Horizon: Zero Dawn - Review
Originally published November 2017Horizon: Zero Dawn is a Zelda game for the PS4. If you're aware of Horizon, you're probably aware of how similar to Zelda it is. Since the newest Zelda game that has proven to be the most innovative (for the series) in years was released only a few weeks after Horizon, Horizon was mostly buried by its inspiration; the rest of the world seemed to forget it came out this year, until only recently when the DLC was launched. I hadn't forgotten and was looking forward to a Zelda experience that wasn't just another retelling of Nintendo's classic franchise. Having finally finished the main story of the game, I feel very similar to how I feel towards most Zelda games. Horizon is a game that I like and respect, but it still has some significant criticisms.
I'll be upfront. Horizon: Zero Dawn is a very good game. Had The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild not come out this year, or been anything less than brilliant in the eyes of the public, it may have been the shining example of that type of game for 2017. I have certainly enjoyed my time with it. However, after completing the story and exploring as much as I can stand of the world, I'm a bit burned out.
Image: Sony
The Short of It
What I've Played
Over 30 hours
Completion of the main storyline
Collected all the collectibles
Maximum character level (pre-DLC)
Numerous side-quests are still incomplete
Pros
Aloy and Sylens are solid characters with enough complexity and depth to carry the story
The world-building with the various cultures, weapons, outfits, and environments is fantastic
Graphically brilliant
Great sound effects
Smart decisions made around the gameplay to streamline the experience
Subtle music cues work to the strengths of the game
Satisfying combat and movement with significant strengths in Aloy's mobility and accuracy with weapons
A satisfying climax
Cons
Dialogue interactions can be buggy, goofy, or just weird; uncanny valley ruins interactions
Characters still succumb to archetypal or predictable behavior
Twists in the story are very telegraphed and not surprising to anyone except the protagonist
A lot to do without much reward
Lengthy segments of exposition and tiresome storytelling
Some moments that required platforming were unclear, causing frustration
Lots of areas in the geometry of the world that could snag Aloy and get her stuck
Too much item management
The Rest of It
Story
Horizon: Zero Dawn takes place in the far future. Our civilizations were wiped out in a catastrophic event and now mankind has reverted back to tribal societies. Nature has retaken the planet and created a beautiful, harsh paradise. Amidst this post-apocalyptic Eden are giant machine creatures that behave like animals and are the dominant species on the planet. You play as Aloy, a young girl who is born into a reclusive society that immediately discards her as an outcast. Aloy grows up under the tutelage of a man named Rost, another outcast who fulfills his role as the "mentor" in all the ways you expect. Aloy proves to be a strong and steadfast individual, determined to find out more about the world and herself. After some tutorials, a montage, and some big events, Aloy is thrust out into the vast world of Horizon to find out more about her own origins and the origins of this wild world.
Image: Sony
The world of Horizon is definitely one of the biggest highlights. The cultures and societies of the different people inhabiting it, the backstory of how the world became like it was, the intricacy of the robot creature designs, the outfits, and character designs are all amazingly effective at crafting a cohesive and enthralling world. The amount of effort the developers put into just the cultural differences of the various tribes, their beliefs, and how they look in the world is incredible. The level of detail put into Horizon is almost too much to bear. As you explore Horizon, you can scan various objects and discover more details about the world and its past in data logs that are stored in your journal. Much like how games like Deus Ex could overload you with emails that provide an excessive amount of interesting backstories, Horizon fills up your journal with these logs. They're interesting, but there are a lot of them—so many that I was skimming through most of them by the end.
There's a lot to take in and not all of it is even remotely interesting. If I were to have creative control over how many text and audio logs there were, I would probably cut down the total by a good 30%. Some of the text logs barely serve a purpose other than to make other logs more important, like a person's morning schedule as a receptionist. That particular example indeed holds clues to the big revelations exposed later (about 5 minutes later), but that subtle method of story-telling is rendered irrelevant by the lengthy expository sections that occur later. I may be wrong, but I think that the storytelling methods of Horizon can, at times, conflict with each other. If Horizon was never going to tell us what happened to the various civilizations of humanity, then small text journal entries about a receptionist's schedule would be the better method, because we'd be looking for those clues as to what happened, sprinkled among the insignificant details. So, when I was finding other entries like that one in the early sections of the game, I was fine with it.
