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Friday, February 10, 2012

Posted by in Video Games April 29, 2010 at 12:45:37 AM

By: Stephen Neveaux
(Staff Writer)

This is the third installment to the Wind Waker story line, Spirit Tracks takes a new approach to the Legend of Zelda franchise. The storyline takes place 100 years after Phantom Hourglass. The back story is that a great evil was sealed away within the land long ago. The train tracks, referred to as spirit tracks, are what help keep the demon sealed away. In the present, you play Link, a young boy working on getting his conductors license. While en route to Hyrule Castle, the spirit tracks mysteriously disappear, and it falls on your shoulders to restore the spirit tracks and save the world... again.

I really do love is the challenges that you face in the dungeons. Some are rather easy, but as the game progresses, I find that they get a bit more difficult than your average Zelda game. A nice change of pace is that while you have some standard equipment from past games like bombs and the boomerang, there is some new equipment as well that adds a fresh twist to the puzzles you will be solving.
Then there is your mode of transportation, the Spirit Train. I love the train, and I hate it. The train is fun to drive, but as the game goes on, it really causes the game to take forever. As you progress through the story, you will open up warp points that will let you travel the world map easier, but the portals themselves are placed a good distance of any places of importance. It is also set up that one portal only takes you to one specific other portal. It would have been great if you could go into one portal, and choose which other portal you wanted to come out of, similar to Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. It would have made navigating the map much easier. And if that didn't make travel enough of a pain, you have kamikaze train cars of doom roaming certain areas of the train tracks. These guys you have to avoid at all costs, because if one of them runs into you, it is game over. So what do you have to do? Take an even longer route to get to your destination.
An aspect of the train I love, is that you can customize it, much like you customized your boat in Phantom Hourglass. Instead of different parts of the boat, it is different train cars. Some of the car themes are really random, the most random being the dessert themed train.


Rating:
Story: (3/5)
It is the same story to every Zelda game, just with names changed.

Graphics: (3/5)
Graphics aren't that bad. I give it the rating based on the fact that it is a DS title.

Music: (3/5)
The music is good background music for the game, but nothing that makes me want to listen to it over and over again.

Control: (4/5)
It is easy to control your character with the stylish and play the game. The only difficulty I experienced in the game was writing on maps and catching rabbits.

Overall: (13/20)
If you are fan of the Zelda series, you should pick up the game. Despite the constant train travel, the game is a lot of fun. There is enough game for at least 30 hours of game play, and that isn't even counting the mini games and side quests.

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