Let me start by saying that Horizon threads a very dangerous line -- it's a game that attempts to do the very tired open-world action game formula and still stand out. To me, it succeeded, thanks to its narrative, worldbuilding and inventive combat, but a lot of people are going to give up if they're not as tolerant with the hiccups, and I want to discuss those too. With those things in mind, let's talk about Horizon: Zero Dawn.
In the distant future, humanity exists as primitive tribes, fighting each day for survival among the overgrown ruins where our civilization once stood. In this world, animal-like machines roam, machines whose origin and workings are unknown, and that grow more and more aggressive each day. A girl is born to a tribe in the mountains, a tribe whose elders deem the baby a curse and have her be raised as an outcast. As she comes of age, she sets out to find her place in the world and discover the truth about her origins.
The game sets off to a fantastic start, with an opening that sets up a lot of mysteries to be unraveled later. How was Aloy born, and why was she cast out? What kind of society is this? Who is the man she's entrusted to, and why is he exiled as well? As we move on to a section that shows Aloy's childhood, we're thrown into a ruin of the old world and a record of the final days of its inhabitants. The questions keep piling up.
We're presented to the game's main mechanics as well as a bit more of Aloy and her adoptive father's characters, until a point where we reach a festival at a bustling village, and here it is evident how much production value goes into building this world. You get to see rituals, dances, shamans telling stories of their tribe -- the culture and people Aloy has been shut out of.
This is one of Horizon: Zero Dawn's positives: so many post-apocalyptic games fall into misanthropic tropes, where humanity is fundamentally rotten and its survivors devolve into warring gangs that know nothing other than sex, substance abuse and, in particular, violence. Any attempts at rebuilding society are presented as shallow, corrupt and/or ultimately doomed to fail.
Games like that are always hard to finish, because regardless of being right or wrong, they lack a world worth fighting for. Horizon, on the other hand, puts a lot of work in fleshing out its societies and their cultures. The festival at the beginning of the game is quite the experience, presenting a variety of characters and setting up several different potential plot threads.
But then comes a part where the game drops the ball for a bit. As the prologue ends, the story does a triple backflip and the game enters a bit of a slump. Maybe several sequences got cut and their plot points smushed into one, or maybe they wanted you to spend some time alone with the world at this point. Or both. Either way, I figure most people who turn out to dislike Horizon are going to drop it during this part, as it's when the game plays to its weaknesses the most by putting the spotlight on the generic parts of the experience.
By that time, Horizon has yet to show off most of its tricks, leaving you only with sidequests to do and collectibles to chase around for, with not many different enemies available or weapon types unlocked. At this point, you'd be excused for thinking Horizon doesn't have any interesting gameplay to speak of.
Since we're on this subject already, let's get it out of the way: the side content in Horizon is simply baffling, and there's a clear divide between the level of care given to the main campaign and to side missions, the writing and polish feeling very off in the latter case. This is actually the first game I've seen that basically admits lots of its quests are pure filler busywork, so much so that they get a separate category called "Errand" in the quest menu. They aren't even considered "side" quests.
There's also an obsession with creating setpieces that often backfires. If you happen to explore the world early on, you'll notice there are conspicuously large, empty areas at dead ends in various places of the map. In almost every instance, that area will be used for exactly one quest later on, and outside of that one quest, it's just pointless. A carefully crafted corner of the world with nothing and no one in it that only serves to remind you that this is not a world, this is a videogame.
But then there's the flipside, the quests that actually build on the world they're in. While the disparity in polish levels is still evident, these quests not only present more interesting storylines that often span multiple missions, but also include important characters and have tangible impacts on the world and its societies, even affecting the ending sections of the game.
It's no wonder that most of these good quests branch off from events and characters the main story, because that is where Horizon shines. Horizon's main campaign, apart from that bit I mentioned, is incredibly well-directed, meticulously unraveling its plot, leading you on until the very end of the game. Every quest area is filled with audio logs that slowly form a bigger picture of the civilization that came before yours, and how your civilization came to be.
The narrative explores themes of environmentalism and war, as well as the fragility of life. The opposition between nature and technology is a core component of Horizon's world design, and it's also ever present throughout Aloy's story. Speaking of Aloy, there's also her personal journey, someone cast out because of a tribe's tradition who then sets out to learn about her origins. She's pragmatic, easy to emphathize with, and a lovable character overall.
Even if you don't care about story at all, though, you might still like Horizon due to its combat, especially the enemy design, which is most inventive I've seen a game have in a while. While the game looks like it might be focused around melee, Horizon is for the most part a third-person shooter. You could theoretically poke enemy machines with your spear until they fall, but that's an easy way to get stomped on, and it's far more effective to use the myriad ranged weapons the game offers.
