Horizon: Zero Dawn is an open-world game where you fight giant robot dinosaurs and giant mammal robots in the post-apocalyptic Midwest. You play as Aloy, a red-headed young woman who was outcast at birth from her tribe, the Nora, for an initially unspecified reason.
I thought that the “It was Earth all along!” thing would be a twist, but the game literally puts it in one of the loading screen hints, and the very start of the game has you walking through a ruined facility to get your Focus – a device which serves as an excuse for giving you an in-game HUD, as well as allowing you to scan and analyze the robots.
This is quite the contrast to your weaponry – you carry around a bow and arrow, along with some other “primitive” equipment, but it is much more advanced than it seems – your bow is a compound bow, and you quickly start getting strange weapons like a sling that fires explosive and elemental rounds, a crossbow that launches explosive tripline traps, and a rope gun that can tie enemies to the ground.
This sort of weird mixture of retro and futuristic runs throughout the game – you fight giant “animal” robots, while using weapons that you craft ammunition for using stuff you drag out of the corpses of the robots after you kill them.
The core promise of the game – fighting against these cool giant robots – works quite well. There’s a reasonable variety of enemies (though a few types – like the various grazer robots – do end up being a bit samey), and each has their own strengths, weaknesses, and attack patterns. There are buffalo that charge around and leave fiery trails, birds that shoot frost attacks at you, giant robots with multiple laser cannons attached to them… it’s a nice bit of variety, both in terms of the size of the robots and in how easy they are to defeat.
Indeed, the game has some nice scaling at first – you start out fighting robots that are about your size, and then encounter your first mid-sized robot, which is a scary challenge. By the end of the game, you are dispatching those mid-sized robots easily and fighting gigantic robots that are more dangerous – well, at least in theory.
In practice, sadly, like many open world games, this game’s scaling is messed up. And part of this is because the game runs out of new robots to throw at you. By the time you reach Meridian – the major city center of the game – you are less than halfway through the game’s playtime, but you will have likely encountered all but one type of enemy robot. This makes the second half of the game a bit of a letdown, as the game ends up running out of new challenges, and fighting the robots you’ve faced already becomes increasingly rote. The shiny new game smell wears off, and it ends up becoming a series of challenges that are just pretty trivial to overcome, except for the DLC area (which is included in the main game now) and the second to final major battle in the game.
The game tries to make up for this in another way – the story of what happened to the world before, how it is that everything is in ruins, why it is that Aloy was cast out at birth, and why there are giant robotic dinosaurs wandering around is all very intriguing, and as you progress through the game, you come to unravel this mystery, seeing the story of the old world come together and just how Aloy’s unusual birth ties into these ancient mysteries.
Indeed, this is where the game shines the most – the facilities look really neat (particularly some of the more active ones, like the Cauldrons, where robots are still being made), and the various audio logs and holographic images are very well done.
Unfortunately, the game has some issues elsewhere with the story; in particular, the normal dialogue scenes often feel a bit stilted, with a lot of the voice actors seeming a bit flat. While the situation is certainly a bummer a great deal of the time, it still ends up being rather stilted at times in delivery.
Still, these shortcomings can be overlooked, and they weren’t a dealbreaker for me.
That being said, this game does have one major flaw: it is far too long.
Open world games often have this problem, and Horizon: Zero Dawn is no exception. There is way more content than there is INTERESTING content, and while there’s tons of space to explore, and a big world to look at, a lot of it honestly ends up being a bit old hat. It is the main quest that is the biggest strength of the game, the mystery of the old world, with the present-day people (with the exception of a handful of characters) being much less interesting than the mysteries of the old world. And given that almost all of the side quests involve the present, not the past, it ends up exacerbating the common issue of sidequests feeling worse than the main plot.
This is combined with the fact that the game ends up running out of new robots to throw at you, and the game as a whole ends up feeling like it is too long for its own good. It really doesn’t feel like it makes good use of its nature as an open world environment at all – while you go around exploring, that’s the worst part of the game, far weaker than the more scripted story sequences where you’re doing interesting things and fighting setpiece battles. As a result, it feels like the rest of the game is basically filler around the main quest, and that the game would have been better if they’d focused more on just making a strong linear story, rather than an open world that isn’t the best. Yes, there’s a few neat things – like vantage points that let you look back into the past, at how things used to be – but it’s just not worth the amount of exploration that is involved.
Overall, I’d say this is a good game, but it is very much a game with a case of open world-itis, where the game would have been better if it had been more linear. The crafting isn’t really something that adds a lot to it, and after a while, you just accumulate resources at a faster rate than you use them, making the whole “hunting” aspect moot.
On the whole, I’d say it’s worth playing, but with the caveat that it is longer than it should be and that the best content is the main plot plus the Frozen Wilds DLC, with a lot of the side content and especially the open world exploration not being as good.
3.0