HZD is a decent game that mostly respects your time, an essential trait of an open world game. The game takes a little long to get going unfortunately, and doesn't really tease you enough that it will get better. After thinking that I'd never care about the game's plot, all of a sudden I was hit with these Nier-level reveals that really helped me to enjoy the latter third of the game quite a bit.
While Horizon does fall into some forgettable formulaic triple A tropes and such, I was mostly able to overlook them. Guerrilla honestly did a great job at making a good open world, which I wasn't expecting myself to say. It's full of varied events and enemies and encounters and they did a great job at making it feel alive with an absurdly impressive amount of detail.
I also ended up enjoying the combat near the end of the game. It is pretty simple and you don't get very many options until later in the game, but once you are able to craft more powerful weapons and have a ton of different types of ammo at your disposal, it can be quite fun. Tearing off machine parts is extremely satisfying, particularly in boss fights, which for the most part are honestly pretty well designed with balanced difficulty-wise.
Horizon takes awhile to get going and doesn't really do a good job at immediately giving you a reason to want to keep playing, but once you give it a chance it turns into a pretty solid complete game that by the end I could comfortably say I enjoyed, which I did not expect to after starting for a few hours.
8/10
While Horizon does fall into some forgettable formulaic triple A tropes and such, I was mostly able to overlook them. Guerrilla honestly did a great job at making a good open world, which I wasn't expecting myself to say. It's full of varied events and enemies and encounters and they did a great job at making it feel alive with an absurdly impressive amount of detail.
I also ended up enjoying the combat near the end of the game. It is pretty simple and you don't get very many options until later in the game, but once you are able to craft more powerful weapons and have a ton of different types of ammo at your disposal, it can be quite fun. Tearing off machine parts is extremely satisfying, particularly in boss fights, which for the most part are honestly pretty well designed with balanced difficulty-wise.
Horizon takes awhile to get going and doesn't really do a good job at immediately giving you a reason to want to keep playing, but once you give it a chance it turns into a pretty solid complete game that by the end I could comfortably say I enjoyed, which I did not expect to after starting for a few hours.
8/10