I posted this elsewhere but here's my rambling mess of thoughts overall. The TL;DR of it all is that the game is really awesome that falls into some open world pitfalls that only serve to scratch and blemish the gem that the game is. I'll quote this entire mess so it doesn't create a massive scroll and easier to skip if you don't care (and I don't blame you). All this is mostly gameplay. I'll post some story stuff after.
The first half will be the negative stuff, the back half will be positive. There’s no real flow to any of it, I try to lead my points into another but it’s mostly just a detailed list of key elements I had thoughts on.
This game and me had a super rocky start. I made it through the tutorial area well enough and even into the open world proper with No Man’s Land but something about it wasn’t grabbing me – the combat. I noticed I wasn’t really having fun. I wasn’t having fun at all, actually. Enemies hit like trucks and were super aggressive. They had several attack each and quite a lot of them had bananas range. I was playing on Hard because I did so with the first game, but it just wasn’t so. I was close to putting it down. But I swallowed my pride (why I even have one about difficulty is beyond me) and lowered the difficulty. I should have started with Normal. I recommend Normal to everyone. Game instantly became more enjoyable for me. The quick and hard-hitting enemies were still there but Normal helped just enough that it became an enjoyable challenge instead of a frustrating one. I can place some blame on me for not doing this sooner and it is called “Hard” after all, but the game’s on-boarding for combat is not good.
I adore this game a whole lot. It’s a diamond in the rough. A not-great opening hours, open world busywork and other bloat really chipped away at the solid core, but it only made surface scratches to this masterpiece. I’ll go into the detail of what works and what didn’t. I have a lot to say on both. I’ll start with the negatives because I enjoy finish reading thoughts on something more when they end on positive notes.
Most of my negatives stem from the usual open world formula. The kind of reflexive motions we go through when playing these kind of games. I think these problems came ahead in this game because it’s a sequel and even after playing the first one I built up in my head things I wish they’d change but ended up not doing so.
I’m at the point in my life where I’m just not interested in resource gathering anymore. The majority of this game’s world, and it is a gorgeous one, is spoiled by not going five feet without coming across wood for bow ammo, or berry bushes for health or plants used in food recipes. I rather be enjoying the scenery between scraps, not scrounging around to replenish my depleted health and ammo resources. I don’t know the solution to this but I wish they’d scaled this back severely. It’s not fun, it doesn’t add anything to the game and it just disrupts your traversal. Just want to clarify that this doesn’t extend to machine resources since that stuff ties directly into the game’s combat and equipment loot. You’re a hunter and hunt machines, so it makes sense that’d you would go after them to get their parts to upgrade the things that help you hunt them better.
Speaking of collecting stuff, regular fauna hunting is back. You need to hunt them to upgrade your ammo capacity and it’s just boring. It’s better than it was in the first game, considering fish or other animals rarely had any bones for you to harvest from them for your arrow pouch – those things are more common now. But it’s still all busywork that doesn’t add anything to the game. All this resource stuff ties into one of the biggest problems:
Bloat! This game is bloated. I don’t mean the side content, which I’ll talk about later, but just the amount of STUFF in the game. When it comes to an arsenal of weapons and gear, I believe less is more. This game has coded weapons that you can buy or receive as rewards. There are dozens of them to sift through and it is a confusing mess of weapons with different perks and elemental types. Each has a radically different function and use. You’re almost paralyzed with choice and it’s just overwhelming. They should give you baseline weapons to upgrade into to these rarity categories, unlocking perks and elemental ammo as you go instead of opening a shop and finding several new bows, all named differently, that look like they do the same thing as what you currently have (except they don’t).
This also ties into the game’s on-boarding problem. The first hour or so is spent in a pretty linear opening mission that establishes the story, characters, motivations and some summaries of the first game. All these things are done really well. What isn’t done well is setting up the mechanics you’ll be using. Yes, it explains and let’s you practice the basics of traversal and stealth. Even the basics of combat, but that’s it. You learn about ammo types after you get a weapon, so if you see an icon you don’t recognize you are out of luck until you buy it, after which you’ll receive two paragraphs explaining that ammo to you.
Same with weapons. You’re never really given a chance to experiment, consequence free, with the different weapons and elements. Nothing is gated by the game so you can get every weapon in the game almost immediately but you will receive no situation in which that weapon would be extra useful to demonstrate to you the best time to use it. I think this stuff is what leads to people just plink-plonking enemies to death with the hunter’s bow and people calling the combat monotonous because the game doesn’t let you get the practice in or offer you any training to gives you some basic weapon and elemental combos for you to try and get experimenting with. It’s frustrating because the game does this with the new melee system and it’s amazing. It tells you the combos to use, and gives you dummies to try them out on to see how they work.
As I said, most of these aren’t unique to Horizon, it’s just the game that was a tipping point for me. I hope they change things up for the third one otherwise I think it’d just be too stale. Now that the unpleasant negatives are over, time for me to gush relentlessly over the stuff I enjoyed – which was everything else.