There's actually so many that it's hard to name them all by heart: you can tie down machines using ropes to make them collapse, set tripwires that explode or electrocute them, sling mines and bombs with different elemental effects, fire at least nine different types of arrows which different effects and/or damage types. It's a lot, and the game does a bit of Souls here by letting you find these weapons and figure out their effects by yourself.
Like with Souls games, everything hinges on how patient you are. If you're willing to spend time at the Hunting Grounds scattered across the map to learn the game's mechanics, there will come a time where everything will click. If you're not, well, the slump I mentioned just got worse, because enemies are getting harder as you move through the map and all you know how to do is chuck arrows at them until they die. This is another reason people might find Horizon boring.
The great payoff from understanding your own arsenal comes from the way enemies are designed. Apart from the human bandits and cultists you face, all enemies are animal-shaped robots of varying sizes whose armored bodies consist of many different parts -- sensors, batteries, fuel cells, fans, weaponry, etcetera.
The trick to Horizon's combat is scanning enemies with Aloy's Focus, learning about these parts and methodically targeting down each enemy's weaknesses. Batteries can be shocked into overload. Fans, exposed when temperature rises, are gaps in the armor. Gas chambers under pressure can be pierced and detonated. For some enemies, you can even use pressure blasts to rip their cannons apart, then pick them up and shoot back.
There are so many different ways in which machines can be taken down that encounters seldom feel alike. And mind you, it pays off to learn all of them: contrary to my initial expectations, Horizon's combat is surprisingly challenging. This is a game that expects you to know how to shoot, to know when to move, but also when to stand still, and even, in some cases, expect you to know to dodge into enemy attacks to get into a better position.
It's funny to even think about it now. As I played, I had a list of enemies in my head that I thought were broken, that I felt were basically unkillable without spamming health potions. That list proved to be entirely composed of skill issues, and dwindled as I got further into the game. The last enemy to be crossed out was the Rockbreaker, a robot that can dig into being invulnerable and then leap out straight into you, in an almost undodgeable fashion.
I thought that move was cheap, until an NPC in a quest told me that the Rockbreaker senses you from the vibrations of your steps, so if you stop moving, it cannot leap out at you because it doesn't know where you are. As I stared in disbelief, reflecting on my own stupidity, I could swear I heard the entire Horizon team laugh at me from somewhere.
And now, I laugh at it too, this moment becoming one of my fondest memories of the game. I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. I think its gambit of trying to stand out in a saturated genre did pay out, and I earnestly recommend it. All of that said, I must reiterate: it is a gambit. Depending on how patient you are with learning games, and with how tired you are of the current state of the open-world genre, your mileage may vary a lot.
In the distant future, humanity exists as primitive tribes, fighting each day for survival among the overgrown ruins where our civilization once stood. In this world, animal-like machines roam, machines whose origin and workings are unknown, and that grow more and more aggressive each day. A girl is born to a tribe in the mountains, a tribe whose elders deem the baby a curse and have her be raised as an outcast. As she comes of age, she sets out to find her place in the world and discover the truth about her origins.
The game sets off to a fantastic start, with an opening that sets up a lot of mysteries to be unraveled later. How was Aloy born, and why was she cast out? What kind of society is this? Who is the man she's entrusted to, and why is he exiled as well? As we move on to a section that shows Aloy's childhood, we're thrown into a ruin of the old world and a record of the final days of its inhabitants. The questions keep piling up.
We're presented to the game's main mechanics as well as a bit more of Aloy and her adoptive father's characters, until a point where we reach a festival at a bustling village, and here it is evident how much production value goes into building this world. You get to see rituals, dances, shamans telling stories of their tribe -- the culture and people Aloy has been shut out of.
This is one of Horizon: Zero Dawn's positives: so many post-apocalyptic games fall into misanthropic tropes, where humanity is fundamentally rotten and its survivors devolve into warring gangs that know nothing other than sex, substance abuse and, in particular, violence. Any attempts at rebuilding society are presented as shallow, corrupt and/or ultimately doomed to fail.
Games like that are always hard to finish, because regardless of being right or wrong, they lack a world worth fighting for. Horizon, on the other hand, puts a lot of work in fleshing out its societies and their cultures. The festival at the beginning of the game is quite the experience, presenting a variety of characters and setting up several different potential plot threads.
But then comes a part where the game drops the ball for a bit. As the prologue ends, the story does a triple backflip and the game enters a bit of a slump. Maybe several sequences got cut and their plot points smushed into one, or maybe they wanted you to spend some time alone with the world at this point. Or both. Either way, I figure most people who turn out to dislike Horizon are going to drop it during this part, as it's when the game plays to its weaknesses the most by putting the spotlight on the generic parts of the experience.
By that time, Horizon has yet to show off most of its tricks, leaving you only with sidequests to do and collectibles to chase around for, with not many different enemies available or weapon types unlocked. At this point, you'd be excused for thinking Horizon doesn't have any interesting gameplay to speak of.
