You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom.2256/

Before jumping into this review, I want to offer a quick disclaimer about the type of content being discussed. While there will be no major events spoiled outright, I do look generally at quests, puzzles, dungeons, and their rewards to give a better image of the game as a whole. If you intend to go into the game entirely spoiler-free, the verdict boxes at the end of the review will be kept as such. Having said that, they will lack the depth and context required to justify my thoughts.

A Slow Start on the Great Sky Island

The game opens in the same cinematic manner as its predecessor, skipping the title screen and taking you straight into depths of Hyrule Castle alongside Zelda. You’re there to investigate the source of a new blight to the kingdom dubbed the Gloom, and fully powered up from your previous adventure, very little is going to get in your way. Though it serves as a natural introduction to the basic controls, its larger purpose is in showing you murals of the Zonai, an ancient race that you’ll come to know more through the game, and the source of the Gloom himself, everybody’s favourite Demon King: Ganondorf. Ending in a dramatic sequence of his revival, Link gets quite soundly beaten and weakened, Zelda disappears into the void, and the world shakes as a new calamity begins to unfold.

With the world below fragmented and upheaved, you wake up on the Great Sky Island, serving largely in the same vein as the Great Plateau of Breath of the Wild. It’s here you’ll learn the ropes by the guiding hand of a friendly spirit, being taught the basics you’ll need to survive in the world below. There’s a lot of parallels, and while I do feel it’s a step up from the Plateau, it does lack that first major “wow” moment you had as you left the Shrine of Resurrection and ran up the hill. Here you get a much slower burn. To get a key mechanic out of the way, your core movement is pretty much the same as what you had in Breath of the Wild. You have the same freedoms, with the ability to run, jump, and climb, with the same limitation of stamina. The Great Sky Island is a much more interesting environment than the Plateau could have hoped to be, and the freedoms given to you by your new abilities open you up to a huge amount of experimentation out of the gate. It does a great job in cramming a lot of information into roughly an hour of playtime if you’re eager to get to the surface, but can feel slower than it perhaps needed to on the grounds of you having had three wheels of stamina for the guided introduction before being powered down to just one. It’s a tough battle to win. You know the Link you see at full strength isn’t going to last, but with the introduction being so heavy on just running, I was more aware than I perhaps needed to be of how much I would come to miss having a bunch of stamina. While there was a lot to see on the Great Sky Island, I instead wanted to rush to get off it to start powering back up. It’s not as though I didn’t enjoy the island though, and the abilities acquired as I progressed were at the core of why I had as much fun as I did.

The Evolution of Abilities

Much like in Breath of the Wild, and I fear you might read that phrase a lot, the Great Sky Island features four shrines, with each of them either providing you with, or showing you how to use, a power that’ll be useful to you for the rest of the game. To start with the most impactful of these, we have Ultrahand. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that your enjoyment of the game will in no small part depend on your enjoyment of this mechanic. At its core you can think of it as Magnesis. You have the same basic way of interacting with objects on triggering the skill where you point and click, and can then move it around. What changes here is that you’re no longer limited to just metal objects, and the freedom you have to move the objects is vastly increased. You can now push, pull, rotate, twist, you name it. But that’s not where it stops. The most significant part of this skill, and the foundation of many of the game’s puzzles to come, is the fact you can fuse objects together. There’s several levels of this, and the game breaks you in gently. My first thought, and the thought of many others I can only assume, was to make giant bridges to solve every problem. That worked, and even after beating the game, I have a profound sense of satisfaction every time I bridge a gap instead of doing something smarter and probably more intended. There’s obviously more at play here though, and while binding together objects in the wild is fun to make rafts out of trees and the like, the ability comes into its own when you mix in Zonai devices.

As the hip new ancient civilisation on the block, Zonai technology offers an incredible range of gadgets and gizmos to glue together. Though you can find these out and about, they also quite conveniently come in capsule form, with you able to collect them from what are ultimately gachapon machines littering the landscape. Each of these machines contains four or five types of capsule, and they’re generally setup to give you devices that are useful to your specific environment. The variety of Zonai devices on offer is more than enough to get you through the world, and opens up a degree of creativity that’s never been explored in the series. If you want to ride around on a Green Goblin-style glider, you can build it. If you want to watch a camp of Bokoblins get assaulted by rocket drones, you can, if you would believe it, build that too. There are a few limitations in how the Zonai devices will just break after so much use, and even within that invisible timer they’re powered by batteries. Despite that though they manage to be an incredibly engaging part of the larger game and remain both interesting and relevant even after 50+ hours.

