see deal The Legend of Zelda Tri Force Heroes - Nintendo 3DS $19.99 on Best Buy

What makes a great co-op puzzle game? For me it’s all about levels that demand teamwork, use clever mechanics, and provide lots of potential for slapstick comedy as you and your buddies try a bunch of different solutions until something works. And as my two co-op partners and I carefully guided our stack of Link-alikes across a tightrope in The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes

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Using the perspective and art style of A Link to the Past and classic Zelda tools like bombs, boomerangs, and switches, combined with new ideas like stacking on each others’ shoulders to reach high places and attack tall enemies, Tri Force Heroes’ 32 levels are carefully designed to encourage teamwork most of the time. The best ones hand each of the three characters a different tool – like a hookshot, arrows, and a gust jar – and ask them to play a specific role to solve a fun, intricate puzzle together.

“ ...Tri Force Heroes’ 32 levels are carefully designed to encourage teamwork most of the time.

Some more forgettable stages give everybody the same tool, but even those found clever ways to get us to team up. Riverside’s Secret Fortress, for instance, had my friends quickly build pillars to form a bridge using Water Rods, while I carried a bomb across it to blow up an obstacle ahead. But we had just as many bumbling failures: when our whole group fell off a highwire while stacked in a totem at The Lady’s Lair because we were too tall to hit a flock of birds that flew at us at a two-person height, it was a hilarious ending for a tense sequence. A single life bar shared between the three of us means mistakes like this could cost the whole group a trip back to the start of the roughly 15-minute dungeons.

The story that loosely ties these challenges together has a wackier and lighter tone than your typical Zelda adventure, and it’s presented as a simple list of missions rather than the traditional rich explorable overworld. The home-base town of Hytopia is a strange yet compact setting, one where villagers use cheeky dialogue to push you toward the local shops in order to build new costumes, buy material, or trade them in for rupees. The larger scale is missed, but as you continue on your quest to reclaim Princess Styla's joyful fashion sense, the puzzle challenge slowly and smoothly ramps up.

Go Team Link

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Combat is very close to the classic slashy A Link to the Past formula, but Nintendo freshens it up by taking away your shield and adding the character-stacking Totem system. Since you can’t defend yourself from projectiles, dodging skills become much more essential for survival. And in keeping with Zelda tradition, the intense boss fights are co-op puzzles in themselves, presenting some of the best examples of how working together makes Tri Force Heroes great. From stacking up to toss bombs into Margoma’s weak point to distracting the snake-like Moldorm so your buddies can rush in behind it and attack its tail, they all require smart teamwork.

“ The home-base town of Hytopia is a strange yet compact setting.

Combat’s made a little easier with the silly yet powerful outfits you can unlock. Each one amplifies a specific item or ability: you can dress as the Boomeranger and throw larger boomerangs that can travel farther and damage enemies considerably, toss on the Cozy Parka and never slip and slide on the ice again, or slip into the Legendary dress and uncover more hearts to help you survive a tough level. They usually don’t open up new solutions to puzzles, but they’re fun to play around with.

Once you’ve seen completed the campaign, you can jump back in and re-try the stages with one of several extra difficult challenges activated – and these are more than simply increasing enemy hitpoints. One of them had us popping balloons hidden inside of a forest stage, while another had us running away from the creepy Wallmaster – a devilish hand that drops in and snatches away your heroes. The challenges are well worth it, since they improve the loot you get at the end. It’s a tough gauntlet, but you can acquire that last item you desperately need to build a costume.

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Get Together

Tri Force Heroes is best played with two friends in the same room, simply because you can put your heads together and communicate as you try to figure out puzzles together. But be warned: we encountered a few bouts of lag both locally and online, which is always a pain in puzzles that require careful timing. We couldn’t pinpoint the reason for the slowdown, but once the issue resolved itself, gameplay moved at a smooth 60fps clip.

Playing online was a much worse experience. Like with many Nintendo games, the heart of the issue is that can’t communicate well enough with people who aren’t physically right next to you, and that’s a major letdown for a collaborative game. A set of eight emotes are the only the tools to express yourself in-game, and those don't provide nearly enough direction or helpful context to coordinate. You can spam the “Noooo!” emoji to voice mild disagreement and “Over Here!” to give vague direction, but the ability to point to a specific item or location of interest would’ve gone a long way. As it is, all too often we had to helplessly wait until all of us figured out what to do independently. Loading

You can play Tri Force Heroes in single-player, too, and I like that it adds to replayability by offering a completely different approach to each of the existing levels. For me, that’s been a total of around 20 hours of play. But while it works well, single-player isn’t nearly as novel or funny as co-op. Constantly switching between the three doppelgangers to figure out how to get them all to the end of a stage is a good challenge, especially the boss fights, but it doesn’t quite stack up next to the manic fun from playing with other people. It’s hard to go back to playing alone after that.