Since we're on this subject already, let's get it out of the way: the side content in Horizon is simply baffling, and there's a clear divide between the level of care given to the main campaign and to side missions, the writing and polish feeling very off in the latter case. This is actually the first game I've seen that basically admits lots of its quests are pure filler busywork, so much so that they get a separate category called "Errand" in the quest menu. They aren't even considered "side" quests.
There's also an obsession with creating setpieces that often backfires. If you happen to explore the world early on, you'll notice there are conspicuously large, empty areas at dead ends in various places of the map. In almost every instance, that area will be used for exactly one quest later on, and outside of that one quest, it's just pointless. A carefully crafted corner of the world with nothing and no one in it that only serves to remind you that this is not a world, this is a videogame.
But then there's the flipside, the quests that actually build on the world they're in. While the disparity in polish levels is still evident, these quests not only present more interesting storylines that often span multiple missions, but also include important characters and have tangible impacts on the world and its societies, even affecting the ending sections of the game.
It's no wonder that most of these good quests branch off from events and characters the main story, because that is where Horizon shines. Horizon's main campaign, apart from that bit I mentioned, is incredibly well-directed, meticulously unraveling its plot, leading you on until the very end of the game. Every quest area is filled with audio logs that slowly form a bigger picture of the civilization that came before yours, and how your civilization came to be.
The narrative explores themes of environmentalism and war, as well as the fragility of life. The opposition between nature and technology is a core component of Horizon's world design, and it's also ever present throughout Aloy's story. Speaking of Aloy, there's also her personal journey, someone cast out because of a tribe's tradition who then sets out to learn about her origins. She's pragmatic, easy to emphathize with, and a lovable character overall.
Even if you don't care about story at all, though, you might still like Horizon due to its combat, especially the enemy design, which is most inventive I've seen a game have in a while. While the game looks like it might be focused around melee, Horizon is for the most part a third-person shooter. You could theoretically poke enemy machines with your spear until they fall, but that's an easy way to get stomped on, and it's far more effective to use the myriad ranged weapons the game offers.
There's actually so many that it's hard to name them all by heart: you can tie down machines using ropes to make them collapse, set tripwires that explode or electrocute them, sling mines and bombs with different elemental effects, fire at least nine different types of arrows which different effects and/or damage types. It's a lot, and the game does a bit of Souls here by letting you find these weapons and figure out their effects by yourself.
Like with Souls games, everything hinges on how patient you are. If you're willing to spend time at the Hunting Grounds scattered across the map to learn the game's mechanics, there will come a time where everything will click. If you're not, well, the slump I mentioned just got worse, because enemies are getting harder as you move through the map and all you know how to do is chuck arrows at them until they die. This is another reason people might find Horizon boring.
The great payoff from understanding your own arsenal comes from the way enemies are designed. Apart from the human bandits and cultists you face, all enemies are animal-shaped robots of varying sizes whose armored bodies consist of many different parts -- sensors, batteries, fuel cells, fans, weaponry, etcetera.
The trick to Horizon's combat is scanning enemies with Aloy's Focus, learning about these parts and methodically targeting down each enemy's weaknesses. Batteries can be shocked into overload. Fans, exposed when temperature rises, are gaps in the armor. Gas chambers under pressure can be pierced and detonated. For some enemies, you can even use pressure blasts to rip their cannons apart, then pick them up and shoot back.
There are so many different ways in which machines can be taken down that encounters seldom feel alike. And mind you, it pays off to learn all of them: contrary to my initial expectations, Horizon's combat is surprisingly challenging. This is a game that expects you to know how to shoot, to know when to move, but also when to stand still, and even, in some cases, expect you to know to dodge into enemy attacks to get into a better position.
It's funny to even think about it now. As I played, I had a list of enemies in my head that I thought were broken, that I felt were basically unkillable without spamming health potions. That list proved to be entirely composed of skill issues, and dwindled as I got further into the game. The last enemy to be crossed out was the Rockbreaker, a robot that can dig into being invulnerable and then leap out straight into you, in an almost undodgeable fashion.
I thought that move was cheap, until an NPC in a quest told me that the Rockbreaker senses you from the vibrations of your steps, so if you stop moving, it cannot leap out at you because it doesn't know where you are. As I stared in disbelief, reflecting on my own stupidity, I could swear I heard the entire Horizon team laugh at me from somewhere.
And now, I laugh at it too, this moment becoming one of my fondest memories of the game. I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. I think its gambit of trying to stand out in a saturated genre did pay out, and I earnestly recommend it. All of that said, I must reiterate: it is a gambit. Depending on how patient you are with learning games, and with how tired you are of the current state of the open-world genre, your mileage may vary a lot.