Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)

Yes, it actually didn't needed a remaster.

Yes, this is probably made for the need to fill a launch schedule and not for the love or art

Yes, even if it looks a lot better, nobody will notice the changes unless put side to side with the previous version.

And yet... and yet I found myself excited to play it. I found myself in love with Aloy again and enjoying one of my favorite video game stories.

I missed the glider and flying like in Forbidden West, but even without those this is the better game, still at the top of my list of favorite games of all times. Here's my review in spanish of the new remastered version.

Also, they improved the animations during conversations. Worth it just because of that.

Aloy's journey in this post-apocalyptic world--destroyed by and reborn with advanced technological beasts--is the incredible thread that gives this game 5 stars from me.

The combat is fluid and exciting, even a little terrifying--what isn't terrifying about going up against a gargantuan robot dinosaur with nothing but a bow and arrow?

The open world is diverse, with the flora and fauna and...creatures (I can't think of an 'f' word for techno-beasts) always interesting and the secrets always waiting to be discovered.

The characters are fleshed out, with tragic stories and burning motives told in great side quests and dialogue.

But the main artery is the original story about the earth's destruction at the hands of humanity's technological hubris. It unfolds slowly, the mysteries building and being explained at each new step of Aloy's journey and the satisfying conclusion (which also sets up the sequel) is wonderfully done.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a great game. It features a cast of likeable characters led but our protagonist Aloy - a welcome refresh amongst so many male protagonists. Aloy kicks ass and takes names and she's just a great character to be and play as; she grows through the narrative but she's also always self assured. No damsels here!

The gameplay loop reminded me most of MGSV in that it's quite simple but also quite deep and just a lot of fun to interactive with and play. This is important as you spend the story uncovering the truth behind Zero Dawn, why there are robots everywhere, and what is the deal with the entire planet. Making this a fun story to experience that encourages exploration and player choice in terms of how you tackle most objectives means that HZD always makes you feel like a bad ass and you always have options. Some people have told me this game is hard to get into (and I get it child Aloy is terrifying) but once the game lets you find its footing and you're out in the big world it opens up beautifully. Hang on for those first 1-3 hours and you'll be loving it.

If I were to sum up HZD in two words it would be: Curated Skyrim. This is not only because of the pseudo medival setting and the HUD but because it really does give you the joy of exploring a world with a little light roleplaying but finely curated so every area of the world is packed with meaningful things to see and do. If Skyrim was a long ass TV show, HZD is a blockbuster film. I managed to clock about 50 or so hours which involved basically shadow platinuming the game (basically I could have platinumed it if I did a few hours of busy work which, no). I was definitely ready to end the game by the end but the engaging story, great characters, and endlessly addictive and enjoyable gameplay loop made it easy to reach that 50 hour mark. If you like Metal Gear Solid, Skyrim, RDR2, and all manner of other AAA open world games - if you're a fan of games in general - you can't afford to miss HZD.

After finishing Horizon Zero Dawn, I just really don't get the hype... While this open world attempt at a good game had everything built in it to succeed, the experience I had with it makes me want to stay as far away as possible from it.

For every positive aspect here, there's a bad one tied to it. And the bad one always screams more than it should. And that's a problem that stayed with me throughout the entire experience.

At first, I was loving it! Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played in my life. The world, character designs, enemies, environments - everything brought a tear to my eye. Not only that, but the game grips you from the start. Characters are interesting, bold, well-written and everything is filled with secrets. It made me want to keep playing to find out everything about this post apocalyptic world and its people. And the story is solid from beginning to end, I have to say. Tutorials were smooth, environments were interesting enough, enemy variety was fantastic and even the sidequests were engaging and actually fun to make.

My first 10 hours of Horizon were great. Maybe the game should have lasted about that long, because when I started noticing its flaws, my run with it just crumbled down.

And what killed HZD for me was the combat.

Even in theory it sounds silly. "Human with a bow and arrow, some traps and a knack of wood try to take down prehistoric robot beasts using stealth". I mean, come on... It's overcomplicated and unbalanced as hell!

