The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Wii Game info trailer

When game consoles transitioned from offering primarily 2D games to polygonal 3D games about 10 years ago, all of the tricks and gameplay ideas that developers had been relying on for years flew right out the window. During this time, Nintendo quickly found its footing and released masterful takes on its old franchises that retained the fun and feeling of the older games while properly updating them in exciting and impressive new ways. 1998's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a prime example of this. It featured a more realistic take on the series' fantasy world than ever before, while implementing innovative new controls and offering a good sense of freedom without making the player feel lost. It's one of the greatest games of all time, so it's hard to fault Nintendo for revisiting that same formula. And that's precisely what the latest game in the series, Twilight Princess, does. For the most part, that's a very good thing, because Twilight Princess is a lengthy adventure packed with many well-designed puzzles and some interesting characters. But once you get over the rush of excitement from a big, new Zelda game having finally arrived, it's hard not to feel a tinge of disappointment--there's a very noticeable lack of evolution here, which makes aspects of the game seem more dated than classic. Even so, there isn't much out there that compares to Twilight Princess, except for the Zelda games that have come before it.

Early on in the game, you meet up with one of the shadow dwellers, an impish little creature named Midna. Midna rides around on your back while you're in wolf form and serves the same purposes as Navi in Ocarina, providing you with the occasional hint. Link's beast form behaves roughly the same as the human form, as far as combat is concerned, but you can't use items. You can, however, access otherwise unreachable areas by following set jump paths that Midna will lead you through. The wolf can also dig and go into a heightened-sense mode that shows off scent trails and other hidden objects. For the first portion of the game, you'll be forced back and forth between forms, but you eventually earn the ability to switch back and forth at will, and some of the game's later puzzles will require you to do just that. You can also ride around on horseback, if you like, but by the time you get to a point when you have large distances to cover, you'll also have the ability to warp around, limiting the horse's usefulness to a couple of combat-oriented sequences.
Many of the early parts of the game take place outside in the game's overworld and in various outdoor areas as you try to clear the darkness from the land. But along the way, you'll also enter various temples and dungeons to collect new items, solve a wide variety of puzzles, and fight bosses. While most of the game's story sequences take place above ground, these temples are the core of the entire game, and they're very well done, even if they cover a lot of the same ground that you may have seen in past Zelda installments. You start out with a forest temple, make your way to a mine under Death Mountain for your fire temple, scratch your head and try to figure out the inner workings of moving water around in the water temple, and so on. That's not to say they're all taken from old blueprints, though, and some of the later temples take you to somewhat more interesting locales, like a sky temple that demands that you make precise use of your grappling hookshot.