Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Instant classic"

This is a great Zelda title to be added to the long line of successors, and fear not it lives up to all it's expectations. Following the usual pattern like many past Zelda games, this one starts off with our hero (Link) in a small Farming village of sorts, herding goats. He soon finds himself in the midst of the action after following a series of events, when he get's sucked into the Twilight Realm. This darkness has also spread across a vast portion of Hyrule. Inside the Twilight, he is transformed into a wolf know as the Blue Eyed Beast. Here he encounters Midna, an inhabitant of this realm who offers Link help to escape his imprisonment and rides on his back offering him hints throughout the game, or access to places he could not otherwise access in Human form, all while seeming to be after something of her own using you to help achieve that.

In Wolf form, Link can still attack similar to the motion controls with the sword but he also has access to two new abilities, Sense which lets him track scent trails of people or things he needs to pursue and also places where he can use his second ability: Dig to dig up items and even cross under small gaps under walls.

The motion controls seem to work well for the most part however sometimes when you try to do a basic move by thrusting to nun-chuck forward to do a shield block nothing will happen or you will do a spin attack instead, this may be however due to where my sensor was located. Horse mounted combat however, is a nice addition to the series that was lacking beforehand

All the usual Temples like the Forest, Fire, and Water are back in new and inventive ways along with a few new ones. The items in each Temple are true to past titles, however there's some twists to a few of them, and some weird items that you wouldn't typically see like the Spinner, a bladed disk of sorts, similar to a Beyblade, that you ride and cross across things like quicksand you previously could not pass and traverse grooves embeded in walls and such and ride them to different locations. The puzzles are just as good as ever, challenging you to think, but I found some of them I found myself staring at the map and re checking ever room only to find a somewhat simple answer in front of me once I figured out what I missed.

The story keeps you moving on at a nice pace, and there is a ton of side quests for you to complete keeping the replay value of this game high. The boss battles are epic, with usually gigantic entities filling the screen and some cool game play to following involving some clever use of one, or mutiple items you recently looted, however most of the battles seem to be on the easy side.

Overall, this is a great game the any Zelda fan should love, and any newcomer should enjoy. With a good story and excellent art style and sounds we've grown to love, this is a must play for the Wii