Image: Sony
When you get deeper into the main story, the purpose of the subtle hints at the past becomes less interesting or useful. This is because there are late-game missions that dump exposition on you about everything. It dumps so much information over the course of a couple of hours in these various missions, I'm still not 100% sure what really happened or what I needed to do to succeed because I lost track of everything it told me. In these late-game missions, you are still finding the now-irrelevant fluff journal entries among the more important audio and video ones that spell things out. There were several missions that gave the end-game warning of "there's no turning back after this" simply because of how long it would take to complete them with all their exposition. I would have preferred not to know as much as I do about their world's origins just because of how dense those segments were. They were tiring and I got bored listening to the endless audio files explaining everything because I had to sit still in a room and listen to it or risk having Aloy find something and start talking over it like the robot she is and miss important details. I can't fault them too much for the decision, since the expository sections tie directly to Aloy's personal story in a convincing but unnecessarily big way. It would have been difficult to tell the story they wanted to tell in another way. It might have been more successful had they spread out Aloy's story over the course of multiple games, but again, Zelda was on the horizon... pun intended.
All criticisms of the main story aside, I still think Horizon was mostly successful with what it set out to do. The main reason that I'm willing to give it a passing grade is because of the character development of Aloy and Sylens. I won't get into the details about Sylens since he's a character that has his own revelations, but I will say that one of the reasons I like him is because he's driven by motivations that are clear and uncompromising. Even some of the dialogue that Aloy has with him has her paint him in one color and he flagrantly disagrees with it. There are a lot of things about him that are on both sides of the moral spectrum, making him the most interesting character in the room.
As for Aloy, she's probably one of the better video game protagonists in recent memory. She's snarky and determined without being too much like a Joss Whedon character. She stays consistently clever and appropriately ill-tempered when people are pissing her off. Even in the moments where you're given a choice on what you want Aloy to say in a dialogue, each response seems appropriate to her character. If I were to compare her to another strong video game protagonist, I'd say she's a John Marston equivalent from Red Dead Redemption, a game with a story that was also held up mostly by its main character. She has her moments, however, where the fact that she's supposed to be 19 rears its head and she acts like a petulant child. These clash with the moments when she seems far older and more mature than she should be. The same sort of age dysmorphia can be said for some other characters that look or behave in a way that contrasts with how old they look, but they don't all get the same amount of characterization as Aloy.
Image: Sony
The side characters can very much mimic the experience one has to do the side missions in the game: some good, some lame. There are some quests that are deep and rewarding, or at least a little interesting. There are also some that tie into other side quests or the main quest, which add to the overall experience. In some ways, I'm glad I did as many side quests as I did by the end, because some characters show up again later as a result, or certain weapons and unique rewards proved to be helpful. But there are also a lot of other side quests and side characters that add next to nothing to the experience. It was similar to the hierarchy of quests in Skyrim, where there were bigger side quests, and then there were errands. Oh, wait, they're actually called "errands" in Horizon, so I guess I should have known what I was getting. The point is, Horizon gives you a lot of stuff to do and not all of it is worth your time. In fact, some of it is responsible for why I eventually got tired of it.
Gameplay
After I finished the tutorial section and had the entire map of Horizon available to me, I barely touched any of the main quests for the next 20+ hours. Instead, I got hooked on playing with the mechanics of the world, exploring the vast landscape, and hunting robot dinosaurs to collect all their body parts and craft new ammo for my variety of weapons. The movement of Aloy and shooting her bow were extremely natural and satisfying. There was clearly an aim-assist mechanic in play, which I normally turn off because it can throw me off and be distracting, but this was subtle; you were basically a little more accurate with your shots by default. If Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption series has you playing as a character using a bow and arrow, this would be a good game for inspiration.
