Reviews for the highly-anticipated sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, dropped last night and immediately solidified the game as an instant classic with a deluge of 10/10 review scores and an almost-unanimous consensus that it’s one of the greatest games of a generation.
And if you needed any more proof that this is an enormous event of a release, review aggregate websites have it in writing – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has officially taken the top spot as OpenCritic’s highest-rated game to date. With a rounded aggregate review score of 97/100, at a glance it’s sharing the honour with the excellent Super Mario Odyssey, beating out its predecessor Breath of the Wild and Red Dead Redemption by a single point and two points ahead of last year’s award-winning Elden Ring.
OpenCritic has dug a little deeper though to highlight that Tears of the Kingdom is actually in the lead compared to Super Mario Odyssey, with a score of 97.223 compared to Odyssey’s 96.811.
Tears of the Kingdom's lead on this ranking is quite significant.
Detailed averages are (currently)
#1 – Tears of the Kingdom: 97.223
#2 – Super Mario Odyssey: 96.811
#3 – Breath of the Wild: 95.905
Tears reviews: https://t.co/19NTuljHc0
— OpenCritic (@Open_Critic) May 11, 2023
Over on Metacritic, Tears of the Kingdom is sitting behind its predecessor with an aggregate score of 96, putting it square in the top 50 games of all time according to the website. It’s worth noting that Metacritic’s ratings go back a lot further than OpenCritic, which dates back to 2013 at the earliest, so the game has to compete with the Metascores of titles like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 sitting at a staggering 99 and 98, respectively.
For our own part, we gave The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom a 10/10 in our review, saying, “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom builds upon Breath of the Wild’s robust systems to offer an experience that eclipses the original in practically every way. Not only that, but it works incredibly hard to restore some of the things lapsed players might’ve missed from the traditional Zelda experience, and it pays off in droves. While the novelty of its design will never be as impactful as Breath of the Wild’s debut, Tears of the Kingdom is one of the best Zelda experiences you’ll ever have.”