That’s just the first ability though. While the others may not be quite as impactful, they each fit in well to this new world, one even addressing a common complaint held against Breath of the Wild: durability. While there can be an argument made for it forcing you to use a more varied pool of weapons, there was a larger issue in ensuring you constantly had viable weapons on hand. Fuse fixes this, to a reasonable degree at least. I’ll be blunt, durability is still a large part of this game. It’s here to stay, for better or worse. At the very least, there’s a justification in-world as to why the weapons are weaker and break so easily, with them having been decayed by the Gloom. What Fuse does is address a part of the issue in the difficulties of maintaining an inventory of viable weapons. In Breath of the Wild you could quite easily find Bokoblins carrying sticks, but you wouldn’t be able to use those for anything more than beating the very enemies that carry them. Fuse evolves the weapon system by still making these basic weapons accessible, but allowing you to attach material from your inventory onto them for an assortment of buffs. Where previously beating your bog standard Bokoblin would give you a low-damage stick, you’ll now get their stick and perhaps the horn that was on their head. In the worst case, you can throw those together and just like that, you have a relatively capable weapon. This expands further, with certain materials having unique characteristics. Gemstones now have a use outside of their value with diamonds and amber offering a good damage buff, and other stones adding elemental damage. The weapon types remain as they were in Breath of the Wild, adding further variety to fused weapons. Because the game makes basic weapons so accessible, I never felt like I was going out of my way for the sake of durability or having to prepare. If I ran out of good weapons, I’d make more on the spot and just carry on fighting.

Zonai devices also come into play for the Fuse ability, with you able to not only add them to your weapons, but also your shields too. With devices like flame and beam emitters available, it shouldn’t take much effort to think up how they might be viable weapons, but shields? It’s not something immediately obvious, but a good chunk of devices thrive when on a shield. You can throw a hydrant on your shield if you need easy access to water, a spring if you want a high one-time jump, or even a cart if you want the smoothest shield surfing of your life. It’s a great mechanic that both addresses an issue of Breath of the Wild, and integrates well with the additions of its sequel.

The third ability worth talking about is Recall. As the name suggests, it allows you to reverse the path of any selected object. The Great Sky Island sells it a little short, demonstrating the ability by asking you to make some gears turn in a different direction so they’ll carry you up them. That’s cool and it’s functional, but it only scratches the surface of what you can do with it. Thinking simply, anything an enemy throws at you can be pinged right back at them. That alone is incredibly strong, but with a bit more creativity, you can combine it with Ultrahand and create your own moving platforms to cross gaps or get you up a ledge. It’s a powerful tool in finding alternate solutions to puzzles, and also serves as your primary means of getting back to the sky outside of warping, making use of rocks that fall from the heavens. As a skill it’s unique in use since it slows time down when activated, giving you a good window to catch whatever it is you’re wanting to rewind.

Our fourth and final major ability is a simple one to explain: Ascend. If you stand below a relatively flat ceiling, you can jump up to and swim through it until you reach ground above. This is a quality of life ability at its core, and aims to make traversal of vertical terrain that bit simpler. On top of this though, you have a fairly interesting potential present for hiding secrets, and it was fun to see how this was utilised. A closed door is no longer just a closed door; if there happens to be a way under the room, you have a new way in altogether. A number of mountainous areas now also have rocks and overhangs to pull you up, making the once-frustrating climbs that bit shorter.

An Upheaved World

The larger world has changed greatly in these past six years, and while we may have the same Hyrule as a base, it’d be disingenuous to just call it Breath of the Wild’s map. Breath of the Wild did a good job of putting forward a vast landscape devoid of life after 100 years of a looming evil. Thematically I think it was quite interesting, but there was little in the way of engagement as you moved from point to point. Tears of the Kingdom takes what is ultimately the blank canvas of a beaten down Hyrule and presents it as a living, breathing world. If Breath of the Wild did an apt job in showing a downtrodden people, Tears of the Kingdom excels in showing a populus on the rise. You’ll see people on the roads, more frequent locations of interest, and materials littered throughout the land from an era of rebuilding. It’s a clever setting that works well with the new abilities given to you, and ensures you pretty much always have some kind of building blocks around you to start fusing away.

Enemy variety and placement throughout the world sees a vast improvement too. Gone are the days of Bokoblin and Moblins at every crossroad; we now have Aerocudas, Boss Bokoblins, Gibdos, Horroblins, Like Likes, Evermean, as well as the new Zonai Construct enemies that will fight Ganon’s minions if they happen to meet. On top of this, you have a great assortment of new bosses spread around to support the returning cast.

Outside of the ground, Tears of the Kingdom gives you two other areas to explore in the sky and the depths. Given it’s where you start the game, the floating islands are something you quickly become familiar with. The reality of it really isn’t all that complex, and they mostly just serve as another area to explore, complete with their own style of puzzles and certain things that are only possible so high up. More than anything I came to rely on the sky more as a means of navigating the lower world than as something to explore. Moving over large areas and scouting the map for landmarks and shrines becomes much easier by using Reverse on a falling rock and getting a bird’s-eye view. One thing I wasn’t expecting is the inclusion of low gravity mechanics on the highest of the sky islands, giving you high floaty jumps that you can repeatedly initiate bullet time arrow shots out of. I wish it were utilised a bit more, with some of my favourite content in the game quite surprisingly being the three mazes lurking in the corners of the world.