Every fight feels like a boss fight and they all take too long, even against humans. One little **** up and you're stuck fighting a single robot dinosaur and 5 masked dudes for about 30 minutes. Melee combat is a joke, robots have a ridiculous amount of health and do A LOT of damage, while you have to fend for yourself with a health made of paper and a few weak arrows. Even healing sucks in this game. When you don't have enough to craft potions, you have to HUNT for FLOWERS to heal a LITTLE.

The enemies in this game even managed to ruin one of HZD's best feature, which is exploring. The baffling number of enemies on the map and their misplacement in it makes running around and doing ANYTHING a massive slow chore. A challenge, yes, but definitely not a good one. It's unbelievable how bad it gets. Especially midway through the game, when you're still discovering things.

And to make matters worse, menu interfaces are a mess, you acquire a lot of useless loot, Aloy's mobility and climbing skills rival Skyrim's, conversation animations are extremely stiff and the DLC is forgettable. Basically, Horizon packs a punch when it comes to bad open world cliches.

I was excited for Horizon Zero Dawn. I really was. But once I started to understand the game's MANY flaws in the dull details of its design, I wanted nothing to do with it. It COULD be a great game, but it's nothing but a mediocre 40-hour robot hunt. I just can't recommend it.

Finally a game with a strong yet relatable female character!

The contrast between tribal and super technological is on point and it definitely tickles the mind to see our culture referred to as "ancient".

The open world is gorgeous and the side quests are interesting, making you want to explore and enjoy the world even more.

I really loved it, I would have wished for a little more development in the relationships between characters but otherwise an awesome experience!

I bought this game after hearing about it's positive reception and Jim Sterling's recommendation but I'm about 8 hours in now and I'm extremely fed up. I was enjoying the game in the earliest stages, the story set up and tutorials were good, but gradually as the game properly got started I found I was enjoying myself less and less.

Honestly I've found most games I play with huge inventories of stuff to pick up immediately get on my nerves and this one is definitely not an exception, I'm already so very sick of looting enemies and picking up every damn flower I see, and managing the limited inventory space is as fun as it is in every game that includes it (i.e. not at all).

The exact point I started to really turn on the game was the attack after the Proving, fighting human enemies for the first time made me realise how much I don't like the combat in the game, especially the extremely terrible melee attacks. The story also lurches forward awkwardly here as well, with a huge amount of major plot points all coming more or less simultaneously. It was kind of off-putting to me personally.

I never feel at all confident fighting enemies, my attempts at stealth always tend to fail extremely quickly and attempting a straight up fight is painfully frustrating since the machines move too erratically to dodge 90% of the time. I know you're intended to take advantage of weak points and weaknesses of enemies to beat them but even when I attempt to do that all the enemies still feel like annoying damage sponges (even the human ones to an extent). I'm always left with the feeling I'm fighting the wrong way and/or that I don't have the right equipment which is extremely frustrating.

While some people might like the freedom offered by allowing such a wide selection of weapons, outfits and equipment to be purchased right from the start I just found it overwhelming and got stressed trying to figure out what I might need. Poor design elements in the menus didn't help either, the icons depicting weapon/equipment effects aren't at all easy to understand and there's seemingly no key/legend explaining their meaning. Also, when I go to buy an outfit, shouldn't the game show me how it's stats compare to my current outfit right there instead of making me go back and forth between my inventory and the shop trying to work out what's better? These are kind of nitpicky I know but the little annoyances really added up in this game for me.

A more minor thing but wow do the "conversation" cutscenes in this look bad. Maybe it's just because the full cutscenes and the game in general look so good but it is distracting how stiff and bad those scenes look. Seriously, Mass Effect 2 managed to figure out how to make basic conversation cutscenes look not-terrible back in 2010, honestly the ones here might look even more stilted than the ones in Mass Effect 1.

