The gameplay drew me in at first, but I mostly stuck around for the story. It suffered the same problem I have with most open world games, there's just so much available and I get super into exploring every crevice of the map for the first half of the game and by the second half I get super burnt out. and I did get burnt out with Horizon, but managed to push through the last handful of main story missions.

The actual present day story in the game was interesting, the concept of all these tribes living in this post apocalyptic society and adapting to the world infested with unexplained robot creatures. But I quickly became way more invested in the backstory you uncover during the main quest, the whole Zero Dawn project and the downfall of modern society. All the ruins you explore, the audio logs and memos you find, reveal this very bleak, but ultimately hopeful, story of the world ending.

I did manage to get through what felt like the majority of the side quests before the burn out set in, not many of them really stuck out in the end though. All the politics and tribal warfare and the Carja and the Shadow Carja and everything lost me around the halfway point, but it felt like the Project Zero Dawn part of the story was more fleshed out anyway

I really enjoyed Aloy as a protagonist, she has a personality beyond just "the hero", but not in an over the top or annoying way. The other character that really stuck out was Sobeck, from what you get to know of her from the holograms, journals, etc. The final audio log and cutscene at the end was just a nice, touching way to conclude everything.

oh and yeah the gameplay was fun too. I mean, by the end it gets repetitive. The game gives you a variety of tools to use, but I never felt the need to try out anything beyond the four weapons I had equipped. You can use the same strategy for most of the robots, the only one I had to switch up my tactics for was the birds. ugh and i did not realize that this game was gonna be so bow heavy, I like to stealth arch as much as anyone, just not with a controller. but that's on me, it wasn't too bad by the end.

The climbing/parkourish mechanics were, thankfully, very reliable. As in, I can trust the game to lock me into a jump or ledge grab if I'm aiming for it. A couple games I've played recently have not been as forgiving, so it was definitely appreciated here. (also, there's been some discourse about "yellow paint" and this game had a lot of that, but I still could barely find the ledges half the time. i say yellow paint stays)

I will say, some of the voice acting is...not great. All the major characters felt fine, but some of the less important NPCs just sounded noticeably worse. And I didn't really like how anyone moved while they were talking. I feel like a lot of games have had trouble making characters look normal during dialogue, not even sure why it stuck out for me here, but it was bothering me a lot by the end lol

anyway, Horizon was a fun, typical open world game with a unique, surprisingly compelling story under the surface