Pretty good. The new dungeons are fun, the building is janky but enjoyable, the new areas are cool. The greater enemy variety, the honest to god bosses, and the overall pretty well designed world map revamp make this game. It's basically a jankier weirder BotW.
I'm not super hot on the new powers--there was an elegance to Breath of the Wild that I appreciated a lot. Sequence breaks and shrine skips in that game feel cool and earned because you're working within boundaries definite enough that breaking them is an accomplishment, often requiring obscure knowledge like the shield surf double jump or the use of special weapons in combination with slate powers. Tears of the Kingdom sometimes had a really good puzzle, but I was able to cheat at a lot of them very easily--many minecart puzzles are weak to the minecart shield, many gap-crossing puzzles are weak to gluing everything in the vicinity together into a huge bridge. Overall it's fun and technically very impressive, but it loses something in its versatility. (As an aside, Ascend is such a half-baked idea for a mechanic in a game already basically centered around different ways of gaining and losing altitude. It comes in handy occasionally but 90% of spots designed to require it could have had a ladder or climbable wall available and functionally changed nothing.)
The plot is written terribly and is structured very badly. The characters are paper thin, the voice acting is generally wasted on pointless material, and if you do things remotely out of order things start falling apart--do the memories sidequest before beating the dungeons and you will tear your hair out over Link's inability to share critical plot details with everyone, ignore the game nudging you towards exploring certain areas first and you'll be locked out of game mechanics until you cave and do what they tell you.
The new enemies are genuinely very very cool. Gibdos rock and should have gotten more screentime. The final boss is my favorite fight in any Zelda game, I think, from a gameplay standpoint at least.
Also the game is broadly very pretty and I very much appreciate that exploring the map and completing segments of the game makes it prettier (removes environmental hazards, turns off big ugly map tower spotlights) whereas BotW rewarded you for completing parts of the game by permanently ruining the view with laser pointers.
It's a weird game. There are things in this that I really hate and things in it that I really like. The moment to moment gameplay is quite good, so I would recommend it overall, and I think in some ways it corrects problems I had with BotW and hits some of the 'classic Zelda' notes the last one was missing. But I also think that viewed as a whole it's a worse game than BotW that loses some of the charm by the very act of trying to recapture it.
I'm not super hot on the new powers--there was an elegance to Breath of the Wild that I appreciated a lot. Sequence breaks and shrine skips in that game feel cool and earned because you're working within boundaries definite enough that breaking them is an accomplishment, often requiring obscure knowledge like the shield surf double jump or the use of special weapons in combination with slate powers. Tears of the Kingdom sometimes had a really good puzzle, but I was able to cheat at a lot of them very easily--many minecart puzzles are weak to the minecart shield, many gap-crossing puzzles are weak to gluing everything in the vicinity together into a huge bridge. Overall it's fun and technically very impressive, but it loses something in its versatility. (As an aside, Ascend is such a half-baked idea for a mechanic in a game already basically centered around different ways of gaining and losing altitude. It comes in handy occasionally but 90% of spots designed to require it could have had a ladder or climbable wall available and functionally changed nothing.)
The plot is written terribly and is structured very badly. The characters are paper thin, the voice acting is generally wasted on pointless material, and if you do things remotely out of order things start falling apart--do the memories sidequest before beating the dungeons and you will tear your hair out over Link's inability to share critical plot details with everyone, ignore the game nudging you towards exploring certain areas first and you'll be locked out of game mechanics until you cave and do what they tell you.
The new enemies are genuinely very very cool. Gibdos rock and should have gotten more screentime. The final boss is my favorite fight in any Zelda game, I think, from a gameplay standpoint at least.
Also the game is broadly very pretty and I very much appreciate that exploring the map and completing segments of the game makes it prettier (removes environmental hazards, turns off big ugly map tower spotlights) whereas BotW rewarded you for completing parts of the game by permanently ruining the view with laser pointers.
It's a weird game. There are things in this that I really hate and things in it that I really like. The moment to moment gameplay is quite good, so I would recommend it overall, and I think in some ways it corrects problems I had with BotW and hits some of the 'classic Zelda' notes the last one was missing. But I also think that viewed as a whole it's a worse game than BotW that loses some of the charm by the very act of trying to recapture it.