The point I just got to that prompted me to genuinely consider quitting was this: I was taking on a couple of Sawtooths(?) on my way to a mission, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to make it but after a couple of close calls I had the last one down to it's last tiny bit of health. Then he just ran through my wire trap and killed me. Possibly a glitch, maybe it jumped over or was right on the edge so it didn't register, whatever. Frustrating for sure but I would've gotten over it...except then I discovered how the saving system works in the game. This was the first time I'd died outside of a mission so imagine my shock when I realised I'd just lost 20mins of progress. I'm sorry, I suppose I'm just used to this modern era of gaming where autosaving happens so frequently I never have to think about saving manually. To be fair I know it could've been a lot worse if I hadn't been to a campfire fairly recently but I'd still lost enough progress for my growing frustration with the game to really blow up.

Don't get me wrong, I can tell that a lot of these frustrations are mostly specific to me and people like me, I'm easily overwhelmed by too much being piled on me at once and I find it difficult to deal with games that are excessively open ended (I'm autistic, just FYI). I've never been able to get into Fallout or Skyrim either for the same reasons.

I may or may not continue the game at this point and even if I do it will be in the hopes that my experience with it improves because right now I'm not enjoying it at all. Even if it does improve I feel like the amount of time I'll have had to put into it before it "gets good" will be pretty unacceptable though.

I will list a huge amount of cons and just a tiny amount of pros and will rate the game 5 stars, so that may seem weird. But in short, gameplay and world design is amazing. There was just 2 times when I was very angry. First one, a side mission with a Rockbreaker. Second one, when I was trying to dodge a Stormbird's attacks and constantly falling to my death because of cliffs and all that. It was difficult to notice cliffs in the heat of the battle, especially when you're running away from such a big creature. Minor spoilers below.

Pros

• Gorgeous and very detailed world design. Beautiful lighting and color palette. It is a joy to slowly walk through the beautifully animated foliage. But you should definitely switch to the Dynamic UI ASAP. Otherwise UI will clutter the screen. You can even try Custom UI, it may be better.
• The core gameplay is almost flawless and super smooth. There is enough variety in weapons and you need to use almost all of them. Same goes for outfits.
• Photo mode. But I guess it's a standard these days.
• To be able to visit Rost's grave and talk to him was a nice little detail. It also serves as a story summary.

Cons

• Pressing L3 to run! I really hate it. I think instead of R1 for light attack and R2 for heavy, they could have made "press R1 for light attack or hold it for heavy attack". Same as pressing or holding circle button to dodge. So R2 would be free and may be used for sprinting.
• Sometimes foliage block your view completely when you're trying to aim.
• Climbing and platforming. They tried to make it very obvious for the player to notice when and where it's possible to climb. But still, sometimes it is hard to notice. First of all, common sense makes you think that you can easily climb or jump over a certain obstacle, but you can't do that because the game doesn't permit you to do so. Then you realize it's not painted yellow or white. Also, you can easily mistake shine effects with that white paint. But once you start to climb, it's a piece of cake.
• Quick item selection, the one you do with directional buttons, could be better. Your most essential items will be your health potions. But they are in the same spot with traps and boost potions, which I didn't use even for a single time. Sometimes it is difficult to juggle between all those "worthless" items and try to find health potions.
• The last boss is... another Deathbringer. And the main antagonist is just a big ball of metal, who you can kill with just the press of a single button.
• I don't believe dialogue choices have an effect on the story. I remember a few times when it had an immediate effect. But other than that, it seemed unneccessary.
• Cities are basically big, beautiful decorations. There is usually a merchant, and side quest givers marked with an exclamation mark and that's it. Once you realize that, you don't need to discover anything and talk to anyone else. It is only necessary if you're going for 100%.
• Why I need skill points to upgrade my medicine POUCH? You can craft better pouches for ammos, traps and potions etc. But not medicine pouch!
• Speaking of skills... Some of them are just better versions of earlier ones. Critical Hit, Critical Hit +. That seemed a little lazy.
• I really needed a button for "sell all 'selling for metal shards' items".
• You can get special maps very early in the game which shows collectables. And when I got it, I didn't realize that it was showing ALL of the collectables already. So I kept visiting every merchant in case I would find other special maps. But that was it.
• Same goes for Golden Fast Travel. It's pretty easy to get one. And when you have it, you don't ever need to craft fast travel packs. So fast travel could have been "free" from the start of the game.
• Getting XP for tutorials is nice, since no one can ever say no to XP. But you need to activate them first. Let's say you need to kill 3 enemies with a blast bomb. Even if you killed 300, you don't get XP if you didn't activate the tutorial quest. I think they should have been passive quests, always active in the background.
• Sometimes it's very hard to see weak points of machines in the Machine Encyclopedia. I think they should have used a 3D model instead of a 2D illustration.
• Sylens has that "seen it all, done it all" attitude and I don't like it. Seemed like a flat character.