Though you might remember these mazes from Breath of the Wild as being Guardian-littered balls of stress, they’re now presented as a unique three-part trial. This trial is, as you might have guessed from the larger topic here, split between the ground and sky, and finally finishing in the depths. I really had a great time traversing between the different environments, and coming up with my own somewhat clunky ways to make it to the sky with the Zonai devices I had on hand. A part of me wishes there were more areas that linked all three layers of the game together, but I thoroughly enjoyed what was available.

The depths are our final layer, and probably the most interesting addition. If you happen to stumble into them as I did before progressing the relevant quests, you’ll be met with a remarkably dark environment littered with Gloom. It’s also around this point where you’ll realise Gloom is in fact a new status ailment that will reduce your maximum health until you leave the depths. It’s remarkably stressful, but as you figure out how to light up the world around you and begin to explore, it really becomes a highlight of the game. This is where you’ll find the most difficult enemies, as well as some of its more lucrative treasures. Unlike the more limited sky islands, this area stretches beneath the entirety of Hyrule, giving you an impressive amount to do and see should it interest you to do so. Despite being a map almost completely devoid of human life, it manages to keep you invested with breadcrumbs to follow and frequent rewards through the darkness.

Let it Shrine

Shrines return in full force from Breath of the Wild with 32 more to find across the sky on top of the 120 throughout the kingdom, notably in new locations now. With a fresh new design and some new puzzles to go with it, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of them. With the nature of the abilities in Tears of the Kingdom, I can imagine it somewhat difficult to create a puzzle that has one explicit solution as so many of the shrines in Breath of the Wild had. While you can often pinpoint what an intended solution is fairly quickly, it’s very rare to find yourself limited to just that option now. You can usually skip the puzzle with a bridge, by flinging yourself, by rewinding a platform of your creation, or by just making something obscure and outside of the scope of what the shrine expects. You aren’t penalised for this in any way. Instead, the shrines act as a means of nurturing that creativity and showing you new and fun ways you can interact with the world. This is especially true in the new combat-oriented shrines that take your gear from you.

Similar to the Eventide Island quest in Breath of the Wild, these shrines take everything you had and present you with a limited set of tools to beat all the Zonai Constructs present. Each of these shrines comes with a theme. You might have one that focuses on vehicles, one that focuses on sneaking; my favourite was one that had you running around dodging attacks while setting more and more homing robots loose with weapons strapped to them. Even after clearing 90 or so shrines I still found myself looking forward to the next, which is a marked step up from my experience with Breath of the Wild.

Lending a Helping Hand

Looking outside of shrines and to the larger topic of quests, I found myself never lacking in a goal to be aiming for. Much of this comes down to the more active world, and every other NPC wanting something from you, or wanting to talk to you about something interesting. The quests themselves are nothing spectacular on paper. You might be taking a picture of something, you might be collecting materials, or using your abilities to clear an obstacle. Where they thrive is in the stories they tell and how they manage to make you care about even the least significant of characters.

Structurally quests can be broken down into three types: standard side quests, side adventures, and shrine quests. Side quests are what we’re used to from Breath of the Wild, and will generally see you working with one character to solve an often-straightforward problem. Some of these can be quite lengthy, such as one NPC’s desire to be told about each of the 58 wells in the world, but it’s in side adventures where things really step up. A new quest type to this game, side adventures see you interacting with multiple characters on larger scale questlines. These might involve you trekking across the kingdom to follow up leads on the location of Zelda, or chasing a familiar face through the depths below. There’s a little more variety at play and they feel like more significant endeavours, both in what you’re being asked to do and your reward for completing them. As for shrine quests, you can really just think of them as a shrine puzzle outside of a shrine. You might get a riddle to solve, or sometimes need to get the shrine rock to the shrine location by following a beam of light Howl’s Moving Castle-style. This style of transport quest is really elevated by the new mechanics, giving you all manner of freedom to get from A to B as you see fit.

Koroks make their return, and again you’re tasked with finding 1000 of the blighters between the ground and sky. It is good to see the short puzzles that make them appear are a little more varied, making good use of the new abilities available to you. A surprising standout in this regard is in the escort-oriented Koroks, requiring you to get one Korok back to their friend a short distance away. You can naturally carry them softly, but there is much more fun to be had in strapping them to a rocket and watching them go. Between this added variety and the fact that a tight inventory isn’t as much of an issue here as it was thanks to Fuse, I found myself just enjoying the Koroks as I came across them in oppose to feeling it necessary to seek them out.

As a whole I had a good time with the quests, but there were a few that had me guessing a little in what they wanted me to do. In retrospect I don’t think these were the worst, but they did stand out quite clearly in a game that otherwise is fairly straightforward in its requests.

