Whether you're shooting an arrow or blowing hot air, Tri Force Heroes is fun as long as your teammates can read your mind.
There is a lot to like about The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes, Nintendo’s latest Zelda 3DS game. It brings the joy of Four Swords to a new platform, but refines the focus to three players instead of four. It reduces the complexity (and the competitive streak) while retaining the challenge. The one big issue with Tri Force Heroes is communication, though.
That could be seen as part of the challenge, but I’m not so sure. Unless I managed to be paired up with fellow NWR staffers, playing through Tri Force Heroes at E3 was usually frustrating, even with the goofy little communication symbols on the touch screen. I didn’t see many other players use them, and when I tried to communicate using them, it just seemed to be ignored. I’m not looking forward to playing Tri Force Heroes in any kind of random multiplayer environment. It just doesn’t seem fun.
Fortunately, when I played Tri Force Heroes with people I knew, it was a lot of fun, even when it got to be very challenging in the later stages in the demo. Still, I don’t think the touch screen communication icons were that much of a help in some instances. It’s perfect for starting up a totem, but if you’re trying to do something specific, like say, only getting one of the two players to pick you up so you can shoot an arrow at the right height, it was hard to do that without telling them in real life. In the moments when my trio clicked, Tri Force Heroes was wonderful. But when one part of my playable Tri Force of heroes faltered, the whole experience fell apart.
The developer’s reasoning for not including voice chat is that more experienced players would boss less experienced ones around. That’s a noble thought, but my favorite moments in the Tri Force Heroes demo were when I talked with my fellow Links and solved puzzles together. We’d experiment. We’d have fun. Okay, maybe at some points a more experienced player would directly guide a less experienced one, but it was in an educational way.
That wide disparity of fun makes me cautious of the final product. In local play (which you can do with one copy via download play as well), I look forward to it. Online, I’m not so sure. I imagine I might be hopping on Skype to play Tri Force Heroes with people I know, and that’s disappointing. If there were more complex communication symbols integrated, that'd help, but you get to a point where you're just inventing more obstacles that could be completely solved by including voice chat.