Played from 4/29/17 – 1/10/18

Quite enjoyed with some minor caveats. My enjoyment did lessen a bit the further I got into the game as the novelty wore off and some of the open world slog set in. Still looking forward to where franchise goes from here.

I ended up playing this twice and getting 100% after about 100 hours. I absolutely adore this game. The world they’ve built is compelling and fascinating. As well as beautiful in every corner. More than a few times I just kind of wandered through the world or just went at walking pace to the next objective so I could enjoy the amazing scenery. The combat is slick as hell with a very deep system. The story is memorable but not the main draw, however the main character (Aloy) is fantastic and I truly cared about her journey. There’s a tonne of content in the game and it never felt repetitive.
But more importantly…goddamn robot dinosaurs.

Narrative: The story in Zero Dawn is very cliched. It’s about a girl who was outcast at birth along with her father and is on a journey to discover who her mother is. That’s it. It’s flat, and if we’re being honest, so is the character’s drive and motivation. Even after the event of you starting off as a child, you help some guy in need (that apparently doesn’t age), and like ten years later through some Mulan-esque type training, you become the baddest of the bad and begin your journey on discovering who your mother is. Now I know when I say it like that it sounds uninteresting but believe me when I say it is. But then it gets interesting… The more I played Zero Dawn, and the more the story unraveled to me, it’s revealed to the player that the story is actually not about Aloy’s personal journey, it’s about the world you live in and its history. Horizon: Zero Dawn’s story doesn’t revolve around the main character. It revolves around the people that came before you, and put civilization in the predicament it is currently in. I almost dropped the game because of it’s boring intro and uninteresting story but because I’m the type to finish what I start I stuck with it. And while I think the pacing is a little on the slower side, it was still a fresh perspective on storytelling that can be appreciated by anyone.

Eyecandy: I would say one of the best things about Horizon would be its very own universe. It’s a varied and diversified country that one would expect from any decent RPG containing jungles, deserts, tundras, all those great types of regions. The world is vast and well populated, too. Well, most of the map is desert and snow (or at least where you spend majority of your time) but more or less the feeling of adventure is achieved. Now that isn’t to say that the world feels alive. While Guerilla Games did a great job with bringing the cities and towns to life with villagers all doing their day jobs, kids running around, listening to the local gossip, every province has its own people and in that aspect is varied just enough to keep letting you know that other people live in this world and in the end everyone is just trying to survive. The art is great, the models and textures are great, I didn’t experience any problems with texture loading, or half-assed sections of the world, but at the same time I can’t say that it’s too memorable. The only thing that’s engrained in my brain is the face of Aloy as I probably spent almost a couple hours just looking at her face during dialogue. And I don’t mean that in a way like, “oh she’s some hot redhead and I can’t stop looking at her” I mean that during dialogue sequences the camera is quite rudely staring her dead in the face while you try and figure out what emotion she’s trying to convey because the facial animations and cinematography are mediocre at best. It’s very similar to how Mass Effect does theirs. Except the dialogue options you choose bear no consequences. They’re there for no reason.

SoundDesign: This is going to be the shortest part of this review because there’s barely anything to say. Zero dawn scores almost a zero in this category. Explosions didn’t sound big and deep, the ambience sounded like a single exported track rather than an amalgamation of the environments sounds acting as one, and the soundtrack was forgettable. Some people would say, “well since you didn’t notice it, that means they did their job right!” I say that when you don’t notice something you’re paying attention to, that means it sucks. There’s over 80 different tracks on the OST and not one of them earned any type of award as far as I’m aware. Now I’m sure GG’s sound studio worked very hard. Well, they could’ve worked harder. Especially on the mediocre voice acting. The cast was horrible in this game and they need a new director. There was probably two characters at most that gave a good performance. The rest? Forgettable.

Gameplay: Finally (*rubs hands like Birdman*). Let’s talk about the most important aspect of any game. Let’s talk about what makes a game, a game. Let’s talk about the broken stealth gameplay, the forced grinding, the menial melee combat, the crappy parkour system, the- ok obviously I had a lot of problems with this game so let me explain. Horizon is definitely not what everyone made it to be. I think majority of people forgive certain aspects of art for an “overall feelling” if that makes sense. Well I don’t. I see video games for what they are so let’s talk about this games mediocre ass gameplay. First, the stealth system. This game was obviously made with stealth being one of the main aspects (even though the skilltree adheres to different gameplay types making you think you can play how you want). I call this the “Dishonored effect”. The game makes you think you can play how you want having all types of mechanics in it when in reality it rewards players for playing how the game wants you to play. I hope that makes sense. I’m an offensive type player. Yes, I will do stealth, but more often than not I just wanna go in and beat everything up and then leave. Wham. Bam. See you later. That’s not the case here. If you don’t play stealth you won’t level up as fast, and you have to grind even harder than you were before and the GRINDING in this game, oh my lord the grinding, is too real. If you like it, cool, nothing wrong with that. I’m not a grinder type, when I saw how this game was to be played, I put it on easy (judge me, I don’t care). I just wanted the story and didn’t care much to explore the world. BUT! And I say, but. This game will FORCE you to grind whether you like it or not. Here I am, playing on easy, level 10, and this game pits me against two level 18 machines with multiple lower scaled enemies. It was unfair, and it was frustrating. I go through all my items, ammo, everything. I was pissed. Here I am, “playing how I want” and this game legitimately said, “Nah bruh you still gotta play how we want you to.” So I left the area (putting the campaign on hold) and grinded the hell out the game. Which even then became a mistake because then I became way overstocked on items and loot (which the loot in the game ain’t nothin) which isn’t balanced and ended up having all the best items about halfway through the game. For the sake of redundancy it was an unorganized mess. I will say that you do have to live off the land in this game and Horizon achieves that feel. Constantly foraging, hunting, crafting, it really does feel like you’re living off the land. Now if we could get more wildlife than the same four animals (foxes in the desert?) throughout all regions it would add so much more to the game, but I digress. What else is good about the gameplay? The climbing system was super fluid. Way better than Assassin’s Creed or Uncharted. It was just too bad that there wasn’t a lot of it.

Conclusion: Horizon: Zero Dawn is not a 10/10, it’s not a 5/5, it’s a mess. It’s an average game, with unbalanced mechanics. It has redeeming qualities. Every city, or town, felt teeming with life. The survivalist-type game had me feeling like I was using the world’s resources to my advantage. The story revealed itself to be bigger than the main character and the world that she lives in, and it really is truly unique. But all of that does not take away from the wonky camera, the unbalanced grind, the mediocre score and voice acting, the hit or miss parkour system, there’s just too many details left skipped or overlooked, and in the end, it showed. Horizon is a game that I’d recommend to certain types of gamers. It’s not a game to recommend to the masses, or your “average gamer”, at least in my eyes. Horizon is a game that can take up a lot of your hours as it’s chock full of side quests and fetch quests. But in the end, it’s a game I would play if I had nothing else to play. For me, that’s the category it falls in. Guerilla Games needs to stick to the FPS genre.

it’s been awhile since i play a game and really enjoyed it to this level, even after finishing the game i’m still playing it from time to time.
love the fighting style & and the robots dinosaurs