The Meat of the Adventure

The main quests are where you’ll find the meat of the story content, and while I will keep my thoughts brief here for obvious reasons, I really did enjoy it more than I expected to. Much like Breath of the Wild, the story is split between two areas: the events unfolding around you and the fragments you learn via memory cutscenes. Though I did enjoy this concept in Breath of the Wild, it fell short in the larger context of the game with the stories having a significant disconnect. Learning about the past events and world was interesting, but it never really impacted your current quest in a meaningful way. This time around is different, and while I won’t delve into it too much here, it does a much better job of linking everything together for a more cohesive experience. The game also explicitly lays out the order of the memories for you and where to find them within the world, which is a nice touch for those wanting to see events in chronological order.

The current-day plot is similar in structure to Breath of the Wild. Zelda is missing, and while each of the four major hubs would love to help you, they have their own issues to sort out first. And you’d better believe you’re going to lend a hand. The Gerudo are suffering from an unending sandstorm, the Rito a blizzard, the Zora have sludge raining on them, and the Gorons are addicted to contaminated rocks. I really like these conflicts as opposed to it being the same issue of a big machine turning against the people, and it allows for the game to tailor each of these quests better to the area of the world you’re in. Your efforts ultimately find you in a temple containing the cause of the issues, and while it might be exciting to hear the word temple, you should temper your expectations a little.

I do like the dungeons on offer here, but it’s difficult to compare them to the dungeons of old. While there is a sense of linear progression in getting to the dungeon itself, it ends on reaching the puzzles. Again we’re back to a similar structure to Breath of the Wild, though again we see it improved and refined. You have a number of terminals marked on your map that you need to get to and activate, but where I think this really thrives is in keeping with the freedoms the rest of the game offers. A number of these puzzles have alternate solutions you can employ if you’re creative with your powers, and it really does feel good to skirt around what’s expected of you. Each dungeon ends with a boss, and following the better enemy variety in the overworld, I had a great time seeing something outside of four very similar looking Ganon blights. The bosses themselves tie into the disasters currently occurring, and fit nicely into the world and environment they find themselves occupying for an engaging and fun fight.

Your reward for completing these dungeons is essentially a companion that can be summoned to fight alongside you. Each of these companions come packed with an ability matching their race, and feel like a more meaningful addition than the champion powers of Breath of the Wild. Instead of just having a new ability, you grow your party as you progress and finish with a team you feel you earned.

Hyrule’s Many Collectables and Currencies

A nice touch is that you can upgrade these companions so they’ll be able to do more damage and help you better in combat. There’s actually a whole heap of things you can upgrade in Tears of the Kingdom, and while I do enjoy having so many things to be collecting and improving, it can feel somewhat unwieldy at times. You have Lights of Blessing to upgrade your health and stamina, Korok Seeds returning to improve your inventory space, Poes found in the depths and Bubbul Gems in caves for unique rewards, Zonaite for battery upgrades. Everything has a place and everything has a use, but a part of me does want it to just be a touch simpler. This extends to the menus too.

Breath of the Wild operated fairly simply, and to the credit of this new game, a good bit of that does carry over. In terms of menuing, there’s just a lot more to fit in for Tears of the Kingdom, especially with how the Fuse mechanic allows you to put any material on the tip of your arrows. Instead of just being able to equip a fire arrow, you’ll find yourself pulling up a menu and having to scroll through your entire inventory to find the material that’ll give the desired effect. While it does keep your place on the menu if you want to use the same material twice, you need to go to the hassle of re-fusing the material each time. And if you want to go to a different material, it’s your entire inventory you’re scrolling through again. To mitigate frustration, you are able to sort by your most used materials, but a simple favourites radial or something on those lines would have gone a long way in streamlining what was previously a really simple endeavour.

Pushing Six Year Old Hardware

Now the Vah Ruta in the room I’ve somewhat avoided talking about up to this point is the console Tears of the Kingdom finds itself on. The Switch was never a particularly strong system, but what may come as a surprise to some is that the game manages to outperform its predecessor significantly. While performance prior to release, or on the cartridge’s 1.0.0 patch, was noted to be incredibly inconsistent, the 1.1.0 patch went a long way in ensuring a consistent 30fps for the majority of the game. It’s not to say there aren’t slow downs, especially when using the new Ultrahand ability, and more especially when doing so in already-busy areas, but it was infrequent enough to not really distract from the larger fun I was having with the world.

Graphically it’s not all too different a story to Breath of the Wild, though the use of AMD’s Super Resolution tech may make the 900p docked image look a bit nicer to some. There are more technically-knowledgeable sites that can give you more rounded information on that though. To me, the game manages to look a lot better for the fact there’s just more things of interest to look at. The sky is no longer just a skybox, and the depths introduce an entirely new style that works wonderfully. This isn’t going to challenge the latest AAA hits from Sony or Microsoft, but considering the context of the platform we’re on, it’s a fantastic showing. I do live in hope of a more powerful system to play this on in the future, if only to see the graphics a little cleaner and smooth out those final stutters, but nothing the Switch has done has made me want to put the game down.

