Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)

Urgh... I've got about eight hours in, and I'm starting to think this is another overhyped game that belongs in the same dumpster as the Soulsborne games.

It's a festival of dull, badly-voice-acted, open-world trudgery with plodding stealth, nonsensical weapon & armor stats, and enough difficulty in the clunky battles to suck any remaining trickles of fun out of the whole ordeal. I'm pretty-well stuck on this first boss in Cauldron Sigma, and not having a fun time.

Ok everyone, Horizon Zero Dawn is free for the next month as part of the Play at Home Initiative:

Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition is coming to PlayStation fans for free as part of Play at Home 2021. Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition is available to download free between April 19 8:00pm PT / April 20 04:00 BST / 05:00 CEST and May 14 8:00pm Pacific Time / May 15 04:00 BST / 05:00 CEST.

Go grab your copy!

Also, Sony extended the titles from last month until Thursday, so if you haven’t redeemed those, now is your chance. Grab them via the Play at Home page.

This amazing selection of PS4 games and PS VR games will be available for free download until April 22 8:00pm PT / April 23 04:00 BST / 05:00 CEST.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to put into words how satisfying I found this game!

I'm late to the party playing Horizon Zero Dawn because from each trailer I saw I thought it was a game about wars between "savages" (eyeroll). However, once you get into the meat of the game, it's very much about "ancient" technology. I don't want to give away too much and spoil it but this game takes a lot of twists and turns and it was very satisfying to uncover Aloy's story.

Not only is the main story great but the sub plot and the side quests are a lot of fun. I climbed through leveling easily just by travelling around the map and taking on all the side quests I could. The open word map is absolutely beautiful. I could play this game for hours and in fact I did! My save is around 65-70 hours.

The characters you meet along the way were all very well written. It takes a lot to get me attached to a character in open world games like this...but that happened easily several times over. By the end I was rooting for everyone. The main character Aloy is wonderful. She's strong, smart and has a very dry sense of humor. I would absolutely recommend this game even for meeting her alone. You really want to see her succeed even from the very beginning.

There is already DLC for this game (which I have yet to play but I'm very much looking forward to it). There's also DLC yet to be released, for a game that came out in 2017! That's how successful it's been.

May revise this review after I've played the DLC and because I feel like I haven't been able to do this game justice with these words alone!

UNFINISHED

Not for me. I don't like stealth games in general, especially when you don't have the option to play any other way as is the case here. I didn't like how you were forced to approach combat, which really turned me off. The characters were also really wooden, which took me out of the game a lot. Even Aloy, the main character, felt really hollow and without a personality. This was even worse for side characters. The way they move in cutscenes and in dialogue was almost robotic. The game also runs terribly, huge frame drops all the time even on lower settings.

Despite this, I might return to the game just based on how fantastic the game's environment and enemy design is. I also enjoyed the story, despite the side missions being very boring. The world the game takes place in is incredible, might even be enough to make me return to a game with gameplay I simply don't enjoy.

This game falls somewhere between The Witcher 3 and the newer Assassin's Creed games, which is a statement about the gameplay as well as the quality and fun it offers. The Witcher 3 has a great story; the Assassin's Creed stories are rather weak. Horizon Zero Dawn is somewhere in the middle. It's not great but not bad either. It's obviously subjective that I didn't really enjoy the whole premise that much, that mix of primitive cultures and futuristic robots with terrifying AI's.

Where the story mostly falls short is side quests. I didn't enjoy those for very long, they became repetitive and so I stopped doing them entirely at a certain point and simply followed through with the main story to quickly get through the game. The grind simply becomes boring after some time, especially when you realize it's less about the level and added skills, some of which really don't give you that much of a boost, like the very specific skill that lets you use weapons while walking on a rope... you might use that maybe once in your playthrough.

What does matter is crafting. Athough even increasing ammo capacity only gives you a slight edge, since you can very quickly craft new ammunition during battle without losing much time. I ended up finishing the game at level 31 (recommended level for the last mission is 34). No biggie, although I did die a few times, but that's because I suck at videogames.

The greatest thing about Horizon Zero Dawn is definitely the combat. It feels smooth and until the very end I never lost respect for even weaker robots and frankly avoided them at all costs. This is probably subjective again because I'm simply not a pro gamer (normal difficulty), but I feel like the open world is designed in such a way it might feel threatening even to seasoned gamers, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

All in all my problems with it are rather personal, it's definitely a top-notch game objectively speaking, and I do look forward to the sequel; but I hope they will add more climbing opportunities, some kind of flying and a better friendly robot system apart from overriding bad robots for a while.