The fact that this game is put on a pedestal as not only one of gaming's flagship titles but was nominated for multiple game of the year awards and has a sequel on its way that is one of the most anticipated releases of 2022 is something that I feel sums up everything about modern gaming.

Let's start with the positive - Horizon is a stunning looking videogame. I've gone back to my old save file - one I bailed on back in 2017 - on PS5 and I can't quite believe this is a five year old game and not a native PS5 title. The smooth 60fps upgrade is likely doing a bit of heavy lifting but even in the many screenshots I have taken from my playthrough, it is an undeniably good looking game, right up there at the very top of the pile.

That's it. That's the positive.

Christ, where do we start with the negatives? What Horizon: Zero Dawn offers is little more than a visual treat. As an open world game, it is doing nothing more than the stuff we got bored of on the 360/PS3. As an action game, it feels awkward with all of the attacks feeling far too over-animated and taking far too long to give you a snappy sense of control. The stealth elements are basic, barebones, nothing special but certainly not bad. Most of the sidequests are fetch or kill quests. The characters are all generic tropes, from the father figure who dies to give you a motive to the villain you remember from your childhood - there's not a single original character arc in the entire thing. The overall lore of the world of Horizon comes dangerously close to being actually interesting but then spaffs that up the wall by only revealing itself to you via an insulting amount of audio logs or, in two hilariously bad sections, unskippable exposition dumps.

Open world games are extremely popular and everything about this feels so fucking cynical. Skill trees lock away basic abilities because heaven forbid you have too much freedom from the word go. Yellow fucking objects show where you can climb and you better not get any ideas about climbing on anything other than these obvious climbing markers! From the lead character, sub-Netflix "box set" show storyline and game mechanics that are so well-worn that you basically know exactly how this game plays and feels before you've even started it - and this is all entirely by design. You're supposed to know exactly what you're getting in to and that is one of the main reasons behind its success. It's a game for the lowest common denominator. It's a game that doesn't want any friction whatsoever. It's the gaming equivalent of wall painted in magnolia white with a Live, Laugh, Love framed poster on it.

It is the most basic of basic bitch stuff.

I think it speaks volumes that this - the absolute fucking DEATH of the old style of open world game that Ubisoft and their ilk have been milking since the first Assassin's Creed and has been begging for death for over a decade - came out only a few weeks before Breath of the Wild showed up and instantly made anything that treads the same boards as Horizon look like a relic almost immediately.

Looks great though so you know 10/10 GOTY please tune in to the Game Awards!!!!!!

The AAA game of AAA games. Everything works and looks fine and dandy, but nothing here is interesting nor innovative. I tried to let this game impress me, I wanted to explore the visually stunning world and see the full potential of its solid combat. But everything the game tasked me to do felt so incredibly pointless.

Alloy is dull as a piece of paper and every interaction is awkward as fuck and has a weird blend of seriousness and wit where you can't tell if they're trying to be funny or intentionally unlikeable. Every task consists of following a trail, kill the enemy in front of you, suffer through an awkward conversation, kill an enemy with more health than usual and so on.

The quests, the world, the crafting, the dialogue choices; everything feels so pointless and only exists because it can. All of it felt like a chore and none of it felt fun.

How can something this well made and with so much potential and looks fucking amazing be so fucking boring at times?
FUCKING ROBOT DINOSSAURS.
The game is great when you're fighting them but thats it.
Project Zero Dawn is cool to I guess.
How could they fuck this up this game has everything it needs to be solid as fuck but It falls flat on so many surfaces.
forgetable charactes
Weird fucking world design, you have the amazing fucking map filled with cool shit to explore but you also fill it with the most pointless side shit possible.
this is a brain boiler, I'm never playing it again.

A 6 anos atrás eu via a gameplay do Alanzoka jogando isso, pela primeira vez eu vi quanto um jogo pode ser semelhante a realidade mesmo tendo conceitos absurdos, e o quanto esse jogo era bonito, foi o que mais me pegou, mas ele me ganhou de fato no momento em que eu vi aquelas incontáveis formigas em uma arvore, um pequeno detalhe que me fez percebe a magnitude do que é o videogame
Todos esses conceito foram apresentados de uma vez para mim, e foi ali que minha paixão por jogar só aumentou

6 anos depois eu finalmente consegui uma maquina potente o suficiente para pode experimentar esse jogo pela primeira vez, e todas as vezes que eu entrava no jogo, era um colírio para os meus olhos, esse jogo ta cheio de defeitos, e definitivamente eh um dos mundo abertos mais entediantes que eu já joguei, mas caça DINOSSAUROS ROBOS eh muito foda, e o enredo está cheio de reviravoltas e conceitos absurdos que me encantaram

Eu estou definitivamente satisfeito e muito feliz

Beat: Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) | 2.5/5.0
Developers: Guerrilla Games

I finally went ahead and finished this thing, but it took everything out of me to keep from throwing my controller - not out of rage or difficulty, but because I just lacked the patience for so many design choices from the “Killzone” crew. Maybe that’s the problem, really. Adjusting to a new genre is a challenge, and the market is already flooded with bloated open world titles. There are some fucking cool mechanical monsters here, but Zero Dawn is a narrative nightmare and a structural mess.

