Update: Hands On.
From what I understood from an Nintendo of America employee, Spirit Tracks is actually not a continuation of the Wind Waker series in terms of a sequel to Phantom Hourglass. Yet the game happens one hundred years after the events of Phantom Hourglass.
The one thing I was complaining about before was of course the train game play. I said it is very limiting to exploration, and I was right. You are pretty much stuck “on the rails” as you explore the land. Traveling between destinations is basically being on an on the rail shooter, as you can tap and shoot things with a bomb cannon once again. Besides that you can control the speed of the train, moving forward or just stopping, blowing the whistle to make creatures get off the tracks, and switching tracks to go to different areas. Track switching is done by either tapping a left or right arrow on your screen, leaving very simplified game play.
The key point to Switching tracks is to avoid bomb trains. Evil train like creatures that will automatically kill you in one hit by wrecking your train. This is done by a head on collision, and when your train is wrecked it is game over. From what I saw there is no Overworld exploration at all, besides the train… and that’s a disappointment.
Dungeon wise and Boss battle wise, it is almost exactly the same as Phantom Hourglass. Boss Battles take up two screens and push you closer to the enemy in terms of the camera moving almost behind Link. If you played a Zelda game you can expect similar puzzles like hitting a switch to advance in the dungeon or being creative with how to kill enemies in your way with the many special items you find.
Overall it’s Phantom Hourglass with less content. The only thing that was added was four player multiplayer due to the fact that most people complained that the wifi phantom game was too challenging.
- 1 2
