Full Review

8 December 2006 - With two out of every three gamers in the US who bought a Nintendo Wii also buying The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, it’s a good bet that the game is the first choice to go for when it comes to adding to your collection, but are the masses right? We've been playing solidly for the last week to find out.

Big is probably the best way to describe The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Coming with over 42 hours of gameplay for a skilled gamer, the game is big and detailed.

As with previous Zelda's, the strength is in the storyline. Once again you play Link, a young man raised as a wrangler in a small rural village, ordered by the mayor to attend the Hyrule Summit with a gift from the village. You set off, oblivious of course to the dark fate that has descended upon the kingdom. Intro bad guys and then a quest that involves you fixing everything they've put wrong.

Gameplay, which is fantastic and the motion sensored controller elements are introduced slowly so you can pick it up as you go and unlike most of the games in Wii Sports you'll be using both of the controllers in the box for this one.

The Wii Remote is used to cast your fishing rod, swashbuckle your sword, do a spot of archery and other such gems while the other controller is used to move you around, lock on to targets and the odd special move.

With both controllers offering motion sensor movement elements in fight sequences as you can imagine it can get a bit frantic and more often than not we found ourselves waving our arms mid air in madness in an attempt to beat the evil foe in front of us.

Beating evil foes is something that you will be doing a lot of, just not for the first couple of hours. Those are spent learning how to ride your horse, herding goats, fishing and climbing trees.

Zelda is a game of patience and learning rather than full out swashbuckling which is perhaps why we've fought with Mrs Pocket-lint as to who gets the controller(s).

As the story progresses there are more puzzles to solve and you'll even get to play a wolf for a while. Puzzles normally involve doing a series of tasks in order and the first main puzzle sequence involves you saving a baby, to then get a fishing rod to then be able to catch a fish to then be able to feed the fish to the cat to return it to the shopkeeper so she'll be happy enough to open her shop and sell you a slingshot. Do it any other way and you'll be there for hours.

VERDICT
Zelda is as good as Nintendo say it is and there is plenty to keep you going for even the hardened of Zelda fans. All the elements are here - bad guys, fishing, swordfighting and of course you even get to meet Zelda.

Our only advice, is that you will require some patience as the story slowly gets going (think King Kong - it's over an hour before you see the monkey).

If you're one of the lucky ones to get a Wii, this is a must have game to go with it.