Horizon: Zero Dawn Review

Sometimes a game will catch your attention with its’ marketing and hype before it is released, but afterwards you never get around to actually trying it until it’s been out for years and everyone else is already waiting for the sequel. Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of those games for me, and I genuinely regret not playing the game on day one. This game is an excellent adventure across a breathtakingly beautiful open world. You play as Aloy, a young huntress searching for answers to a mysterious past - both the past of the world she lives in, and her own. Throughout the game, I truly felt like a fearsome hunter, tracking and defeating the machines that rule the lands. Did I mention that the main enemies are giant robotic dinosaurs called machines? Because that’s honestly one of the coolest things about the game. When you square up against a mechanical T-Rex armed with enough firepower to level a village with just a spear and a bow in your hands, the triumphant feeling you get when you actually win is something very few other games can match.

I’ll begin by admitting I played the majority of this game on the lowest difficulty setting. I started on the default difficulty, and repeatedly lowered it throughout the earliest parts of the game. By the time I left the first main area, it was on Story difficulty. Whether that’s due to the game being particularly challenging in general or simply myself not being that great at the combat isn’t entirely clear, but the important thing is, the game was still fun. Even on the easiest difficulty, there was still plenty of challenge and I enjoyed myself for the entire rest of the playthrough. The combat was varied and engaging - sneaking around enemy camps, picking them off one by one with my bow like a silent sniper was immensely satisfying. For the times when stealth wasn’t an option (or the enemy had found me sneaking around), my favourite method of fighting the enemy head-on was by sprinting around swinging my spear around like a madman, cracking any skulls that happened to end up in my warpath. Playing like a berserker was as fun as it was absurd and silly, and that’s the important thing, isn’t it? Outside of the (sometimes) hectic combat however, a lot of the mission objectives felt very same-y; almost every mission was simply a random combination of “walk over here, talk to this NPC, fight for a bit, climb this wall, talk, fight, talk”, and it started getting a bit repetitive about halfway through the game. Some of the more RPG-style mechanics also felt a bit tacked-on; I imagine the game would’ve felt more fun without a lot of the tedious resource gathering. Sometimes I wondered if the developers had created the base story of the game before realising it needed gameplay too, so they threw in some somewhat unnecessary extra mechanics to “fill out” the game.

Whether you decide to play Aloy as a spear-swinging berserker terrorising the enemy forces in front of her, or as a hidden archer silently striking from the grass and sniping an entire bandit camp before they’ve realised their numbers are dwindling, Horizon: Zero Dawn’s combat mechanics are impressively easy to learn and memorise. All it took was one group of enemies at the start of the game, and I’d felt like I knew the game’s combat inside and out. With an array of skills to unlock throughout the game that improve stealth and melee combat, it’s very easy to customise your fighting style and play the game exactly how you want to. The controls are fluid and responsive; you can leap off your mount into the fray and switch from your spear to your bow in a quick series of inputs that feel great to use and quickly become almost like instinct. Some enemies are rather frustrating to fight though - especially the aerial enemies that fly far out of your spear’s range and love to duck and weave around your arrows while pelting you with projectiles that constantly knock you off your feet. You’ll be seeing a lot of them throughout the game, and it never feels like they get any easier to fight. In-between the fighting, I spent most of the game riding around on one of the various types of machines that you can “tame” and mount. As peaceful as riding these mounts can be (and I’ll admit I always became oddly attached to my mounts and enjoyed fixing them up after combat), they generally do what they want and it can get annoying trying to steer them to your objectives when they’d rather take the wrong road or jump on rocks instead of walking around them.

Horizon: Zero Dawn features one of the most gorgeous open-world environments I’ve ever explored in a video game. The forests, cliffs, snowy mountains and sprawling cities look stunning during the sunrise, and the eerie, frozen, abandoned old bunkers are suitably creepy to wander around in. On the other hand, these abandoned bunkers are extremely dark, which isn’t helpful when they’re usually full of puzzles and treacherous platforming. I’m all for environmental storytelling, and these bunkers would logically be too dark to see anything. But sometimes it gets in the way of good gameplay, so a few inexplicably-functioning lights would be appreciated. The machine creatures you battle throughout the game look incredibly detailed - you’d think that if robotic dinosaurs were real, this is how they’d look. The amount of thought put into the design of the machines, both for worldbuilding and gameplay, was obviously one of the most important details on the developers’ minds, and the end result is both very believable and highly immersive. The human NPCs, however, could’ve used a bit more work. They look perfectly fine, but their animations (particularly during dialogue interactions) are rather stiff, and their facial expressions fall right into the uncanny valley. With the oddly-twitchy eye movements, you’d think everyone in the game was constantly staring at the sun.

Like their realistic and painstakingly-detailed appearance, the machine’s sound effects are mostly well done and immersive. The Strider’s synthetic chirps and whirrs, for example, sound very much like how a robotic horse would, and the grating roar of the Thunderjaws are terrifyingly realistic. That said, I couldn’t help but feel like some sound effects during combat sounded a bit out-of-place; for example, getting run over by a charging Corruptor generally just knocks you to the ground, but the accompanying sickening CRUNCH sound makes it seem like it was supposed to tear Aloy into bloody pieces. There were several times that the SFX of taking damage made me think I was on the brink of death, when really it was but a flesh wound. If you can ignore the (rather distracting) facial animations, the human characters in the game have some excellent voice acting. Aloy herself, voiced by Ashley Burch, shows a huge range of emotions throughout the game by voice alone, a testament to Burch’s impressive range. Although, sometimes I felt Aloy was a bit too chatty - she’ll narrate almost every little event in the game aloud and it can get a bit annoying sometimes. Yes, after growing up totally isolated from other people, she’s probably used to not needing to keep her thoughts to herself. But come on Aloy, you really don’t need to make a different comment every single time it starts raining. Or it stops raining. Or nighttime starts. Or daytime starts...you get the idea.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of those unique games that keeps drawing me back to its’ world after I’ve already finished it. Partly because of the collectables and side quests that still remain to be found across the world, but the main reason is simply because I was having that much fun playing and exploring and just didn’t want to say goodbye. Wandering around the environment, riding my mount and taking in all the scenery is enough incentive to keep me coming back to this game. In addition to that, as I said before, there is a plethora of hidden collectables to find around the map. There aren’t enough to make the task of grabbing them all seem tedious, and for those that have difficulty scanning the area for the various items, you can acquire maps very early on that point out the general area that each collectable can be found. Some of the activities to do around the map are not only tremendously fun, but are actively encouraged as they provide extra abilities or reveal more areas of the sprawling world map.

Open-world games are often very hit-or-miss in the type and scale of content they offer. Too little content and the game is unsatisfyingly short. Too much, and it feels bloated and tedious. If the content is too repetitive, the game quickly gets boring. Horizon: Zero Dawn is a rare example of an open-world game that has achieved an excellent balance of interesting and varied content that keeps the player engaged and wanting to play all the way through the game, and then some more. I never felt particularly lost or bored, and the combat was consistently fun no matter how I approached it. Exploring the beautiful plains and forests alone was enough reason to continue playing after the end, and the extra side quests and collectables were a bonus. Most importantly, I was so invested in the world that the developers have built from the ground up that I wanted to see what was beyond the small part of it that I explored in this game. I may have only started playing this game years after it’s release, but I already know I’ll be remembering this game for a long time - and I’m beyond excited to explore the world beyond it in the sequel (especially since the human NPCs seem significantly better animated in it). 8/10.