Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment review – the button mashing of Zelda

The third crossover between The Legend Of Zelda and the Dynasty Warriors series lets you control Princess Zelda in the distant past of Hyrule.

Dynasty Warriors will be 30 years old in 2027, and we can’t think of any franchise less deserving of having lasted that long. We don’t want to put developers out of work, and clearly someone must like them, but despite innumerable sequels, spin-offs, and crossovers the games have barely seen any evolution in gameplay in all that time, which is a real problem when the core concept is so simplistic and repetitive.

The crossover games, such as Persona 5 Strikers, do tend to be the best ones (the mainline games are all set in Ancient China) but none of them are actively good. They’re popular in Japan though and for whatever reason Nintendo has teamed up with developer Koei Tecmo for not just Zelda spin-offs but Fire Emblem as well.

This is the third Hyrule Warriors, with the first one being a straightforward reuse of the Dynasty Warriors formula but with Zelda characters. It had very little in the way of story but 2020’s Age Of Calamity featured an original plot within the continuity of Breath Of The Wild, set in the past when the Champions were still alive. Age Of Imprisonment is set even further back in time, telling the story of what Princess Zelda was doing in ancient Hyrule during the events of Tears Of The Kingdom.

The problem with this premise, is that we already know what Zelda was up to in the past, through the numerous flashback cut scenes in Tears Of The Kingdom. It’s hard to imagine that the majority of people playing this haven’t already played Tears Of The Kingdom but if you haven’t that’s the only way you’ll be surprised by the story’s major plot points. There’re a few new bits of lore towards the end, but really nothing to justify the game as a whole.

One of the key problems is the lack of memorable characters. It was fun to see the Champions in their prime, in the previous game, and controlling the Divine Beasts added a touch of variety. 90% of the characters in Age Of Imprisonment are either completely new – but just bland exemplars of the various races – or sages that were seen in cut scenes from Tears Of The Kingdom but never named. They’re given personalities here, but inevitably they’re all boring, selfless martyrs.

The only exception is a garrulous korok and a mute construct (i.e. robot) that is used as a surrogate for Link. He’s much more versatile than the other characters, and able to use different types of weapons and abilities, but it really doesn’t matter because all the game’s combat boils down to is mashing the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ buttons. Technically there are combos, depending on how many times you press ‘X’ before ending with a ‘Y’ attack, which creates a different special effect, but the difference this makes is so mild, and the difficulty level so low, it’s effectively meaningless.

There are other special moves, either intrinsic to the character or obtained via Zonai weapons, but their primary purpose is countering enemy special attacks, so you tend to just keep them in reserve for that and never use them willingly.

All of this is far less enjoyable than the action in Tears Of The Kingdom. Combat in Zelda games is not exactly complex but you’ve so much freedom in how you approach encounters it never gets dull. The opposite is true of Age Of Imprisonment, even though combat is all that happens in it. This is especially obvious when the game tries to awkwardly replicate elements from the main games, such as fighting a boulder-like Talus or a bomb-inhaling Frox, where things like jumping on their back become automated actions rather than an organic part of the battle.

The only thing breaking up the ground battles are brief Star Fox style sequences where you take control of the not-Link construct, which can transform into a jet. These on-the-rails sections are mildly enjoyable, but like the rest of the game they’re trivially easy and rely too much on repeating ideas from Tears Of The Kingdom (despite being set thousands of years in the past, most of Hyrule still looks more or less the same).

The key appeal of Dynasty Warriors has always been that there are hundreds of enemies on-screen at once and you can attack dozens at a time with any weapon. That fleeting novelty is all there is to the games, except for a strategy element where most missions involve capturing and holding bases on a larger map. This aspect is greatly diminished in Age Of Imprisonment, as it’s completely ignored in side missions and even in story missions it’s more something that happens as a side effect of your progress, with very little back and forth, in terms of who occupies a base, and no sense of urgency.

Instead, the side missions take place on smaller maps (from a tiny selection that are constantly repeated) and simply involve killing a set number of larger foes. Sometimes there’s a non-threatening time limit or an escort mission, but usually not. Enemies usually have some sort of elemental enhancement, like ice or fire, that can be countered with specific attacks of your own, but the pool of enemies is taken from Tears Of The Kingdom, so not only have you probably seen them all before but the game runs out of new ones within an hour or so even if you haven’t.

There are virtually no brand new enemies and even the unique boss characters are inspired by bosses from Tears Of The Kingdom. All of which means that the game is both insanely shallow and extremely repetitive. You need to do a fair amount of the side missions to level up your characters, but mindlessly scything through the ranks of impotent cannon fodder takes on an almost dreamlike quality as you do the same thing again and again and again.

Although this is a Switch 2-only game it looks exactly like Tears Of The Kingdom. Age Of Calamity did as well but that was hobbled by terrible slowdown and technical issues. If nothing else, Age Of Imprisonment is proof that the Switch 2 is considerably more powerful, as there’s now no performance issues at all.

This allows for the one saving grace of the game: split-screen and online co-op. It’s completely unnecessary, because the game’s already so easy, but if you are going to endure the tedium of playing the game it’s best to do so with a friend.

It’s clear that Nintendo wanted a Zelda game to be available for the Switch 2’s launch, despite a new mainline entry being several years away, but this was the absolute worse way of achieving that. If they were going to make a new Hyrule Warriors it needed to have either more involved gameplay or at least a more compelling story. Age Of Imprisonment has neither and, frankly, all involved should be locked up for their crimes against Hyrule.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £58.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: AAA Games Studio
Release Date: 6th November 2025
Age Rating: 12

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