The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom review - Old meets new, but for who?

It has a retro-aping Chibi art style, reminiscent of the Link’s Awakening remake from 2019. But in terms of gameplay, it seems heavily inspired by the player freedom and creativity that earned rave reviews for Tears of the Kingdom last year.

This mix can be seriously charming at times. As you wander between tiny houses and chat to cute NPCs, it does feel like you’re playing a forgotten Game Boy game.

But as you wander further, you’ll realise that you’re actually in a modern open-world environment with plenty of side quests and hidden treasures to find. It’s a winning blend of old and new.

Before I previewed the game a few weeks ago, I had assumed it would be a simple kid-friendly affair that wasn’t really for me.

I was pleasantly surprised by the preview event, though, with the first couple of hours winning me over with their surprising amounts of depth and agency.

Although Zelda can temporarily transform into 'Swordfighter' mode to borrow Link’s sword, shield, bow and arrow, you spend most of the game developing a different set of skills — skills that encourage you to think your way through situations rather than simply hacking away at them.

With the the help of her yellow floating orb friend named Tri, Zelda can use her wand to summon 'echoes' of almost anything — items such as tables and beds, enemies such as piranhas and birds, can be plucked out of thin air to help you out.

Whether you’re building a bridge to traverse a dungeon, or summoning your former foes to defeat the next big nasty, you’ll come to rely on this echoes system a lot.

You also have the power to move certain items around, or to attach yourself to them (for example, you can attach yourself to a moving platform and follow its path around the room).

I was impressed by these systems in the preview event (my video report from the event is embedded above), but the sheen did slightly come off when I played the full game for this review.

As much as you do feel clever when you work something out (like climbing up a spider’s web to progress through an area), it never stops being fiddly to select the echo that you actually want to use.

The more echoes you collect, the more time you’ll spend tapping through the menus to find the one you want at that moment. It doesn’t feel super intuitive, and the rudimentary menu on offer does pull you out of the experience a bit and break your immersion.

Another qualm is that the puzzles do get a little repetitive at times — if you’ve made one bridge out of beds, buckle up, because you’ll end up making a hundred of the things.

It doesn’t feel like Echoes of Wisdom gives you as much freedom as Tears of the Kingdom did to approach each problem differently. Sometimes this new game feels a bit more 'one size fits all'.

Bosses were another element I didn’t love. It’s quite fun using echoes to defeat smaller enemies (I’m a big fan of throwing snakes at people), but the rigmarole of trying to defeat a big boss without actually using any weapons can get a bit annoying.

That being said, Echoes of Wisdom did keep pulling me back in. The art style is really bright and loveable, the music is consistently great (with different sounds for the unique areas of the map), and the dungeons provide a decent amount of challenge.

There’s also a cool feature where you can move the camera round using the right stick, allowing you to see a little bit more of the map at any given point. I’d love to see more games given this treatment, with Pokémon seeming like a really natural fit for this presentation style.

One uncool feature is the lack of proper voice acting. This is rarely a priority for Zelda, but it does result in a lot of reading and/or skipping through dialogue. Again, this breaks the immersion a bit, distancing the player from the (fairly light) story at hand.

Another thing I’ve not managed to fully understand — who is this game for? If it’s for younger fans, they might want a little more outright action. If it’s for adult veterans of the franchise, they might want the creative element to be a lot more freewheeling and open-ended.

Neither camp is likely to be fully satisfied here. But as an experiment in combining two different eras of Zelda, while giving the title character a chance to shine at long last, Echoes of Wisdom does feel like a success.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom launches today (26th September) on Nintendo Switch. You can order your copy now.

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