You ever keep meaning to do something, keep telling yourself you'll do it tomorrow, but then never actually get around to it? That was more or less me and Horizon Zero Dawn for a couple months. Or, more specifically, me and actually buying the game, not playing it. I'm not one of those people that buys a game and takes forever to actually...Okay, yes, I did that with The Witcher III's DLC, but I did play those! And I finally got around to playing Horizon Zero Dawn, to the point where I got the Platinum Trophy! And guess what? This game's pretty rad.
After having the misfortune of coming out the same week as Breath of the Wild, and my reading a lot of hot takes about how Breath of the Wild did "stuff" better than Horizon, I was a bit apprehensive about how much I'd end up enjoying Horizon. Of course those apprehensions were mostly wrong, because it turns out a great game is still great, even if it releases close to a different great game. There are certainly things I wish Horizon did more like BotW, but there are also things I wish BotW did more like Horizon. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Horizon Zero Dawn is at its absolute best in the heat of battle. Slow motion sliding around monstrous machines, dodging attacks from every angle, knocking off pieces of their armor and weapons off whenever there's a clear shot, using elemental weaknesses to gain an upper hand, and eventually felling these huge mechanical beasts. It's thrilling, and to be frank, cool. It also feels original in a way that I'm not sure a game's combat has for me in quite a few years. I can't think of any other games I've played that have had such a large focus on dismantling enemies before actually defeating them (I'm sure they exist, you know what I mean).
It's not just about head on conflict, either. If you want to be sneaky, there are stealth attacks, though the stealth isn't up there with stuff like the best MGS games, even if one of the sneaking songs in this game sounds like it's straight out of that series. There's also traps to be laid out, preferably before a fight starts, but I definitely found myself using them mid fight as well. Some are effectively proximity mines, where you just drop it and forget it. Then there's trip wires, where you shoot one end into one spot (ground or wall), and the other somewhere else.
I do think it's a bit absurd that enemies don't see these trip wires, but it's one of those things where realistically intelligent enemies might be too smart to be fun to fight. Though, there were times where it felt like some of the enemies were avoiding them once fights started, so I don't know! Anyway, whatever walks into the wire (aside from Aloy, thankfully) gets blown up. Or set on fire/shocked, depending on which elemental variant is selected. As one might expect, fire does damage over time, and shock can stun enemies if they're weak to it, or get shocked enough. There's also freeze damage, which weakens enemies so they take more damage from non-freeze attacks, and might slow them down? I'm still not sure if it actually slows them or not.
And if a certain enemy is getting a little too aggressive, or if you need to back off and heal (which I did a lot because the enemies do a lot of damage), you can shoot cables at them, which tie them to the ground, at least temporarily. The more connect, the longer they stay tied, and enough will pull them down to the ground, where you can do a critical hit, or override them and make them friendly robots. Of course Aloy can't override any old enemy from the start of the game, and unlocking new overrides was always exciting because I wanted to get bigger and bigger machines fighting on my side. And really, there's something satisfying about using those cables to lock enemies in place and seeing them struggle while I take a moment to breathe and figure out my next move. Conversely, sometimes it made me a little sad to see these majestic robotic beasts struggling against the cables, but then I would either override them and let them go, or remind myself that they wanted to kill me. There's some really good sound work on the straining cable noises (and all the audio in general, it's superb). There's a lot of options available in the fights, and just about all of them feel really useful. There are certainly ways to break the game, and get really over-powered, but at its best, it's some of the most fun, original combat I've played in a game in years.
As cool as it is, I actually wish it went even farther. Rolling around with a squad of overridden robots would probably be too powerful, but I do wish the overridden robots would follow Aloy at least a bit farther than they do. Knocking the gun off a Ravager's (big robot saber tooth tiger) back will affect how it fights, but what if actual limbs were being blown off these things? Removing armor, and sometimes revealing hidden weak spots is cool, but what if actual holes were being blown into the machines, and I could see all the way through to the other side? Though, given how hectic the fights in this game are, especially against larger groups of enemies, I'm not sure that I'd even notice holes in the robots, so who knows if it'd even be worth the extra time/resources it'd take to make that work.
It's still tremendously fun, and there's plenty of variety in the machines throughout the game to keep it fresh. Fighting a group of Longlegs (big turkeys with a yell attack that stuns Aloy) is a lot different than fighting a Rockbreaker, which tunnels through the ground and responds to the noise you make, like the cinematic classic Tremors. And again, there are parts of these machines that can be destroyed mid-fight that change how the enemies react. Don't like getting stunned by the Longlegs? Shoot the big air sack on their chests enough, and it'll pop! And I think that if you hit the tunneling legs of the Rockbreakers enough, they'll be stuck up on the ground with you. I'm not entirely sure, though, because I didn't figure that out until near the end of the game, when an NPC suggested it to me, and I didn't quite manage it the last time I fought one. And there's plenty more neat ways to take on the other enemy types in the game, but I don't want to spoil them for you. I won't take away the thrill of figuring out how to conquer a majestic Thunderjaw (think T-Rex, but bigger and more heavily armed (though ironically with no actual arms)), or whatever else lies in wait.