I do think it’s important to address that the Switch does actually add a few features uncommon on other platforms that go a long way in improving the gameplay experience, with gyro aiming being front and centre. It’s unbelievably nice to be able to just point and shoot, whether it be with the bow or just orienting your camera to mark a shrine in the distance as you’re falling. It’s fluid in a way that just works, supplementing the larger control scheme in a way that feels natural. Amiibo also return for those already invested in that ecosystem, but a pleasant surprise is that the vast majority of equipment is entirely accessible in the world regardless.

Final Thoughts

Tears of the Kingdom is marvellous and natural evolution of the gameplay set out in Breath of the Wild. Offering an expansive world full of things to keep you occupied and unique gameplay mechanics to keep you hooked tens of hours later, it is a must buy for the vast majority of Switch owners. While technically held back by the platform it finds itself on, it simultaneously serves as a testament to, and reminder of, what the Switch is capable of.

You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/elden-ring.2021/

I’m fairly new to FromSoft’s great Soulsbornekirings series, or however they combine the their titles nowadays. Starting with Dark Souls Remastered on the Switch after seeing it on sale a few years ago, I was completely enthralled. Though these games have a reputation for their difficulty, what stood out to me was the carefully-crafted world I found myself exploring. How intentionally each enemy was placed, and how, given time, you could overcome any obstacle. To me, Dark Souls was a game of guided exploration and learning with a difficulty that scaled with your knowledge to keep your encounters satisfying and your victories triumphant. Since then I’ve spent a bit of time playing each game in the series, but none of them quite captured the same spark the bonfire of Firelink had kindled for me. For the first time in many years I wanted to beat a game that wasn’t the first one, I wanted a game to completely captivate me from start to end. It turns out I just wanted Elden Ring.

The Souls series as a whole is one defined by several notable aspects, the biggest of these for me being its combat. Weapons are heavy, attacks are intentional and both designed to punish and be punished if used poorly. Since my time playing the first Dark Souls game and moving through the franchise, I’ve noticed the combat speed up. It’s become more fluid, but it’s still undeniably Dark Souls. Elden Ring feels like a natural step forwards from what was on offer in the third game; frankly it’s a joy to play. You have 31 weapon types to hold in two hands, each with unique actions when hold, two handed, and even when dual wielded. Though much of this was lost on me when I first played due to solely using one or two weapons, my second run opened my eyes to the scale of diversity and variance on offer. I’ve used twinblades and moved into two unique short swords in my most recent run, and I just found myself having more and more fun as I stumbled across caves I’d previously missed and grabbed a weapon I’d never seen.

It’s not just the weapons though. Much like Dark Souls 3, each weapon also has a skill. Where Elden Ring differs from Dark Souls 3 however is that, for the most part, skills are equipable and transferable—to be swapped and used as you wish. These skills, called Ashes of War, only go to put a cherry on the top of this divine cake of combat. The arts vary greatly in function. Some will apply a buff to your weapon, some will cast magic or incantations without the usual casting requirements. My favourite art is something much simpler though: Bloodhound Step. It’s a fairly basic art. You vanish for a moment and then reappear in a different place. It’s a fancy dodge, and it absolutely transformed how I used the otherwise slow and immobile Greatsword thanks to how far you can move and the invulnerability granted while using it. It was like going from the Greatsword of Monster Hunter World to the Greatsword of Monster Hunter Rise with its wirebug addition, as an easy comparison for the hunters out there.

But that’s just one art. There are so many that completely change how you play the game, not to mention the few unique arts that lie within special armaments. Not to spoil them for you, but some strong to the point of being game-breaking. I can’t fully express just how fun it is to wander around the map and stumble across a weapon or art that completely shifts the path you’re on. Something so unique or fun that your entire build pivots to accommodate it. There was just too much for me to try in one journey, leaving me excited to explore the rest in subsequent playthroughs.

This scale is present beyond the game’s diversity in combat however, bleeding into the design of the world and how you interact with it as a whole. Elden Ring isn’t going to be boasting about having the biggest map to grace the open world scene, but what matters is that what is there is filled with life—with a story unfolding naturally and regardless of your presence. Enemies might be fighting amongst themselves, sat around a campfire, patrolling a road or pulling a carriage. Some may run to fight you, but others will just carry on with their lives. The world is large, but not to the point of feeling empty. Micro-narratives are organically presented throughout, leaving you with an incredibly rich and interesting landscape that you’re likely to view differently based on which parts you ended up visiting. I never thought an open world could feel so intentional in its design while still giving the player the freedom to engage or not engage, but here we are.

