bit-tech Review: The Legend Of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass

[Chierin]

The Phantom Hourglass has run out of time and now we can only choke out our parting shots before we're buried under a veritable mountain of great gameplay.

That's exactly what's on offer with The Phantom Hourglass too -- a mountain gameplay which will keep you coming back for more over and over. The game does well to offer a scaled down version of past Zelda titles and the design team has obviously learned what was good and was bad about The Wind Waker. More impressively, they've managed to design a game which is perfectly suited to the hardware of the DS.

There are a few problems with The Phantom Hourglass though, such as the titular hourglass which provides Link with a set amount of 'safe time' when traversing the game's central dungeon -- The Home of The Ocean King. The dungeon itself relies more on stealth gameplay than puzzles and the hourglass is an obvious and annoying attempt to add tension to it all by restricting players to a certain amount of time before they die.

That said, as a whole The Phantom Hourglass is a fantastic game which should be considered a must-buy for the Nintendo DS. For hardcore gamers there aren't that many must-have games either, and if you want to avoid the likes of Nintendogs then you're pretty much limited to Mario, Advance Wars and Castlevania -- which makes The Phantom Hourglass even more of a feat.

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