When comparing Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze vs The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Slant community recommends The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for most people. In the question“What are the best games for the Nintendo Switch?” The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is ranked 1st while Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is ranked 48th. The most important reason people chose The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is:
Most open world games follow the same pattern - they give you a map that's full of blips, forcefully guiding you to marked locations, causing you to ignore everything along the way. Breath of the Wild steps away from this design choice by having a map where only you can mark points of interest. It's up to you to survey the land from high vantage points, choose a direction of heading, and find interesting locations. As a result, exploring and paying attention to the world actually matters, making it a really enjoyable and refreshing experience.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Creative level design
A lot of thought and effort went into the level design in Tropical Freeze. The massive side-scrolling forests, jungles, mines, underwater zones, and many other locations are filled with spectacles that naturally fit into the gameplay. There are gigantic sea monsters following your every move with platforming obstacles, intriguing animal-like creatures who float around as possible pillars and ledges for you to grab onto, and parts of the environment that come crashing down unexpectedly that you have to react to in time. Each of the platforms you encounter are way more than simple, random blocks sticking in the field, helping you feel like you're traversing actual living, breathing locations.
Pro Challenging platformer gameplay
Platforming is a challenge without feeling cheap. The game will push you sometimes, especially with all the moving parts in each levels where you have to quickly adapt to new obstacles. As you run up to a gap of some kind or a wall you have to scale, you might see the solution as you approach, only for the environment to suddenly change on-the-fly. That ledge you thought you could reach is now too high, or the stones you're standing on start to move, or the camera might even shift to cut off your usual side view of the level. The difficulty is fair since it encourages you to think on your feet, meaning you naturally get better as you keep trying to get the timings down just right.
Pro Modernized feel to age old classic platformer action
The look and feel of Tropical Freeze is very reminiscent of the original Donkey Kong Country game for the SNES, offering plenty of nostalgia. The 2D view and traditional platformer play is in-tact, with modern updates like polished graphics, cinematic camera angles, and tight, responsive controls. Everything feels familiar while still improving on the old school ideas. Anyone who loves retro gaming will probably enjoy Tropical Freeze.
Pro An open world game where exploration feels exciting
Most open world games follow the same pattern - they give you a map that's full of blips, forcefully guiding you to marked locations, causing you to ignore everything along the way. Breath of the Wild steps away from this design choice by having a map where only you can mark points of interest. It's up to you to survey the land from high vantage points, choose a direction of heading, and find interesting locations. As a result, exploring and paying attention to the world actually matters, making it a really enjoyable and refreshing experience.
Pro An engaging cooking skill
Breath of the Wild features a very interesting cooking skill, allowing you to combine up to 5 different ingredients to create useful dishes or elixirs that can aid you on your journey.
While the cooking process itself is really simple, only requiring you to light a fire and use a pot, experimentation is what makes it truly interesting. There is no in-game recipe log to give you hints, so most of the time you're experimenting with ingredient combinations, which can make finding a good recipe feel like winning the lottery. Some guesswork is eliminated because most areas are saturated with ingredients that can be used to create dishes useful to that specific area.
For example, the cold area has ingredients that can be used to create dishes that boost your resistance to cold, so your character won't be shivering and dragging his feet as you explore.
Because most of the dishes you make are useful, it can also motivate you to explore just a bit more, since there might just be a useful ingredient on top of that next mountain.
As a result, Breath of the Wild has a surprisingly engaging cooking skill that blends well into the core of the game, making the experience more fun as a whole.
Pro Wonderfully crafted puzzles
There's a vast array of puzzles found in Breath of the Wild where you use your abilities to move, manipulate or destroy the environment. It can be very simple like destroying rocks with a bomb to unblock a cave entrance. Or it can be fairly complex, requiring you to rotate and connect massive platforms, move stone orbs through an area filled with obstacles, and create pillars of ice on a waterfall to cross a bottomless pit. Regardless of the type of puzzle you encounter, they motivate you to think creatively, making it a delight when you arrive at the solution, especially because there's always a treasure waiting at the end.
Pro A variety of fighting methods keep the combat fun
There are many ways you can fight the monsters in Breath of the Wild.
You can go for close combat, using swords, spears, clubs and many other weapons, besting your goblin-like enemies with well-timed parries, dodges, slashes, and strikes.
Or you can fight enemies from afar by shooting your bow, throwing your boomerang, or lobbing an infinite supply of bombs while maintaining the distance as the monsters try to helplessly get near you.
You can even be stealthy, sneaking up on unsuspecting lizard-folk and stabbing them from behind.
If none of the above works, you can also use the environment to your advantage. This usually involves things like pushing boulders off cliff edges, dropping them on top of oblivious casualties.
All of these provide a great amount of variety that keeps the combat from going stale for the whole playthrough.
Cons
Con Optional bonus rooms are boring
The optional areas in the game are pointless and boring. They're pretty much a single room with a bunch of floating platforms with bananas on them. All you have to do is reach all of the bananas to "complete" the bonus area. Compared to the huge, creative levels in the rest of the game, these are way too flat and repetitive in design. Thankfully, unless you're going for 100% completion, you can avoid these rooms altogether.
Con Can't use the Wii U touchpad as a second screen
There's no way to use the touchpad as a second screen while playing Tropical Freeze. When playing on your TV, the touchpad goes blank. You have to specifically play with the Wii U gamepad instead of the TV in order to see the screen at all. Since plenty of other games utilize the second screen in some way, it would have been nice to see some Wii U touchpad interactions built into the game.
Con Cooking can feel inconvenient
There's no in-game log or cookbook to record cooking recipes you discover. The only method of checking a recipe is by examining a cooked item in your inventory, which isn't very reliable since you can only check it as long as you have the item. As a result, you have to memorize and/or write down any and all cooking recipes you discover, which can feel cumbersome to some players.
Con Weapon durability system can feel tedious to some
When you attack enemies, your equipped weapon quickly loses its durability, breaking when it reaches zero. This can force you to switch to new weapons multiple times during a battle, adding a micromanagement aspect that can disrupt the flow of combat. You're not just fighting enemies, you're also fighting the flimsiness of your arsenal.
On top of that, most weapons can't be repaired either. This can diminish the joy of finding new weapons, since that cool sword you just found will be gone thirty minutes of gameplay later.