Zelda: Link's Awakening Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

3. Dungeon Creator Lacks Substance

This one is a mixed bag.

On one hand, the Dungeon Creator was a very pleasant surprise addition to an already fantastic game, giving the potential for those of us likely to speed through the story through muscle memory something to keep returning to the game for.

However there is a lot of wasted potential here. This is not quite the Zelda version of Super Mario Maker - far from it.

Unlocked after completing the second dungeon fairly early in the game, you will earn chambers each time you complete a main story dungeon, and you can use those chambers in the Dungeon Creator in a huge variety of combinations to make your own dungeon. You can then play through this dungeon, earning monetary rewards for doing so, and share it with your local friends through transferring it to an amiibo.

The constraints here are obvious.

Firstly the elephant in the room, players may only share the dungeon levels they have created with people who they meet face-to-face AND will need to buy and own an amiibo to do it. Whether we will see online dedicated servers to upload dungeon designs to in the future is hard to say, but perhaps honestly it's not such a big deal, because of constraint #2.

Constraint #2, of course, being the fact that these are all dungeons we have literally just completed. You may only use a room once you have already learned all of its secrets, and the main appeal of Zelda in figuring out each room's puzzle is completely lost, since we recognise every single one from being in the main story.

It's a sweet addition, sure, but ultimately quite pointless in its current form, past popping in once or twice to check it out.

Hopefully this is more of a prototype for a full Legend of Zelda Maker game to be designed in the future.