The story starts off quite strong, stealing a few tears thanks to Aloy’s rather impressionable father figure. The plot of Aloy’s origins and the creation of this world becomes a driving force for many of the main missions, and I initially ate it all up. But the method of storytelling becomes extremely tiresome after you realize most every main quest involves finding a cave and listening to audio log after audio log....after audio log to discover the truth behind these mechanical monsters and why they dominate the planet. This is by far the worst way to tell a story, sacrificing its pace and wasting so much of the player’s precious time in the process. By the upteenth audio log, I just didn’t care anymore. It’s even worse when the dialog is often written in college BS-ing fashion, always avoiding the fastest way to a point and instead opting for flowery expressions and religious mumbo jumbo to explain its secrets. I wanted to care, truly, but I found myself struggling to get through such repetitious and uninspired level structures. Slogging through the stealth just to get to these caves is another misstep, that ultimately led to me running through a lot of the finale gameplay.

The side stuff isn’t any better. Nearly every side mission falls into the tracking variety, requiring the player to follow footsteps before following fruit trails that end in following blood tracks to a place where a creature or human ambush waits patiently for you to kill. It’s all mundane and I hated all of it. Merchants stop selling new stuff about midway through the campaign, so I rarely felt like I was getting stronger. Leveling up should be fun, but I found entire trees to be useless and later unlocks to be shockingly unhelpful.

So it lacks creativity in its story and mission design, and the progression sucks, but the thing that kept me playing and returning is the way it channels Monster Hunter. Every mech has weak points and particular ammo to take them down that much faster. I found a few ammo types to be worthless and the castrated weapon wheel to be a nuisance in more difficult fights, but I liked the tearing modifications. I liked the override mechanic before It lost its usefullness. I enjoyed the weapon modifications and socket system before I realized that switching them out in the middle of and in between fights is absurdly unintuitive.

At its core, Horizon is played best as a stealth title. The problem for me is that this already bloated, repetitious game doesn’t deserve the sort of time it takes to slowly make your way through each new bloated, repetitious level design. I found myself very irritated the more I played, and I remain confounded by its praise.

I'm sure that if this game was in the hands of more competent videogame developers, it would actively get me interested in the story more and I would probably take my sweet ass time reading the logs and all that. It wouldn't be hard to make me interested in logs, Resident Evil 5 managed to do it. Half of the interest comes from the logs being from a franchise I hold near and dear to my heart but the other half is due to game being interesting and enjoyable enough to the point where I felt the need to know more about the story. And the other 33% is Albert Wesker being fuh-knee. (Dees Dude went from talking about halves to thirds, what a JERK!)

Did this game even have sound design? Lance Reddick was in it. RIP, he was my favourite Reddit. I wish this game wasn't just a simulator to walk across the planet. Guys that I talked to two seconds ago that I had to run 3000 ingame steps toward tell me "I'm glad you came here. Let's continue this conversation over there" as he points behind me. I turn to see where he was pointing. By the time I turn my head back to him, he's gone. My quest marker says I need to move 3000 ingame steps back where I came from. I laugh, but the joke wasn't funny.

I love fighting sponges with no AI, cause there's something really cool in a videogame where you arbitrarily take the right amount of steps backward that bugs the thing you're fighting from moving as it just stares at you while you pelt it with arrows for sixteen years.

I can't wait to play the next videogame in this series where Aloy grows hair on her cheeks and has a red stain on her underwear, and she has IBS and

-First trailer comes out:
+Oh shit. It looks something like shadow of the colossus puzzle bosses (⁠・⁠o⁠・⁠)

-Reviews comes out.
+They say it's a open world ubisoft style game.

-My expectations get shattered.
+But friend convinces me it's gonna be great, so I buy it.

-Turns out It's a grab plant/climb tower/craft garbage kinda ubisoft game first, boss game second.

+Dam#it.

A near perfect gem! Unlike Breath of the Wild (which it's been compared to), its flaws are a little harder to ignore. Jumping and climbing never felt quite right, the character animations can be janky (at least in the base game. They were improved a bit in Frozen Wilds), some NPCs are rather flat, and the melee combat is...there. The option of overriding the machines was sadly undercooked as well.