That said, I hope they add a bunch of new ones for the sequel (which is most likely going to happen). I have some ideas, which is why I'm bringing it up. Stuff like gorillas, spiders, and scorpions are some of the more obvious ones to go to for video game robot enemies. I think armadillos could be interesting to fight, too. Heavily armored, so they'd be tough, and a fun rolling attack to dodge. A big porcupine covered in spikes, so you can't get close to it at all would be interesting. Plenty of other types of bugs, like preying mantises could be cool. Maybe a walrus, or an octopus? They don't even need to be directly based on real world animals, if they want to make truly out there enemy designs. And they should! I'm just saying, there's so much potential for even more enemy variety in the future, and I hope they go all out with it.
But all of that is in contradiction with the combat against human enemies, which is okay, but not great. Their AI isn't especially fun to deal with, and there's not really anything the game does to make them any different than fighting humans in any other game. It's not thrilling or exciting like fighting the machines, but it also doesn't detract from the experience. Though, some of the tougher enemies, especially near the end of the game, take multiple arrow headshots to kill, which is a bit too bullet-sponge-y (arrow-sponge-y?) for my taste. I'd have much preferred if the human enemies had some more similarities to the machines, actually. Aloy can shoot armor off machines, so why not shoot armor off humans too? That'd be more interesting, and more sensible than a regular dude being able to take multiple arrows to the head. That, or maybe more depth to the melee combat than just mashing R1 and R2 for light and heavy attacks.
Then there's the world itself. It is a big open world, and an astoundingly gorgeous one, too. I'd have to go look at Uncharted 4 again to compare the two, but I'd say Horizon is probably the best looking game I've ever played. It definitely is for a game of this scale and scope. U4 still has the advantage in faces, but that's more because the more limited scope of that game lets them do facial capture and make every cutscene as bespoke as possible, whereas Horizon suffers from some hit or miss facial animations. That, and the lip-syncing is off in spots in a way that is weird, and I thought they probably would have fixed by the time I played it.
That sort of thing can be disappointing in the moment, but it didn't really detract from the overall experience. Even if the mouths weren't lining up with what was coming out of them, the acting and writing were usually good enough to make up for it. Story is always one of the things I appreciate most in games, and Horizon's is good enough that even after it was praised by many, I was still pleasantly surprised. The main cast of characters, while perhaps a bit smaller than I expected, is great, especially Aloy. The world itself, and the lore of the various cultures is fleshed out in a way that I feel like most game worlds aren't. Or, if they are, that stuff is buried deep enough that I don't find it, or it's not especially interesting. A lot of the stuff around the Carja, and their former "Mad Sun King" in particular was the sort of stuff I wasn't expecting at all from this game, and it really drew me into the world.
On top of all that (or beneath it all), is the mystery of how the world became the way it is. Yes, it's true that a lot of this part of the story is told through finding audio logs, and "exposition dumps," but the game's unique spin on that sort of story (you'll know what I mean if you play it, I don't want to spoil it) is more than enough to make up for it. I did spend some time trying to think of better ways the game could convey that stuff, and the best I could think of would be playable flashbacks to the past when that stuff is happening. That would be cool, but it's the sort of thing that would require a lot of extra time and resources on the developers' part. Then it might just end up feeling out of place, like they disrupt the flow of the game, or just have a different set of issues. Anyway, the actual story part of that stuff is just as good as the rest of the game, and worth seeing through to the end.
I do have some other issues with the game, which range from nitpicks to more important issues. Stuff like how most of the time the armor Aloy has equipped is in the cutscenes, but there are some where it isn't, and she's wearing the default from the start of the game. That's definitely jarring, and I don't really know why it's the case. Nothing in those cutscenes seemed outlandish enough that they had to be pre-rendered, but who am I to say?
And the game has some issues related to inventory stuff. Apparently the option to sort the inventory was added after the game released, which seems absurd to me, given that it's still a bit of a chore even with that! Yes, there's a button to sort stuff, but it'd be nice if the game told me how it was being sorted, or let me pick how it was sorted instead of just cycling through the options. That, and the game could really use a "sell all junk" button. You can mark stuff to sell a variety of things at once, but unless I missed it, there's no sell all junk button.
