‘Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild’ Proves Skeptics Wrong, Scores 98 At Metacritic

Nintendo is having a pretty good week, it seems, with the launch of the Switch and the latest Legend of Zelda game. Speaking of which, reviews for “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” are already pouring in and what a picture they paint. Not only is the game already considered a game-changer, it’s even got skeptics changing their minds about it.

Right now, Breath of the Wild has a Metacritic score of 98, which is keeping in line with pretty much every Zelda game in the past. Even so, at an almost perfect score on the collective site, Nintendo did more than just hit the ball out of the park. The ball went straight into orbit.

Now, there are a number of reasons for why reviewers and gamers are head over heels for this game, and it would seem that the reviewers are finding a difficult time agreeing on which of these reasons is the standout winner. Breath of the Wild is being showered with praise as much for the subtle, practically inconsequential details as it is for the huge (and it is huge!) open world setting.

With Kotaku’s review, for example, the piece starts out by describing a mechanics in the game that accurately shows just how much freedom players have. Instead of slogging through a particular puzzle scenario that involves rolling a huge boulder, gamers can just take advantage of the title’s inherent physics system to solve the whole thing and move on.

Even the game’s difficulty is a delight to many of the reviewers. Zelda games have always been known for pushing players through the grinder, but some had feared that Breath of the Wild would lose its edge. It didn’t. This prompted Business Insider and so many other sites to start publishing certain tips that would help gamers overcome some of the more challenging parts of the title while thoroughly describing why the difficulty is a good thing.