Naturally there’s another aspect of this world I’ve neglected to mention to this point. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this franchise out of its notorious difficulty: the bosses. You’re looking at more than 150 of these red-barred menaces, and while these aren’t all unique, I was surprised to see how well the duplicated encounters were handled. One fight that stuck with me was the Godskin Apostle. I first encountered this dastard in a small rectangular room in a basement area. He’s a large enemy that mostly relies on close-range attacks and closing distance quickly. In this arena, you had limited room to run away and nothing to really hide behind when in peril. It was a methodical process of learning attack patterns and finding openings to attack up-close. There just wasn’t the room to use the magic I had to that point favoured. It was a fight I enjoyed a lot, despite it not being the flashiest affair. It was a few days later where I found myself exploring a new area where I stumbled across this familiar face, now standing in a very open part of the overworld at the top of a hill. In this setting, I had more space, the ability to put distance between myself and the boss. On top of this I had access to fighting on my horse should I want that degree of mobility. These factors gave me a choice in how I wanted to deal with this enemy, transforming it into a completely different fight. Later yet into the game I came across my old Apostle friend, this time paired with another enemy for a duo boss fight. One more time this familiar boss was transformed, putting a heavier reliance on positioning to split them up from their partner and rewarding the use of spirit summons that could aid in drawing attention. I’m not going to pretend every boss fight is a joy—I ran into plenty of frustrating walls on my first playthrough, most of which I just left along for a while. What I do appreciate however is how far these small changes can go in putting a fresh face in what could otherwise end up feeling like a repetitive fight. It’s an attention to detail that really makes me look and laugh at the state of Izalith in the first Dark Souls game, and celebrate just how far we’ve come.

If I had such fun with the bosses that appeared multiple times, it should go without saying the unique bosses are spectacular. In not wanting to ruin somebody’s first encounters with these foes I’ll keep the details light, but each major fight managed to solidify itself as a milestone in the journey. Some of these bosses are fresh takes of previous creative ideas, but others are completely fresh and utilise everything that’s been put into the game. Of course on top of these you have a few optional bosses behind the scenes that act as a true test of strength, and I feel these are where the devout fans will find the most fun.

Though I somewhat glossed over it in an earlier paragraph, having access to a mount in Elden Ring really is a gamechanger. As something you can collect in the first ten minutes of play, the game guiding you towards the location you get it from, the horse is essential in making the open world work well. Instantly summonable at the press of a button, you’re free to hop on and off to aid in traverse the map, flee from battle, or even engage in cavalry combat. However you choose to use your horse you’ll find yourself appreciating the fluidity of summoning it. One button and it’s there and you’re riding. No annoying menus, no pause as you wait for it to stroll across the map and no awkward jostling to climb onto it. This is how every mount should be, and it shouldn’t be overlooked.

Outside of your horse, there are a huge number of summonable entities in the Summoning Ash items. Giving you convenient access to NPC allies that you can pick and choose between, Summoning Ashes can be brought into boss battles and certain areas to aid you in your quest while you’re otherwise playing solo. I adore this system. Though you only start with one ash in a lovely trio of wolves, you’ll find a brilliant variety of ashes on your journey, each with their own benefits and each able to be levelled up for better utility. You might have skeleton archers, punchy crystal friends, or a happy hawk assisting you from the sky. With the ability to only summon one of these in your fight, you might find yourself picking or choosing, or just focusing on one that you like. The best part of this system is that it’s completely optional, and doesn’t replace NPC summons in the game. If you think having three wolves gnawing at the knees of a pointy-hatted lady with little in the way of poise trivialises the fight, you’re still free to tackle it in the way you find most fun. These options are great, and while they don’t necessarily provide the game with the easy mode many people ask for with these titles, I feel they go a long way in aiding accessibility and enhancing your available arsenal when you come across a fight you struggle with.

Really though, Elden Ring is a game that’s as difficult as you want it to be. Thanks to its more open design, it’s by far the most accessible Souls title to date, assuming you’re happy to embrace everything the game has to offer. There’s many a deeply challenging experience to be had. Playing with no armour, fighting only the essential story bosses, beating the game without levelling up, or even just cutting out the new features like Spirit Ashes. That core challenge still exists for those who want it. But for people new to the franchise, they have so much to play with to ease themselves in. The game gives you so many tools, and I don’t feel there should be any shame in using them. Elden Ring doesn’t have to just be one gruelling session of learning boss pattern after boss pattern. It can be, and frankly is, so much more.

As a brief note before finishing off the review, it’s worth saying this review is based in its entirety on my experience playing the Series X version of the game. You can find great analysis of the game’s performance on other sites, but I can at least say the game felt great for me as I was going through it. It’s definitely not a solid 60fps experience even in performance mode, but the Series X supporting VRR meant I really didn’t feel the shifting framerate. The single exception to this was in one of the final fights of the game, where an enemy swings a hammer with a large AOE effect coming after slowing the game for a moment.