I spent 50 hours with around 75% completion. I'm not a 100% guy but I really want to complete all side quest and collect all Vantage Points at least. Weird thing is, I'm not excited at all about playing DLC. Maybe I'll change my mind later.

As a preface to this review, I was born in '99, and didn't really start playing mainstream or even classic video games until '13/14. This probably will skew my "best game of all time" opinion, being as I wasn't around to experience the initial release of games the original Portal, TF2, L4D2, any LoZ, . . . , i.e. any of the real "classics" that were groundbreaking games for their time, so take my opinion with a grain of salt (as you should to every review).

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a beautiful, story-rich, and open-world game filled with aggressive and deeply varied mechanical creatures which threaten primitive settlements such as the one the protagonist lives in. This protagonist is a girl named Aloy, who balances sarcasm, her frustrations with the archaic systems governing her home, and big-hearted heroism to be an incredibly charming and compelling main character. The beginning of the game limits your actions as it forces you to go through what could be described as a tutorial area which doesn't feel like a tutorial whatsoever, where story elements combine with riveting combat which rapidly becomes intuitive in order to teach the player the ropes of the game.

I will continue with my few criticisms of the game, which really are not up to scale to the massive praises I have for it.

• The dialogue at time can be corny and predictable, and the animations for speaking can have problems lining up with the actual voice lines. Between the cutscenes I remember and the gameplay before and after, there wasn't a super smooth transition where initially you can't tell you've entered/left a cutscene, like in God of War.
• The map has a few buggy spots where it's possible to get stuck, but I would gladly take a couple of buggy spots where if you explore every crevice of the edge of the open world, you may get stuck in a few of them over a smaller less diverse map.
• Lastly, the story feels a bit slow at parts, particularly in the beginning when it sets up plot points.

Now, onto the praises:

• A huge, entirely explorable open world with several biomes, where the story seamlessly takes you from area to area, allowing for additional solo exploration or guided exploration through side quests. Exploration outside of any quest is rewarded through loot, collectibles (which, when enough are collected, can be traded for more loot), and additional world-development through text and audio logs.
• A riveting story which guides the exploration of the massive open world that Guerilla Games has developed. Additional exposition is not forced upon the player and is instead given through optional text and voice logs which can be read or listened to at the player's leisure.
• Combat inside of Horizon is one of the most satisfying combat experiences I've ever had inside of a video game. Several different weapons allow for different approaches, such as stealth or run in and try and dodge everything. The human enemies are not super varied, but the machines are incredibly diverse and require different strategies as to not be run over. Several difficulty options are available for the first-time-ever video game experience, the casual playthrough, a challenging gameplay experience, and a going-through-hell-and-back playthrough (with the option later of a New Game+).
• The game is beautiful. It's not a case of a few artwork pieces that show the only parts of the game that the map designers and developers put actual work into -- there are countless areas to explore and even if you look at a single view for hours, you still won't be able to take in every detail. The different biomes inside of the map only increase the beauty of the game -- and it's not just natural structures. There are some gorgeous man-made structures in the game, in addition to some spooky metallic ruins.
• The world-building is spectacular. I can't reveal just how in-depth it is without beginning to spoil some of the incredible plot points in Horizon, but there are various cultures and civilizations with complex political, religious, and military elements, in addition to awareness and strong feelings on the civilizations other than their own.

Overall, I cannot recommend this game enough. If I understood just how much I was going to like this game, I would have bought a PS4 when the game came out in February of last year just to play it. Cheers.