On top of that, this is yet another post Far Cry 3 game where you need to hunt all sorts of arbitrary critters to craft bigger inventories. Everything from holding more resources to more of each ammo type for each type of weapon. Hunting for skins to upgrade stuff was novel in 2012, but now it's just a chore. If a game wants to make inventory management a serious component of the game, that's fine, but this isn't that sort of game. This is a "take as much stuff as you possibly can" game. But to get the inventory maxed out, you need to kill a whole bunch of cute little bunnies, foxes, turkeys, boars raccoons, and fish. Honestly, it makes me feel bad. I know they're not real animals, but they can't even fight back. I'd much rather just have the inventory be maxed from the start, or make the upgrades something bought from merchants with money. I'd even take using parts gathered from the machines over this, because again, at least fighting the machines is fun.
Oh, and the worst part? What you get from the animals is random, so you might end up killing a whole bunch of foxes just to get the one skin you need to upgrade your quiver. It's also the thing, like all these games since Far Cry 3, where there's no logical reason for why it needs to be a fox skin instead of a boar skin. Why fish bones instead of boar bones? Why rich meat instead of bony meat? At least it's not as absurd as Assassin's Creed IV, which required killing a full sized whale to craft the fourth gun holster. You know, because if you have four guns, you can only make the fourth holster out of whale skin, and you can't use the rest of that entire, fully grown whale for anything else. Only a holster for a pistol.
Earlier on I said I was worried I might like this game less after having played BotW, and I will say that one area where Horizon doesn't hold up is in how you can traverse the world itself. One of the first things I did after the opening prologue was try to climb up a rock like in Breath of the Wild. Sadly, as capable as Aloy is, she can't climb basically anything like Link can. Instead, there's Uncharted style specific ledges and hand holds that she can grab onto, and you can try to hop up rocks and other stuff.
I think this is the first game I've played with that sort of climbing where sometimes it was actually hard for me to see what was and wasn't climbable. Then again, every time that happened, it ended up being a lighting thing, where it just happened to the the one time of day where a shadow was over the spot I needed to climb, and it was a bit tougher to see. Doesn't mean it wasn't irksome, but it's not a huge problem. Anyway, between steep slants, and invisible walls, the game is usually pretty good about keeping you out of places the developers don't want you in. Or at least they were with me, I'm sure people out there have found ways around that stuff. They always do.
I'm not saying that every big open game needs to let you climb ANYTHING like BotW does, but I hope games in general move more in that direction. In this case specifically, I'd love for both some more freedom in what can be climbed/traversed, and some more reasons to actually explore around every nook and cranny. Sure, there's plenty of collectibles, but those aren't as enticing as stuff like puzzles in BotW. Horizon is a gorgeous game, and I loved looking at the ancient ruins, and majestic mountains of it, but I never, or at least only very rarely had the same sense of adventure and wonder that I did in BotW. Finding an old, rusted out building should be exciting. It should make me go, "OOH, what's in there?" Instead I thought, "That's cool looking," and usually continued on my way. I'm not saying it needs to have elaborate shrines filled with bespoke puzzles like BotW (though I wouldn't complain if it did), but just a little more of...something for bits like that would've gone a long way to add more of that adventurous wonder to Horizon.
I know good puzzle-crafting is hard, and especially doing it in a game the scale of BotW is even harder, but I'd sure love it if there was stuff like that in Horizon. As is, after BotW it does sort of feel like something is missing from the open world parts of the game, and the best answer I can think of for what that is, is some sort of puzzle solving. Do I think they'll have a lot of puzzles in the next one? Probably not, but who knows!
Breath of the Wild has been referenced several times here, but now I'm going to reference another open world game that Horizon reminded me of: The Witcher III. Remember all the side quests in that game that boiled down to using Witcher senses to follow a trail to a thing? Well, a whole lot of the side quests in Horizon boil down to using Aloy's fancy ear piece to follow a trail to a thing. It's not bad quest design every once in a while, but so many of them use this exact framework that it I wanted to mention it here.
The last nitpick I have is that sometimes when aiming toward the sky (be it at a flying enemy or a really big one I'm a bit too close to), the camera gets behind grass and other foliage, which makes it harder to aim. Other than that stuff, I really do think it's a fantastic game. These days especially, I know I only write about the stuff I really like, but I REALLY LIKE Horizon Zero Dawn. And I'm really happy that not only did Guerrilla Games' overlords at Sony let them make something other than Killzone, but that what they made is easily their best game. They've set a really high bar, and I hope the next one is even better!
Thanks for reading! I know it's been a while since the last thing I wrote, and I'm hoping I can get back into the swing of putting stuff up more frequently. Either way, I hope you all have a pleasant day!
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