Koloktos (Skyward Sword)

There’s something incredibly satisfying about tearing an enemy apart and using its broken pieces against it. Horizon Zero Dawn based an entire gameplay loop around that idea, and whatever your thoughts on the whole game, if you don’t think breaking apart a robot dinosaur and using the gun that falls off its back to take it down is the tightest shit on Earth, I don’t know what to tell you. Koloktos in Skyward Sword is that concept distilled into one fight, and it kinda rules.

Luckily, the fight itself is one of the least reliant on the game’s controversial motion controls, making for one less barrier between you and a pretty cool encounter. Koloktos first appears to you as a multi-armed contraption wielding an arsenal of killing instruments that swing at you from a hole in the ground. You can use the whip to grab its arms and pull them right off, tearing the thing limb-from-limb until it gets pissed enough to emerge from its hole and bring out the big guns. Or cutlasses, in this case. The dismemberment continues in the second phase, but now you can grab its giant cutlass to slice off its legs and start wailing on Koloktos’ helpless torso. Skyward Sword’s motion controls often make fighting enemies feel arduous, but Koloktos manages to push all that aside in favor of a satisfying combat design. Swing away, Link. Swing away. — Kenneth Shepard