A lot has been said of HZD all over the place, so I'll keep my notes personal. I found the views breathtaking, the storylines, especially the main mystery, exquisitely written (loved the audio and text bits in the main underground base in particular) and the characters interesting and believable for the most part - and most importantly so is Aloy.

Combat is largely exciting from start to finish and the skills interesting if not game-changing. I think a wider array of skills that could not be all gained in a single playthrough would be better for a New Game+ sort of experience, but they were fine as-is.

I liked the hunting (although less-so the random drops) and crafting and that the health system meant that even as a high-level character I couldn't stupidly blunder into the least-powerful robots (Watchers) and expect not to be seriously harmed.

My list of dislikes is both short and somewhat petty, so keep that in mind: I'd like shorter load times, not having sellers demand a resource (wire for health potions, for example) that they sell themselves and not having to kill dozens of animals to get a single piece of randomly-dropped bone or skin.

I also think an Iron Woman mode, which disables fast travel and multiple saves would be an interesting option.

I love this game. Still not sure about the name, though. :)

I have been sitting on this review for a few weeks now, not feeling quite ready to say something about the game. I suppose I was still digesting. But I can only hold off for so long. Here we go...

When I completed my run of Horizon Zero Dawn I decided to take a glance at my save game file to see my recorded playtime. Was I surprised that I had about 155 hours on record? Not really. I am sure there are a couple hours in there dedicated to the console equivalent of going AFK, as is natural with every game. So let us be generous and shave off 10 hours for potential AFK moments. Did I really play Horizon Zero Dawn for 140+ hours? I think I did. I am pretty convinced I did. I spent a lot of time off mission simply exploring and hunting machines. I spent a decent amount of time pitting Thunderjaws against other machines, including other Thunderjaws. I think I spent a solid day just watching Thunderjaws fight each other.

So 140+ hours. Did I finish everything? Not quite. I left several collectables uncollected. I just cannot bring myself to pick everything up. Horizon Zero Dawn is a far cry better than something like Assassin’s Creed: Unity, where the latter’s map of collectable items gives me genuine anxiety. Horizon Zero Dawn does not overwhelm you with collectables, but it also does not make you feel particularly excited to find them all. Sure, I found all the pigments and the story benefited a mission resolution in the form of a Banuk painting of a machine rider. That was enjoyably worthwhile. On the other hand, I collected every ancient vessel and the mission giver still acts like there are more out there. A little on the disappointing side.

Ok, I have gone off on a tangent about collectables. And there is so much more to Horizon Zero Dawn. There is a lot of praise floating around for this game, much or all of it deserved. It is an exceptionally well-crafted game with rich characters, story, environment and mechanics. The world of Horizon Zero Dawn is a remarkable place, one that is extremely enjoyable to get lost in. A significant contributing factor is the caliber of acting in the game, especially from Ashley Burch, who rocks in everything she does.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a joy to play, due in part to the meticulous detail and work invested into the game. Furtehrmore, for the fact that Guerrilla Games built upon the established formula of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, trimming the excess that has accumulated in those games and perfected the elements common to them. Horizon Zero Dawn is the deftly refined version of those open world games. Rather than being particularly innovative, it is near perfectly engineered. The devs clearly looked at what worked and what didn’t in the various open world games available and took lessens to heart from Horizon Zero Dawn’s predecessors. If not for Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn would have been the best open world game of 2017, if not to date.

Side note: I know there is a lot of comparison of Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild out in internet land. I am not fussed about such comparisons and will not offer mine here, largely because I do not think they are the same genre of game. Yes, they are both open world, but where Horizon Zero Dawn is a tightly designed open world game in the vein of Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry, Breath of the Wild is a tightly designed puzzle by way of a physics simulator that wears the skin of an open world game. I ultimately think it’s fruitless to compare them because the devs had different goals, and mechanics, in mind when designing their respective games.

