In Horizon: Zero Dawn, you hunt robot dinosaur… Ah, I see there’s a suddenly a large person-shaped hole in your wall. Well, anyway, as you’re sprinting to GameStop, rest assured, you won’t be disappointed.
Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4 exclusive)
Artistic Achievement
Guerrilla Games, best known for Killzone, delivers a lushly beautiful game here. You can creep among robots in the golden hour, spear at the ready, sneak up on bandits in the middle of a snowstorm, or set up photo mode and just gawp around like the yokel this game will likely reduce you to. While the robots have been lovingly engineered, so has everything else; you’ll wander in lush forest and mesa straight from a postcard. The sound design is well-done too, and good thing, since the game uses cues like lens flares and the hiss of servos to alert you to a robot behind you.
There is a problem in that the setting, which is far more elaborate and thought-out than the game’s marketing has hinted at, is a lot more interesting than the story told in it. There’s a lot of well considered societies here with social mores, religious beliefs, and political concerns that frankly don’t mesh well with Aloy’s rather conventional hero’s journey. And while the score appropriately sets the mood, it’s not breaking any ground and the overuse of strings feels a bit out of place in a post-apocalyptic landscape full of hippies, future Romans, and robots. Why am I hearing weepy violins when you could be using synths and pounding drums?
Innovation
This game will likely draw comparisons to survival games like Rust and Ubisoft’s caveman FPS Far Cry Primal, and in truth it’s got a lot of similarities to them, although more the latter than the former. Foraging and careful hunting will be crucial to your survival, particularly early on, but this isn’t really anything we haven’t played before, albeit with a lovely polish to it.
Execution
What makes Horizon: Zero Dawn stand out, though, is the aforementioned setting. The mechanics are highly polished and a lot of fun; it’s rewarding to see a swarm of bots, duck into some tall grass, and pick them off one by one. There’s also a lot of gameplay variety; you can sneak past robots and platform your way to the top of a walking platform called a “tallneck” to reveal the map, in a nice twist on the Assassin’s Creed method. You can wipe out bandit camps one headshot at a time. You can explore tough dungeons called Cauldrons to learn how to recruit the robots and use them to wipe out tougher foes.
But it’s the setting that drives the game. As I mentioned, there’s much, much, much more to it than the ads or the trailers have implied. And while the game does get a little cutesy in places (we could do without the metal-themed names like Rost), the story is told through the eyes of what amounts to a Candide of sorts: Our heroine Aloy is from a band of isolationist humans who jealously protect their borders, thanks in part, it turns out, to a mad king in a neighboring area who was violently deposed. As a result, she becomes an ambassador introducing us to the different post-apocalyptic tribes of humans, and, of course, uncovers just why humanity got thrown back to the Bronze Age.
That said, while Aloy has her smartass moments, and it’s fun to dig through the game’s extraneous but fun dialogue trees, she’s a bit of a blank, and the story itself is fairly easy to stay a few steps ahead of. There’s a giant pile of lore and fascinating pieces to this game that almost make it feel like a pen-and-paper RPG that was translated to a game.
Staying Power
Set aside a few weekends: Our first playthrough took about thirty hours, and I’m still cleaning up bits and pieces.
DLC And Microtransactions
So far, aside from some in-game pants and weapons, there’s no DLC on the horizon, and any “microtransactions” are pretty easily ignored. Honestly, buying resources would spoil the fun.
Final Thoughts
Horizon: Zero Dawn is an ideal open-world stealth game; fun without being easy, varied without feeling unfocused, challenging without feeling forced. Whether you just want to hunt robot creatures, or whether you get sucked into the setting, this has been the easiest game to recommend in a long time.
Verdict: Clear Your Calendar
This review was conducted with early game code