Perfectly primal
(This
review contains minor spoilers!)
Wow, where to begin with this one?
Well, I guess it’d be best to start at the beginning.
I could tell you exactly where I was
sitting when the first trailer for Horizon:
Zero Dawn premiered back in 2015. I was blown away by how unique the game
looked and how the combat seemed to work, and I followed the game in the years
leading up to release, watching every trailer, every gameplay video, every
developer interview up until release.
So with all that hype, could the game
possibly deliver on my expectations?
Absolutely. The folks over at Guerilla
Games truly pulled out all the stops with this one, and created a game that not
only met my lofty expectations but exceeded them tenfold.
The game is set in the far distant
future, where something has happened to humanity that the species has almost
entirely gone extinct. All that’s left are a group of primitive tribes who work
together to stay alive. Also present are deadly robotic beasts, each of them
with different strengths and weaknesses, and all based on an animal or dinosaur
of some kind. There’s crocodiles, moose, rhinos, giraffes, t-rexes and more,
and they are all brilliantly designed and incredibly detailed. Each monster is
covered in metal plating, fire and ice canisters as well as several weak spots,
and it’s up to you to exploit those weaknesses in order to take them down. I’ll
get back to that later, though.
Our main protagonist is Aloy, who is
considered an outsider from the rest of the tribe because she was born an
orphan. The opening segments of the game see you playing as child Aloy learning
the ropes of machine hunting, and when you become an adult you take part in an
event called the “Proving” as you attempt to join the royal guard.
Aloy herself is a great character to
take control of. Her design is very unique and memorable, and she’s sure to
become a modern PlayStation icon. Even better is her personality, which is
delightfully sarcastic and fun to listen to. She’s a character I really enjoyed
playing as, and I truly do consider her to be one of the highlights of the
experience. The side characters are less memorable, but none of them are truly
bad. I liked spending time with them and seeing their stories unfold. The voice
actors overall did a good job bringing the world to life, though there are a
good few lines where I think a retake might’ve improved on the delivery. Again,
there’s no truly bad examples, just a couple of sentences here or there that
didn’t exactly sound natural.
Honestly, my one real gripe with the
game is the opening tutorial segment. It’s a little too long and slow for my
tastes, as the game kind of dumps a lot of necessary story exposition on you to
kick the plot into gear, characters are introduced for later purpose, and the
basics of the gameplay are given to you. It’s not until you’re freed from the
constraints of the opening area that you truly are free to do whatever you
want.
But once you’ve learned the gist of
the plot and have received the tools you need to get on your adventure, you
leave the village and are free to go do whatever you want in Horizon’s enormous open world. The world
you explore is the most expansive and detailed I’ve ever seen in a video game,
and yes, that’s including Breath of the
Wild. The world is brilliantly divided into a realistic ecosystem, with
snowy mountains and tundra to the north and arid deserts and lush jungles to
the south. Every inch of the map is covered in stuff to collect, robots to fight,
and sidequests to unlock.
This is helped tremendously by the
incredible graphics. Horizon easily
rivals Uncharted 4 as the best
looking thing currently on the PS4. It got to a point where someone posted a
very well-lit screenshot of Aloy on Twitter and I was legitimately having
trouble figuring out whether it was an in-game screenshot or a cosplay. The
game looks that good. Since I don’t have a PS4 Pro I can’t tell you how it
performs over there, but on a standard PS4 it looks beautiful with little to no
slowdown whatsoever. The music is very stellar as well, but none of it really
stands out as something you’d like to listen to outside of the game itself
aside from maybe the Main Theme.
But a graphics and sound mean nothing
if there isn’t excellent gameplay to back it up, and Horizon doesn’t disappoint in this regard either. Being an
open-world game, Horizon lets you go
do whatever you want once you’ve finished the opening. Want to go follow the
main storyline? Sure. Want to go complete tons of sidequests? Go ahead. Want to
scour for hidden metal flowers and artifacts? Knock yourself out. Want to go
right to the highest level areas and fight the scariest machines imaginable? I
wouldn’t recommend it, but you can try. The sky’s the limit here with what you
can do. And here’s the best part: unlike most open world games, regardless of
what you’re doing, you can bet your bottom dollar that you’ll have a great
time.
While the story does start out a
little weakly, looking like it’s going to be another “we need to find out who
killed our friends!” storyline, it becomes far more investing once the game
poses the question of where exactly the machines came from, why they’re here,
and what happened to Earth. Let me just say without spoiling anything that all
three of those questions are given a satisfying answer. This is the rare game
where I really want more background information on this universe, just because
I love this world so much.