Everything else was amazing though!! I love all the different ways you can kill your enemies. Your focus allowing you to scan for any weaknesses and also read up on people from the past. I was so caught up in the lore, I did just about everything. I only require five remaining Blazing Sun medals. I only did a little bit of Frozen Wilds, yet I still made sure to get every artifact. The environments are absolutely gorgeous. I learned from The Completionist that the areas were based on Colorado and Utah. Having visited the former, yeah that's about right. Finally, Aloy is one of my favorite protagonists in recent years. A great arc combined with a fantastic performance by Ashly Burch.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming sequel. The comic sounds promising too.

2017 game that would have been revolutionary in 2007.

The entire art team deserves some awards for their achievement on this, the game is still beautiful and a lot of effort went into tiny flourishing details.

The rest of the teams who worked on this just made a by the book gamey game for gamers.

You climb on yellow stuff, you talk in worthless dialogue trees, you unlock basic gameplay through skill trees, you craft shit, you buy gear with colorful rarity, you slowly farm nonsense off of the ground, you go on dumb side quests. You do it all in a giant open world filled with icons. It's a game and all those things are there because that's what you do in games like these, and I'm so tired of it.

I think I would've appreciated a straight forward, linear, 10-20 hours experience a lot more, maybe I just want to play Enslaved again.

Agonizingly AAA. Surprisingly racist, even for mainstream Western media. No idea how to motivate a character beyond "my loved one is dead". Bottomless disdain for the player. But damned if they didn't make fighting a robot t-rex pretty fucking sick. The combat is the real selling point, and between setting up traps, capitalizing on weak spots, and carefully choosing skills it made me feel consistently clever.

I can't fathom how embarrassing this must have been to release next to Breath of the Wild though. A game with graphics a full console generation worse than this that nevertheless runs circles around its open world design. Even knowing this was pre-BotW I keep trying to go to spots that look interesting on the map and being crushed when there's nothing there or, worse, it's totally inaccessible.

já faz uns 2 meses que tento baixar esse jogo e jogar pra mais de 1h, mas toda vez me sobe um sono desgraçado e eu acabo fechando o jogo e indo fazer outra coisa, ahhh que jogo ruim cara, simplesmente impossível de jogar, não tem identidade própria alguma, o mundo aberto é mais vazio que a cabeça do Davy Jones, a aloy tem o carisma de uma pedra, os personagens são chatos, a história parece até legal, os gráficos realmente são belos, mas é tentar tirar uma pepita de ouro de um monte de merda em volta

é o jogo mais sem carisma possível da Sony, simplesmente insuportável esse jogo, revoltante o quão sem graça ele é, é o primeiro jogo que fico revoltado jogando do tão chato que é, não consigo jogar isso

só não dou zero porque não tem como, não tenho interesse nenhum em jogar a sequência, não importa se é melhor, não importa msm, não me desceu esse jogo aqui, longe dos melhores exclusivos da Sony, consegue ser pior que Days Gone

Great story, excellent combat and gorgeous visual design.

The story to Horizon: Zero Dawn is actually very good, like surprisingly great. I can't go into it much without spoilers but lets just say anyone that can plausibly explain robot dinosaurs and animals gets a thumbs up from me.

The protagonist Aloy is such a great character voiced wonderfully by Ashly Burch. She is strong, determined and can be incredibly sassy during conversations. I like her a lot. Other characters aren't quite as well developed though and those that seem quite interesting don't quite get the screen time to develop further sadly. If anything from my personal taste Horizon needed more conversations and quests with the characters throughout the world just because I want to find out more all about them.

The game plays as an action game so you control Aloy with basic actions such as run, jump, climb, roll etc. as she travels around the open world map. During her travels she will often run into the many robotic enemies scattered through out the land as well as some human bandits here and there. The robot types vary hugely from horse and deer types up to huge saber-tooth cats, giant birds, huge crocodiles and various others. Aloy being a huntress can sneak past them hiding in tall grass, take them down using stealth attacks or just full on engage them. Stealth works surprisingly well for both sneaking and fighting, though some of the larger enemy types can't be stealth killed you can do sneak attacks on them or hit and run before they pin point where you are, I enjoyed that a lot ha ha. Open combat works great as well partially because Aloy handles very smoothly and partially because of the weapon options and tactics. She is largely equipped with bows using the tribes tech base. Each bow type fires different arrows with different abilities and she can swap between four weapons on the fly. Each bow has it's strengths and weaknesses depending on the enemy. Some arrows do elemental attacks such as fire, electric or freeze while others are more interesting like corruption which turns enemies against each other as well as my favorite the Tearblast arrow which blows selected armor and weak points off of the robots completely. On top of bows there are other weapons like the tripcaster which will leave traps, the ropecaster which pins enemies down with ropes etc. There is a decent variety for different situations.

