Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment review for Nintendo Switch 2
System: Switch 2
Release date: November 6, 2025
Developer: Koei Tecmo
Publisher: Nintendo
It goes without saying that Hyrule Warriors is no doubt the most successful spin-off series The Legend of Zelda has ever seen. The original Hyrule Warriors was met with praise when it released on Wii U, and things have only gone up from there. More recently, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity released on Nintendo Switch. And though it received generally positive reviews, its performance was heavily criticized. To sum up Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, then – if you liked Age of Calamity, you’ll love this game. Though its performance isn’t perfect, it’s a huge step up from the previous title and offers tons of satisfying hack-and-slash gameplay.
Warriors games occupy a very specific niche. Those who love them really love them, and can easily spend over one hundred hours on each title. But they won’t click with everybody, and that’s okay – so if you’ve never played a Warriors game before and are on the fence, I’ll quickly describe the gameplay loop. There are a huge number of missions in this game, and each one has you going from point A to point B destroying any enemies or bosses in your way. Age of Imprisonment renders hundreds of enemies at any given time, and you can cut and slice through them with each character’s unique moveset. Characters have different combos and moves – you can just button mash on the easy difficulty if you want some mindless fun, but if you want a true challenge you can ramp up the difficulty and focus on more optimal fighting styles. Age of Imprisonment does add a few extra incentives to not mash buttons all day long – bosses now use specific attacks that require you to counter them with special techniques of your own. There are also Zonai devices you can equip that strike elemental weaknesses, which then opens up the possibility for elemental combos.
That’s one area where Age of Imprisonment really shines – you can choose what kind of game you want it to be. Sometimes, you just want to turn your brain off and mow through tons of enemies, and there’s so much content on offer here that that will keep you busy for dozens of hours. But gameplay doesn’t have to be mindless, either – on tougher difficulties, you’ll have to think about each attack you use, and you’ll also have to master perfect blocking, perfect dodging, and Flurry Rushes. There’s a surprising amount of depth here, but only if you want it – which makes this game especially friendly for beginners.
In this game, characters have special moves just like previous Warriors titles, but they also have Sync Strikes that can be performed when two characters are next to each other. These Sync Strikes are incredibly unique and have a lot of visual flair. They’ll often have you aiming laser beams and other such projectiles, and giving the player direct control over these super-strong attacks helps make them feel even more impactful. It also incentivizes the player to keep characters in groups, which offers an additional layer of strategy – do you spread your characters across the map or keep them together to wipe out enemies faster?
One of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity’s largest criticisms (other than its performance) was that it wasn’t the canonical tale of what happened before Breath of the Wild. Age of Imprisonment fixes this – there’s no time travel shenanigans or anything like that this time around. This game provides additional context and cutscenes around what happened during the Imprisoning War. There are plenty of small details here that weren’t covered in Tears of the Kingdom, and it’s interesting to get a second look at the story. In Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, the player is not really an active part of the plot – most of the interesting stuff happened in the past – so to be able to be a part of that story this time around rather than discovering it thousands of years later is a great change of pace.
Age of Imprisonment’s performance is a huge upgrade over Age of Calamity, which struggled to run on the original Nintendo Switch to say the least. This time, single player gameplay targets 60 frames per second. It isn’t perfect, though – the frame rate drops into the 50s when there’s extra action on the screen. The frame rate honestly is not a problem in single-player mode – it’s the resolution that bugged me a little bit. In handheld mode, the resolution fluctuates between 468p and 648p, which is only a slight increase over Age of Calamity’s own resolution in handheld. Furthermore, cutscenes in the game run at 30 frames per second, are of low resolution, and seem to have uneven frame pacing in the same category as Persona 3 Reload, which released last month. So needless to say, the visuals and performance aren’t perfect here – they certainly leave something to be desired. Going from 60 frames per second to the 30 frames per second cutscenes makes them feel kind of cheap, which is a shame because there are a lot of them. Interestingly, Age of Imprisonment started development as a Nintendo Switch game, and was later moved to Nintendo Switch 2. This could potentially explain the game’s subpar performance, as it wasn’t developed with the Switch 2’s hardware in mind.
If you liked Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, you’ll love Age of Imprisonment. It offers more of the same, but with much better performance. And even though the performance is an improvement from Age of Calamity, it’s far from perfect – you’ll almost certainly notice the low resolution if you’re playing in handheld. Even so, this is still perfectly playable and fun, and still very much worth a pickup if you love Zelda or Warriors games (or both). As a side note, the game takes up a whopping 44 GB of space, so it might be a good idea to get this one physically. The full game is on the cart – no game-key Card shenanigans here.