Horizon Zero Dawn’s strengths are not in experimentation, or in taking risks. Rather they lie is the game’s refinement of roughly two decades of games that came before it. They are in the depth of attention paid to the history of gaming. The rest is something that may be somewhat safe from a design point (note: by safe I do not mean easy or simple), yet exhilarating to play. Horizon Zero Dawn is not an attempt to subvert establishes mechanics or challenge any paradigms in gameplay, but a beautifully crafted homage to everything great about modern video games.

Rating: 9/10 or 9.5. I can't really land, I just know it's a great game.

Only kinda about Horizon disclaimer: Before I begin, you have to realize that I compare every open world RPG to The Witcher 3, whether that's fair or not. It's impossible not to because Wild Hunt did everything required to be a complete masterpiece and a standard-bearer, and it is legitimately the only RPG (outside of Witcher 2) to come out since the '90s that made me reconsider my golden trilogy of favourite RPGs of all-time (Parasite Eve, FF6 and 7).

Anyway, let's get the "bad" out of the way first: while the story is definitely interesting, it takes a while to get going and there's a specific info dump that wasn't handled as well as it could have been. If I have a criticism of Guerrilla Games as a whole, it's that they don't always handle their narrative with much finesse, and this is coming from a massive fan of them because I adore Killzone. Killzone had a great story that was let down by how they told it, leaving out the good bits. With that said, despite the flaws of how they get their message across, it is a pretty solid plot by the end of it that takes some fun turns. It's not Witcher 3 (there it is!), but it's good.

This extends to the side-quests. Again, competent, but not extraordinary. They try to make them a little more sprawling occasionally, and sometimes they succeed admirably, but it's really not where Horizon excels, which isn't a huge deal because the game is either great or amazing in every other way. You just won't come out with any of them being better than the main quests in other games like in Witcher 3, but hey, that's a strong standard to live up to.

Horizon is basically a greatest hits of other games and this genre specifically. Off the top of my head, I see the influence of Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Monster Hunter, The Last of Us, The Witcher, and Far Cry.

Simply put, it has the emphasis on scavenging that The Last of Us has, where it ties in and becomes integral to everything you do. I had the same feeling playing the Naughty Dog game, as I do this. Obviously it has the bow play and platforming that Tomb Raider has, though maybe with less danger. It has an adventure feel like Uncharted. It's trying to do quests and whatnot like The Witcher, though this influence is probably more in seeing what CD Projekt Red did with environment. Speaking of environment, it is totally Far Cry. You even hang out in bushes all the time, and go hunting.

The best part is what you expect, the giant robot battles, which is a little Monster Hunter for sure. While I think it carves itself a good identity by combining all the elements of other games, I think this propels it to bigger heights. It really is awesome how you can tackle these fights, whether it's by tying them down or setting traps. All of the robots have different attitudes and sometimes they do things you might not expect, like lunge at you, even though they're based on an animal that doesn't do that. They give you a good combination of weapons to deal with this.

It's also a staggeringly beautiful game. They really did their research and combined different elements to make a cohesive whole. From a technical standpoint, GG is always top of the line, so that's not surprise. The music also has occasional brilliant moments, which aids your trek through this wasteland.

That's basically the game, but there is crafting which is fine, and skill trees that are pretty normal for the genre. I wish these games would sometimes have more depth in the latter regard, but oh well. It's still intriguing how you can build your character and use these abilities to tackle problems.

So yeah, it's really nice to see GG make a game that is almost universally beloved. I know it'll have its haters, but critically it is a success. Killzone was always warmly received but I meet very few people who are like me and consider it their jam.

Whenever a new open world game comes out it's a challenge to differentiate them from all the other sandboxes in the market. This can be done in many ways, but most generally it's by means of a unique setting or style. And on that level this game is a blast, since I've never seen a setting quite like it. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has been reduced to primitive tribes competing to survive in a dangerous world of robots, you play a young outcast called Aloy (Ay-loy, not alloy) whose goal is to become one of the tribe and find out the identity of her mother. Naturally, larger issues intrude on the quest in time, but I appreciate how intimate they make the game's first quest. They don't rush in and just let the world expand naturally.

