The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild review – Link has never been so free

For years, it gave the impression that it was content to live in its own little corner of the gaming world, making well-received updates to its own franchises, without really caring about what the wider industry was doing. Now we know that for all that time, it was watching and learning. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the result of that examination: a game that marries the best bits of the franchise's long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts. At its heart, Breath of the Wild is an open-world exploration game, in the vein of titles such as Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and FarCry 4. After completing the small starting area (and these things are, of course, relative: that area feels about as large as the entire Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time), Link is thrown into a world scattered with quests to complete, people to meet and monsters to defeat. He can find and climb towers to mark new areas on the map and travel at speed between them.