Nice enough sandbox. I adore the world, its quite original and as we all know, robots improve literally everything. Combat's pretty bullshit though. Its only either trivial or way too arduous, there's never a middle ground. Most machines, while extremely cool to look at, are absolute pigs who love to blindside your ginger ass. The story is nice and actually pretty intriguing, I really did want to know the main mystery. Graphics are cool, with machines being the obvious standout, music has some nice tracks, the camera feels way too close to Aloy, there's a merchant who sells you machine parts in case you need them for a mission or for upgrades, but none like that for animal parts such as skins, which are also vital for upgrades, and that sucks because hunting animals is boring Got it for free with my console when I bought it , which is pretty cool.

This is fun as hell. I love the feeling of nature as something that looms, something that can quite literally fall over you at any moment if you're not paying enough attention. The battle system doesn't get boring easily, as the machines can always surprise you, similarly to how animals would in real life; they behave realistically, and that requires for you to also behave realistically (both by being always on guard and by strategically thinking over the way you will face a certain machine or another using the rather limited resources you have at your disposal). A good science fiction story with genuinely interesting mechanics.

There is a single thing Horizon has going for it over others and it's the art direction. There are a lot of fascinating designs, the robot animals are cool, the world is beautiful. Every other aspect is where it drops off.

The story is terribly uninteresting, the only captivating moments were when you'd find out new stuff about the old world. Unfortunately, between those moments, you are stuck with stiff and boring characters and a story that the game felt almost reluctant to tell.

The combat with the robots had some fun, though even using their weak spots, many fights felt too grindy. Perhaps are larger array of abilities for each robot would have helped. Even worse are sections where you fight other humans, which were woeful. The movement itself felt nice save for some roughness when riding mounts, but that didn't make up for the majority of the moment to moment gameplay.

Still, it isn't a terrible game—it just strikes it right down the middle.

Obviously stunning visuals, etc etc. Most of this game is perfectly playable but some of the optional bossfights required me to turn my brain on way more than I expected and it really won me over. The story in general is a series of great ideas that are hampered by hollow, lifeless writing and an incredibly arrogant and whiny (but not in an interesting way) player character. Aloy (which is a name that someone deliberately gave to this character) is literally just if Chloe from Life is Strange were the lead in an action game which is ehhh not great but you can't win em all I guess.
Decent game overall, perhaps in spite of itself.

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.

I finally got around to playing this and it was such a great experience. It has a lot of the trappings of your standard open world game, but it incorporates them in interesting ways. Ubisoft towers? They're cool roaming giraffe monsters. Collectibles? They're snippets of poetry, flashbacks to the world before, unique religious trinkets. Side quests? They're pretty basic but the people you help are actually good characters and many of them show up throughout the game.

The writing is mostly great and the voice acting, though sometimes spotty, is absolutely stellar across the board for the main characters. Most of all, HZD excels at world building. This feels like a super well thought out and well realized world. I do wish some of the secrets of the story were revealed to you earlier, but discovering these secrets in the main mission bunkers makes sense in the fiction. The story really feels compelling toward the end of the game as you discover more and more about why the world is the way it is.

It's definitely not perfect. It has even worse climbing than Uncharted and some of the things that make sense in the fiction don't make for fun gameplay e.g. standing around listening to five audio logs all left in the same room. But despite some poorly implemented ideas, it is clear a lot of love went into this and I cannot wait for the inevitable sequel.