I really appreciate their commitment to the setting. They've taken almost all their cues from stone and bronze age cultures to bring us a world unlike any we've seen before yet which seems oddly familiar. We get to deal with uncommon issues, like a god-king who is worshipped as the physical manifestation of the sun and demands human sacrifice. Or the goddess cult of the Nora. Where else are you going to see that? And I really appreciate that this isn't done in a mocking way. The Nora's taboos mean that outcasts (even those born as such) are shunned by true tribesmen, yet while this is presented as an obstacle they don't beat you over the head with its malice and just regard it as a cultural tradition. I like that.

The first quarter or so (before you leave the Sacred Land) is where this worldbuilding and character design is at its best. It's almost flawless, and I loved every minute of it. Unsurprisingly, it's the moment when the game begins to open up and release you onto the complete world map that the game loses much of this special feeling. Open world games all have a certain sameness to them that this one had managed to avoid until this point, but now it hits with a vengeance. Once you leave the Nora lands you can do the stories in any order you want, which means that they have to be very nondescript in terms of timeline and plot. For example, you pick up a robot mount and ride it around talking to people, but despite this being basically the most amazing thing ever nobody ever comments on it. Even when you're sitting on it chatting to them. This is a problem with any open world game, but it feels worse than normal here, possibly because the first part was so good.

Another problem that appears once the open world arrives is that the game abandons much of its interesting cultural depictions. The Carja seemed like a fascinating bunch of sun worshippers when you first met them in the Nora capital, but when you get into their kingdom they quickly become a basic heroic kingdom with the "good" Carja and the "shadow" Carja. Their capital city of Meridian is generic fantasy kingdom, something that seems disappointing after the very gritty Stone/Bronze Age look of the Nora. More disappointingly, Aloy loses her assertive pride and becomes more of a generic everyman. She's still blunt, but in other respects she seems far more open to all peoples and traditions than you would expect after having played her for ten hours. This may be another feature common to open world games, but it is a disappointment.

The grand story is about what you'd expect; there are only so many directions they can take with this material. Waiting for Aloy to figure out what the audience has known since the beginning can be frustrating, but generally the game is good at timing the dishing out of juicy details. It also ends on a massive post-credits cliffhanger that's just obviously begging for a sequel.

To sum it all up: the game becomes a typical sandbox game with all the problems and cliches that involves. So what keeps it worth playing? Well, sandbox games are fun, and even if this one has a lot of saminess with other open world games it's not actually inferior to them. If it does lose much of its distinctive aesthetic and tone once you reach the big city, it still has a pretty neat setting and enough goodwill earned to last you through the game. The sidequests are generally unique and varied. Even fetch quests have enough twists and turns to remain interesting.

But who am I kidding? The main reason to play is the robots. The robot designs are some of the most inventive and original creations I've ever seen. Robots in the shape of various prehistoric animals was a great idea, bizarre as it must have sounded. Hunting them is dynamic, with various weak points and equipment designed to make every fight a challenge. Combat is structured to make every battle a fight for your life. This is no Dark Souls, but the the health bar goes down very quickly and it's easy to die in even random battles if you're not watching it carefully. For bigger baddies, you need to make careful use of stealth and tactical retreats (ie. running away like a total wuss). Dodges are highly effective, although the camera controls make it easy to lose sight of the enemy.

I really enjoy the game's navigation system. Instead of being a fixed arrow pointing you directly towards your destination, the game tries to navigate you towards the quickest path to get you there. This is particularly useful in cities. One irritant is that game saves are all manual. If you're in a boss fight or something, the game will often take you back to just before it begins, but in general when you die you go back to your last save spot. Save spots are camp fires. There's a lot of them in this world, so finding one isn't too tough, but it's very easy to find yourself killed in a minor encounter and having to go back and do it all again. Constant saving is important.

In general, the gameplay is pretty superb except when the game tries to do something it wasn't designed to do. Platforming is not the game's strength. This isn't Assassin's Creed. When the game wants you to platform it makes it clear by really obvious yellow/white markings, but they are not the most reliable controls. You can easily jump off a cliff while trying to leap to the next platform. And such things are frequent features of the dungeons.