Each weapon uses ammo obviously, Aloy can craft more using a mixture of materials found in the wild as well as looted from defeated robot enemies, if you get really short you can also purchase what you need from merchants scattered around the map and towns. The most interesting thing about this is you can craft arrows on the fly in battle as you need them in seconds while barely slowing down which is a nice touch. Sadly the crafting is really missing a beat here as while you can upgrade your carry pouches for resources in crafting and need some parts to get new outfits and weapons it's very limited. There are maybe a couple of weapon upgrades and while there are a variety of outfits they are mainly all cosmetic as the stat boosts between them don't seem to do a hell of a lot though you can equip modifications to change the stats in the direction you want. I would have liked to be able to craft weapons, and various armor pieces with the parts I was scrounging even if I needed to find blueprints or something first to make exploration and quest rewards feel more tangible. As it was I finished the game with resources and money coming out of my ears and nothing to do with them which is a pity.

So the story is good, Aloy is great and the combat is fun. Where Horizon truly shines though is the visuals. They. Are. Amazing. Horizon felt a generation ahead of most Playstation 4 games to me. The detail, art, amazing lighting and dust effects are just staggering. Almost every time you pan the camera around you get amazing views almost wherever you are. The fact that this looks that good but is a huge open world game, has no texture pop, no glitches (I had one hard crash) and surprisingly quick load times when fast traveling is just crazy. There is a fantastic attention to detail with certain things too such as ants crawling up trees, dips in the ground filling up with water when it rains, the world map is in 3D when you are plotting where to go etc. To top that off the heads up display (HUD, where your health, compass, items are displayed on screen) is fully customizable so you can remove things to lessen the clutter on screen or put it on dynamic so it comes up with a touch of the track pad or situationally is a great touch. Lastly to take advantage of this the photomode in Horizon is great. anytime you pause you can bring it up, fiddle with time of day, colour, lighting, the camera angle for some amazing pictures. Most of the time all you have to do though is simply pause it, remove the HUD and take a picture as it looks amazing already.

Despite all my visual gushing there, it isn't perfect. The game has a night and day cycle as well well as various weather which is great but it transitions far too quickly from one to the other. It's not a deal breaker or anything but it is hugely jarring to the experience when it is midday sun one moment then huge storm literally a second later.

On the sound front, the sound effects are really good, when some of the enemies wind up to attack there is a "oh crap" feeling, especially from one of the bigger enemies. The voice acting is somewhat mixed, Ashly Burch as Aloy is fantastic, some of the other side characters are less great though and just don't match Aloy in a lot of cases though there are a few great exceptions. There was one moment in it though from an audio file that actually affected me emotionally and I was shocked, it was amazing. Something easily missed but really feel like I should mention it, I listened to it several times. Lastly is music, it's actually really good with tribal themes, chanting and drums but it is very subtle and perfect for that, more often than not it will play softly then fade into the background as the wildlife sounds take over which I really liked. There are some great action themes that play here and there when things hit the fan which are perfect for the moment.

I got the platinum trophy and my play time was at 53 hours. The game could be completed a lot quicker than that if you just did the main quests with a scattering of side content maybe 25-30? I did explore around a lot and tended to move on foot taking in a lot of the scenery as well as doing every side quest but either way it's a fair sized game depending on just how you want to play it.

All in all, Horizon is a fantastic game. It has a surprisingly good story, handles really well with fun combat against interesting enemies, and it makes everything else on the PS4 look crap in comparison visually. It has a few minor flaws if I nit pick such as it needs better crafting, better developed side characters and better weather and time transition but they don't detract from Horizon's overwhelming strong points and I highly recommend people give it a try.

+ Aloy is a great character and the story is surprisingly good.
+ Both stealth and combat work very well, excellent weapon types.
+ Is breathtaking visually. I mean gorgeous.
+ Customizable HUD and great photo mode.

- Missed opportunity with crafting, quest and exploration rewards are lackluster.
- Night/day and weather transitions are far too quick.

Honestly part of the reason I even bought a PS5. This, Persona 5, and the fact that I wanted a 4k console sold me on the platform. And it was totally worth it. Sure, P5 is a perfect game in every regard but we're talking about HZD here. Story, gameplay, art direction and level design all get 10/10. The only low marks are character and dialogue. Our core cast are done well, but the steady stream of supporting players that Aloy meets are just nobodies. Real NPCs. You do a lot of talking, hoping to get some answers about what happened to the world. But these are mostly found in text logs and cutscenes. You do so much talking for no reason. And it's not fun like Mass Effect or The Witcher. Looking forward to the sequel which really seems to be taking advantage of this current generation's capability. But a little part of me wants this studio to fully commit to something new again. Because I'm sure whatever they do will be another hit.