Elden Ring is the best game I’ve played in many years. It completely captivated me from start to end, and is also the first game I’ve got every achievement for in many years. Having said that, it is still a Souls game. Despite the leaps and bounds it’s made, I don’t think this is the game that will change the mind of somebody who knows they don’t enjoy this style of game. And that’s fine. For those of you who have been patiently sitting on the fence though, and most certainly for those of you who have played and loved a past title, Elden Ring is a masterpiece. It’s everything I look back fondly on from my first playthrough of Dark Souls on a grander stage and executed magnificently. If you get the chance to pick it up, I can only suggest you do so.

You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/remarkable-2.1687/

I love writing, I love recording, I love documenting. For years I’ve bought fancy pens and equally fancy notebooks for the joy of writing in them, but they’re not all I’ve sought out. For just as long, I’ve looked for a decent way to write digitally. I’ve gone through graphics tablets, styluses, and even the bizarrely unique Yoga Book, but it never quite felt right. Historically for me, these devices become more a pain than a joy given enough time, and one by one they fall back into the obscurity they once crept out from. The reMarkable 2 is different, for me at least.

For those not in the know, reMarkable is a brand that’s been around for a good few years now. Attempting to offer a tablet to replace paper in both utility and feel, they first released the reMarkable in 2017 to middling reception. Though the idea was solid, it was let down by latency, cost, and to some extent, even its build quality. Roll on recent years and they’re back in business with a sleek new design, but has enough changed to warrant the still-premium price tag?

Out of the box, the reMarkable 2 is sleek. Aesthetically, I’d compare it to a large Kindle Oasis minus the bezel on the back, with a similarly asymmetrical design not dissimilar to that of a notebook. Moving away from the white plastic of its predecessor, the reMarkable 2 opts for a more premium feel, complete with an aluminium frame and slightly grey body. Both the back and front have a real papery vibe, which is fitting given its purpose. On the top and bottom of the spine, you can find the power button and USB C port respectively. The rest of the device remains free of buttons, or anything else for that matter. Given the asymmetric design on the left, it would have been nice to see the bottom bezel match the top to maintain some kind of aesthetic symmetry, but that’s my only real criticism here. As advertised, the tablet is incredibly thin, being just under half a centimetre thick. For its £399 price point, you want the device to look nice and feel durable; the reMarkable 2 checks both these boxes.

Of course, the tablet itself is unlikely to be the only thing you’re buying here. After all, how can you write on a paper tablet without a pen of sorts? While, as I mentioned, the tablet costs £399, it doesn’t actually come with a Marker, the tablet’s titular stylus. Instead, you’re required to build yourself a bundle on buying the device. Sure, you can buy the tablet alone, but you won’t really be able to do much with it outside of being an oversized eReader. For the basic Marker, you’re looking at £49, and for the more expensive Marker Plus, you’re looking at £99. But that’s not all! To protect your lovely new device, you’ll probably want a case. Is this included in the £399 retail price? It is not. The cheapest case, essentially a sleeve to keep the tablet in while you’re not using it, comes in at £69. Moving onto the book folio cases, these vary between £99 and £149 depending on the material you choose to go with. With these in mind, the real cost of the reMarkable 2 comes in at somewhere between £517 and £647 depending on your choices.

Turning on the tablet for the first time, there isn’t much in the way of fanfare. You create an account for reMarkable’s free cloud storage service, and you’re let out on your merry way. The overall experience is brilliantly intuitive. After having a scribble for a few minutes, my mum wanted to try it for herself. I passed it to her, and she just started writing. She flicked the screen from right to left to turn the page, and she even tried her experienced hand with the calligraphy pen to really quite pleasant results. There’s a reasonable assortment of templates for you to write on, varying from lines, to grids, to sheet music, and even a few daily planners. While you can’t yet create custom templates to import, you are able to read and write on both PDF and EPUB format documents, so you could easily create your own planner this way and fill it in like any other page on the device.

Along the left side of the screen by the spine, you have the toolbar. This contains a few helpful things like your choice of pen, your line thickness, eraser tools, selection tools, zoom, and the ability to undo and redo. Most of this is fairly self-explanatory, and in practice I found it just as easy to use. The menus never go more than one or two levels deep so you find things are right there when you need them, and when you don’t, you can just hide the toolbar entirely. There’s a few nice features lurking in this toolbar, one of my favourites being the ability to create and use layers as you might in a modern image editor. Though the larger use here may be artists using the device as a sketchpad, I did find some pleasant utility in being able to annotate my scrawlings without having to desecrate the runes directly. You can also export pages or even full notebooks as SVG files, allowing you to retain these layers should you want to continue your work on a PC. When it comes to export features, you can even convert your writing to text, with surprisingly positive results.

To test the handwriting to text functionality, I figured the easiest way would be to write out this paragraph by hand, and see how the software copes. Now it’s worth saying my handwriting isn’t exactly neat, nor is it really that consistent. I’d say it’s somewhat middle of the road all things considered, so should prove at least a modest challenge. I can’t say it’s perfect, but based on the few times I have used this feature, I can say it really isn’t bad.