My love of Horizon’s universe also led to me doing something I rarely do:
sidequests. I normally stick to the main path like a magnet, just because I
rarely feel that the reward you get by doing side stuff is worth the time
spent. For whatever reason this wasn’t the case here. I often found myself
straying from the past and talking to locals and running errands for them like
retrieving their lost sword or clearing out bandit camps. Whatever they were, I
often did them if they were on the way to where the story needed me to be next.
I also loved exploring just because
it’s incredibly fun to just roam around and see what you can find. There’s
something new around every turn, be it a mountainous terrain filled with unique
plants or a field full of reindeer upset you interrupted their grazing. Just
watching what the robots are doing from a distance is surprisingly
entertaining, and their animations are pitch perfect.
Combat is another story entirely, but
no less invigorating. While they’re all designed differently, your mechanical
foes have one thing in common: they rarely go down without a fight. These bots
are not to be messed with if you’re unprepared, and if they catch you off guard
you’ll need to improvise quickly to stay alive. Horizon prioritizes stealth over all else, providing lots of long
grass to hide in and several ways to sneakily take out enemies when they least
expect it. Through leveling up and completing parts of the main story you
receive skill points that can be installed in three different ability trees:
“Prowler”, which increases your stealth abilities, “Brave”, which improves your
combat prowess, and “Forager”, which gives you increased healing, chance to
find materials and more. I personally put most of my points into the Prowler
class because of how much Horizon emphasized
stealthy solutions to combat.
If stealth isn’t an option, you’re
left facing the beasts head on. Every machine has an entry in an encyclopedia
you’re given, detailing their weak spots and how to exploit them. Whereas the
low level creatures like Watchers and Grazers have obvious vulnerabilities,
high level monsters often have their weaknesses hidden under metal plating or
in hard-to-reach spots.
Fortunately, Aloy has several methods
of taking down. The bluntest is her spear, which can perform both light and
heavy attacks. These are basically only used to make quick work of low level
enemies, considering that it’s essentially impossible to fight the giant stuff
except from a distance. You can also tie down some monsters with rope and set
up electric wire traps, but I didn’t find myself using them that often. I found
that they were a lot of setup with little reward, and mostly spent my materials
crafting more arrows for my bow.
The bow is your ultimate weapon, and
the one you’ll use for basically everything in Horizon. If you worry about your aiming ability hampering your
experience, fear not. By the end of this game you can basically consider
yourself a master marksman. There are several different types of arrows
available, but the main ones you’ll be using are standard and fire arrows,
mostly because you need to buy other bows to use ice, electric and other arrows
(I learned that the hard way). Fortunately you can beat the game using only the
types given to you for free.
While the combat seems deceptively
complicated at first, defeating the giants is actually pretty simple. Keep
shooting them with fire arrows to raise their burning meter until they’re
engulfed in flame, and then fine their weak spots while they’re distracted with
putting themselves out. This may sound repetitive, but trust me when I say
you’ll be engaged the whole time. Keeping an eye on your foe at all times is
absolutely necessary, as you need to dodge all their attacks or you’ll need to
dip heavily into your healing items. While you can fill a pouch with medicinal
flowers and potions are pretty common to find at merchants, running out in the
middle of a battle happens frequently and often spells your doom.
You also can hack the enemies to turn
them to your side, and in some cases even turn them into mounts. The bulls,
rams and moose are all rideable, and they’ve quickly become my new standard to
how a mount should control. There’s no fight or struggle in getting them to go
in the direction you want. All you have to do is point them where you want to
go and speed them up every once in a while. It does make the game a little
easier to have one, so if you’re truly looking for a challenging experience it
might help to ignore them. If not, they’re a lot of fun and a great way to
appreciate the scenery.
The one thing I feel like I must
mention is that this game isn’t exactly bug-free. I did encounter a few
glitches that forced me to restart from earlier saves. At one point I dodge-rolled
beneath some guy’s hut and got stuck with no escape. Later on during a very
important boss fight one of the enemies I had to kill to complete the mission
somehow trapped himself inside a rock, forcing me to do the whole thing all
over again. While this is only two easily fixable things in an overall
wonderful 15-hour experience, they are there.
Horizon:
Zero Dawn is a beautifully crafted game. Boasting an excellent and
intriguing story, gorgeous world and enemy design, a great cast, unique
gameplay and an open world that’d make Breath
of the Wild jealous, this easily joins Uncharted
4 in the ranks of PS4’s must-have exclusives. If you haven’t picked it up
yet because you’ve been busy with Zelda, be
sure you don’t forget about it. It’s absolutely worth your time.
FINAL SCORE
10/10
Legendary
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