Our Demo of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment didn’t tell me much, but it seems to run very well

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Trade show demos are typically short, and our hands-on time with *Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment* at Tokyo Game Show 2025 was no different. As a new installment in the series for the Nintendo Switch 2, *Hyrule Warriors* was a key title to check out. Previous *Warriors* games had performance issues on the original Switch, so we were especially interested in seeing how this one ran on the new hardware, and what changes they’d made to the gameplay and story, which is set within the world of *The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom*.

I didn’t see a lot of the game’s full scope during the demo. It took place in an early section where Zelda and her team were exploring underground, and served as a tutorial for controls, the unique Zonai items, and swapping between characters. Since it was so early in the story, the underground area wasn’t very expansive, but the different abilities each of our three characters had were definitely fun to play with.

Zelda’s fighting style focuses on light, letting her attacks reach further. She has powerful combos that send out waves of light to damage enemies all around her, though her attacks are a bit slower and she generally stays in one place. Mineru is different – she uses advanced technology to charge directly through groups of enemies. Rauru, meanwhile, fights with a spear, slicing his way through opponents.

It’s hard to fully judge how the characters will develop or feel as you play the complete game. And, based on just a small demo, it’s tough to predict how the overall gameplay will be. However, we can say that the game looks and runs well, based on our time with the demo – and that’s a good sign!

The game looked very sharp and clear. While we don’t know the exact technical details or the monitor resolution we were using, it still appeared great, even up close. The game consistently ran at 60 frames per second, and we didn’t notice any slowdowns, even during intense moments like the boss fight against the Frox or when using powerful combo attacks with multiple units.

Despite these minor points, The Depths don’t seem to be a particularly demanding area, and longer fights might cause some slight drops in performance. However, it’s encouraging that the game runs so smoothly initially. I’m interested to see how it performs with GameShare, as it should function similarly to the co-op mode in the original Hyrule Warriors on Wii U. We would have liked to test the co-op demo, but the game is coming out soon anyway. We’ll share our complete review as we get closer to the November 6th release date.

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2025-09-28 11:26