Eternal Edge+ (PC) Review
The grass looks pretty cool
Takes guts for a smaller dev team to try and take on the massiveness that is Zelda
Doesn't run smoothly
Why play this when you can just play Zelda?
Everyone gets it – The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild was a hugely popular game. Even people who haven’t played it can attest to that by how many games have “borrowed” features from it. Some of them are good, like Genshin Impact. Most of them are just forgettable, like any other recent Nintendo game. Then there are the small and select few that are just terrible. The question is, where does Eternal Edge+ fall?
Terrible. The game falls in the terrible category.
Games that do this formula will use something called “environmental storytelling,” which is a fancy way of saying that you can look around the world and almost piece together what happened here. This works in games like Elden Ring when it fills in the blanks of the story itself. It works in games like Zelda when you can look at a puzzle and figure out how to interact with it, and what is expected of you. There was very little effort at this in Eternal Edge+ to the point that things just felt disconnected from each other and uninteresting.
The game also runs pretty poorly on higher end machines. This is probably due to the grass in the game being overly detailed and moving as if the wind is actually blowing it. That sounds fun, but it also seems to render way more of the field at once then it needs to, slamming the performance of the game.
Aside from the glaring issues, the gameplay itself is just a by-the-numbers Zelda clone, something that is a dime a dozen on Steam, and many of them are free. I entirely understand that many of the titles that are released by indie devs are a labor of love, but that doesn’t make them good.
If you are a fan of the series you will be heavily disappointed in this title. If you aren’t, just play Breath of the Wild or wait for its sequel instead.