The combat, despite having a super rocky start for me and on-boarding issues is still super fun and satisfying. The power behind the attacks is tremendous, aided by the sound design and damage models of your enemies. Nailing weak spots for a massive explosion of sparks and damage or watching all the armor plating being blasted off never gets old. The abilities you unlock in the skill trees really add flavor and options for you and the valor surges can make hard fights into cakewalks.
Speaking of sound design, it’s flawless. From the machine sounds giving you clear audio indicators of when they’re going to attack, to the soundscapes of each area of the world, the power behind your weapons to all the performances, and the music. It’s all incredible. Folks need to be winning awards for the sound in this game from the actors to the composer and sound designers. There isn’t a single bad performance in this game. Some of the strongest ones are even from one-off NPCs in side missions that you can easily miss. The music for just running a round is very understated and changes with each area but fits perfectly and reacts to the condition of the world.
https://twitter.com/shinobi602/status/1497972998753636361
A spoiler for the end of a cauldron. But stuff like this is present through-out the entire game and just as unexpected.
Seriously, the voice work is some of the best in the business. The performances and directions are fantastic. Each player brings such life and nuance to their characters and feels like actual people who are the result of the society they grew up in instead of one defining personality stretched to its breaking point. Special props go to the lead, Ashley Burch, who has such amazing range. I won’t spoil anything but she runs the gamut of emotions and delivery in this game.
The game world is one of the best and most realized worlds in an open world game. Each major settlement feels lived in. The NPCs going about their business or doing work, all beautifully animated. It captures a new civilization building upon the bones of the old perfectly. The major settlements you visit are wholly unique to their culture and they’re built out of the ruins of the wold in really fun and creative ways. Inbetween you’re running through nature reclaiming civilization with the story of the final days all around you. The area is where the final stand of humanity against the machine swarm that destroyed everything happened, so you can see that battlefield and it perfectly paints the last, desperate effort against an unstoppable force. The color palette they use to sell this fantastic world has higher than normal color saturation, this world is different than ours. It gives nature a warm hue to everything that makes it all inviting despite the dangers within it. I’d compare it to the likes of Fury Road with how saturated the color is.
The new world cultures are better introduced and explained. The game is a whole lot better connecting the old world with the new. In the first game you really don’t learn the roots of the different clans in the game. You get highlights of them. You experience both the bad and good aspects of it but you never really experience their history so there was a disconnect. The old world mystery ended up being more interesting than the new world politics. Here, you’re given a real good reason to care about the Tenakth. Their entire pantheon is on display and you’re shown how they interpret these old world images and incorporating them into their way of life. But it’s also a messy society, as one often is, that has a great many faults. I can’t speak to appropriation, it’s not my place and I’m not knowledgeable enough to point things out. I don’t think anything here is as uncomfortable as the Banuk got and maybe Guerrilla thought so too because everything about them is wholly absent from the game except one character.
I’d be remiss not to talk about the side content. Almost all of it is as produced and well written as the main story missions. Most of them fill out the world in interesting ways while others are isolated mini stories that are often heart-felt, sometimes melancholy. Some of the finest acting in the game are from a few of these easy-to-miss side missions. A few of them even change the state of the world, which was unexpected.
Finally, the overarching story in this game was quite good. Almost all the story missions were new revelations about the world and expanded the worldbuilding to new and interesting places. I feel the ending itself was a bit rushed and didn’t satisfactory denouement for a certain character but the twist, while kind out of left field, was really rad and kind of changes everything. The villains of the story weren’t as strong or developed as they could have been but they worked as a broad representation of an idea than the villain in the first game was. They were tied to the old world better too and reinforced the environmentalist and anti-capitalist themes of the game a whole lot more too.
Story-wise, I was onboard for all of it. The raging atheist shit is such a weird take that I have to wonder if I played the same game. Aloy is empathetic to everyone except people in authority who wield their faith as a hammer to belittle others or to put them in danger. The only time she outright has an outburst is in the beginning in which she immediately apologized for. She has a savior complex and is a flawed person overall but that's where her growth comes in. The only person shes really short with is Beta and their relationship is Aloy coming to understand and better empathize with her.
The Zeniths were a good boogeyman and got enough of them that they were fine. They're the walking corpses of capitalism who, with infinite time and resources, still never bothered to create anything good or lasting - they were incapable of thinking of anything other than themselves. Instead they put up their bubbles and stewed in them until they destroyed their planet. Now, once again, humanity will have to deal with the consequences of the capitalists putting themselves ahead of everyone else. It only highlighted the success of Zero Dawn.
The only real complaints I have is that Regalla was super underdeveloped and never felt like a threat. If I were to change anything I'd make her more part of the story and get in some wins against the group here and there instead of just being someone to fight again. Also Tilda never really received denouement at the end. It felt kinda rushed considering everything leading up to then.
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