You can see the above paragraph written on the reMarkable 2, and the email I sent with it converted to text. Notice something? It got it perfectly. Now it’s not to say that it is perfect, as I mentioned above. In the few times I’ve tried this, I’ve had the gist of what I’m writing communicated well, with it struggling in particular with things that aren’t real words more than anything. When writing the notes out for my recent K101+ review, the reMarkable 2 struggled consistently to translate my writing of “K101+”. This would largely be down to my Ks looking like Hs, but also likely because it couldn’t rationalise it to any kind of actual word. As somebody who has random spurts of inspiration before bed or on the train to work, it’s great to know I can write out my thoughts and have this feature turn it into legible text at worst with the odd word wrong. Where I am a little disappointed is the lack of integration in the reMarkable PC app. Though you can view your notebooks and pages in full, you’re only able to use the writing to text feature from the device itself, which is then sent as an email. It’s all just a bit convoluted for what could be such a simple and convenient process.

The eReader capabilities of the device are fairly standard, with it handling EPUB and PDF files as mentioned earlier. I’ve had a nice time reading The Night is Short, Walk On Girl on the large screen. Having said that, I doubt it’ll be replacing my Kindle Oasis as my primary reading device. With the reMarkable 2, I would say I read on it as a convenience. I take it with me to work, so I read on the train and on breaks. While I’m at home though, I have every device at my fingertips without having to justify its space in my bag. There’s no fancy features on offer here. You can’t highlight words for their definition, you can’t save your favourite bits, nothing like that. You can however write on the pages as if they were any other page on the device though, which could be handy for those needing to annotate and distribute documents as a part of their job. I’d be really interested to see a smaller and cheaper device with a larger focus on students. I’d have loved something like this through my GCSEs as I worked through Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls. I really do think a more affordable A5 model would do well in this respect.

The tablet aside, I think it’s time we looked at the Marker and Marker Plus to dissect exactly what you’re buying for £49 and £99 respectively. At their core, these are both unpowered stylus pens and both come with nine additional tips. I assume any Wacom pen would work, since my Yoga Book’s stylus had no issues writing on the screen, but it didn’t really compare to the feeling of writing with the Markers. It’s irritating difficult to put into words beyond “wow it’s like real paper!”, and as somebody reading I can completely understand how difficult it is to contextualise that beyond it sounding like a stoic repetition of an advert. In an attempt to be a little more descriptive, it’s not quite the same as the paper feel they so clearly strive for; it’s something entirely its own. Despite being an eInk screen, I’m really impressed to see such low latency between writing on the screen and it showing up. It all just feels natural. It’s a real shame the device isn’t out in stores to try, because that really is the moment where you realise it is or isn’t for you. While reMarkable do offer a 30 day satisfaction guarantee, I understand the difficulty for many in putting down the money in the first place.

When it comes to comparing the two Markers, there’s only one functional difference: the Marker Plus features an eraser on the top. I didn’t think much of it at first, and with reMarkable sending both Markers for this review, I can say the writing experience is identical. The more I used the Marker Plus though, the more I found myself making those small and quick alterations enabled by the eraser. Sure you can go into the menu and select the eraser, but the Marker Plus goes that one step further in aiding the overall intuitiveness I love about the device. Both Markers can be mounted to the side of the tablet via magnets, and I’ve found they hold really quite well. I’ve walked around an office with the reMarkable 2 in hand with the confidence the Marker won’t randomly come loose.

Looking to the folio cases, reMarkable again provided the cheaper sleeve, as well as the more expensive brown leather book folio. It’s worth saying there’s a grey polymer book folio that sits between the two I have on hand too, coming in at £99. You can think of this option as having the material of the sleeve, while retaining the more functional book design. Of the two cases I have, I can say I have never used the sleeve outside of the initial box opening and testing. There’s nothing really wrong with it, it’s just the book folio suits my needs far better. The reMarkable 2 attaches to the book folio securely using magnets, with the case aptly protecting the screen without adding much in the way of bulk. I really love it, but it is a little frustrating the device doesn’t unlock by opening the case. It’s a small grievance, but when you’re spending upwards of £600 on a device so focused on doing one thing, you want it to pull out all the stops to make that one thing as seamless as possible. Sure it’s just pressing one button after opening the case, but it’s one button press that feels out of place.

The reMarkable 2 is a device I adore, and it’s a device I can see others loving too. Having said that, it’s the kind of thing where you need really need to know what you’re buying to avoid being disappointed. When talking with reMarkable’s PR, they quite bluntly recommended an iPad for those looking for a device that can do everything, and frankly, I agree with them. You have two similarly priced devices where one does one thing magnificently, and the other does a spectrum of things well. If you want something to keep you focused, something without distraction, and something that feels just as much a joy to write on as paper, the reMarkable 2 is unmatched.