players already know, rebuilt with new caves and wells worth ducking into. The Depths underneath are the real surprise, a pitch-black mirror of the overworld lit only by glowing plants and the bombs you drop to see a few feet ahead, and they're genuinely unsettling in a way this series rarely attempts.
The story leans on the same structure as Breath of the Wild, memory fragments scattered around the map that you piece together in whatever order you find them, and it's the one part of the game that feels recycled rather than reinvented. Zelda's actual role in the plot is more interesting than last time, but the delivery mechanism for getting there hasn't changed much.
Shrines are shorter and punchier than Breath of the Wild's, and the four regional temples that replace the divine beasts are a real improvement, each one a proper dungeon with its own identity instead of a reused floor plan. The Fire Temple, built around a moving fortress you're actively trying to survive rather than just explore, might be the best dungeon Nintendo has built in this style yet.
None of this comes free on the hardware. The Switch is well past its prime by 2023 standards, and busy areas, especially the Depths with heavy particle effects, still cause noticeable frame drops. It never got bad enough to cost me a fight, but it's there, and a Switch successor can't come soon enough for a game built this ambitiously on aging silicon.
I've put about seventy hours in and I'm still finding sky islands I hadn't noticed. Whether it beats Breath of the Wild depends on what you wanted more of. If the answer was more Hyrule with better tools to break it apart, this is that game, delivered without a single wasted mechanic.