Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity belongs to the musou genre (Japanese variation of hack and slash). Essentially, it's an attempt to cross-breed Zelda games with titles from the Dynasty Warriors franchise. In projects in this series, heroes alone can shred dozens and hundreds of opponents. Sometimes they are accompanied by several characters. The protagonist destroys the enemy army, captures important objects, accompanies important NPCs, runs from point A to B within the allotted time, and so on. This crossover is no exception and also uses such mechanics. It doesn't have an open world. Instead, there is a global map where you can select challenges and missions. New points of interest open up as you complete story and side missions. If desired, they can be launched repeatedly to farm the resources needed to improve the characters.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity can be called a prequel story to Breath of the Wild. The story involves time travel. The game gives you the opportunity to see how the fantasy world looked a century ago. The plot focuses on Ganon's attack on Hyrule. The story has two endings. One of them is secret. In this branch they let you play as Link, Zelda, Mipha, Impa, Daruk, Urboz, Revali, Estha, Roam, Maz-Kosh and other heroes. They can deliver strong and weak blows, perform different combos, use runic abilities, upgrade, and discover new skills. Their opponents are moblins, lizalfos, bokoblins, chuchu and other familiar monsters. Among the opponents there are large individuals and bosses with whom you will have to tinker. In battle, you can dodge enemy attacks and briefly turn on time dilation. The spin-off has a couple of its own features. In it, you can use a glider and an artifact called the Chic Stone to get into hard-to-reach places and solve simple puzzles.