Image: Sony
Aloy has a rather extensive arsenal of skills available that work to different styles of gameplay. Some skills are geared toward making Alloy more lethal while she's on the move, while others are more around basic inventory management. She has abilities that slow down time, allowing her to more easily aim while riding an animal or jumping through the air. She also has abilities to make her more lethal in stealth situations, such as a stealth critical attack and a whistle to call an enemy over. Stealth in this game, is not quite as nuanced as it is in HITMAN. Alloy simply has to crouch in some tall grass—which isn't very tall— and she's almost 100% hidden from enemy sight, allowing you to get that critical hit every time. It doesn't matter if the patch of grass is smaller than she is, if she's in the grass, the enemies will have trouble spotting her. It makes a lot of the early game way easier: just play it like a trapdoor spider and just pop out of the grass with a critical blow before retreating back into the grass, over and over. By the end, this technique wasn't quite as useful, but like all the skills in her repertoire, each comes in handy in its own way.
When it comes to weapons, Aloy's primary weapons are a bow and spear, but she also gets a tripwire gun, a mine-throwing slingshot, and some weapons that can shoot wires out to trap enemies, to name a few. All of the weapons have their own ammo types that can vary in their uses. You don't have to go looking for specific ammo, thankfully. Instead, you craft most of the ammo from pieces of the robotic creatures, giving you incentives to keep hunting them. Occasionally, when you kill one of these robots, it drops an item of varying colors to help identify its rarity. As I mentioned in my Visceral Games post-mortem and Injustice 2 review, it's the year of loot! The loot is, thankfully, not quite as exhaustive or ruining as it has been for other games. It actually serves as a reason to explore and hunt for a while, but it still eventually causes its own problems.
Image: Sony
Soon enough, the loot was not enough to keep me interested. As I already mentioned, I was pretty spent on Horizon by the time I finished it, partially because of the story beats wore me down, and partially because I didn't have the motivation to keep playing once the rewards for completing quests and killing robots were no longer significant. Despite there being items of varying rarity, there aren't that many weapons in the game or enough quests to make you want to find others. Most weapons and outfits Aloy can use are easily accessible through merchants. There is some special armor you can get through completing the main quest, but it's actually too good; it makes it so there's no reason to wear anything else afterward. I only experienced one quest that gave me some unique weapons as a reward and they were barely any different from something I could buy in a store. In most other open-world games with quests like this, you expect a lengthy encyclopedia of weapons to suit your styles and some legendary ones peppered in there to float above the rest. Most of the weapons that I used till the end of the game, I bought from a merchant only a few hours in.
The only other thing that could have added to the rarity of the weapons and costumes were little upgrades you could find on the robot corpses or scattered around the world in chests. These accessories could be attached to your weapons and armor to heavily amplify their stats. However, they could only do so much, and attaching them didn't do anything in terms of cosmetics. Once you found enough of a particular type of accessory that suited the weapon or the outfit, there was not much of a reason to keep looking for more, you would just have to rely on the enjoyment of hunting robots.
When it comes down to it, if you want to know whether you will enjoy Horizon, you simply have to do a little robot hunting. Robots are all over the world and hunting them is the main way to pass the time, whether it be for the purposes of a side quest or just to gather more material to craft your ammunition. The different robots all have their various strengths and weaknesses. Scanning them highlights these various weak points, allowing you to target them accordingly. Some robots have weak points that are specifically susceptible to elemental damage, like fire and ice. These pressure points, when struck with enough of the appropriate arrows, may explode in extravagant fashion, causing even more damage to the robot and the other bots around it. Once you've made your kill, you can inspect the "animal's" corpse and pillage it for parts that are used to make more ammo for your weapons. It's a simple and effective cyclical method of keeping the player engaged in the hunting mechanics, there's just one problem.
Image: Sony
Inventory management becomes a real issue before you know it. There are some easy methods of increasing your inventory space for ammo and for materials by doing small side-quests that involve hunting real animals, but by the end of the game, my inventory was always >90% full of material that I used to craft ammo. Since you have to craft ammo, sometimes in the middle of battle, I kept my bag full of materials to ensure I never ran out. This, however, was a constant annoyance when I had just finished one of the game's lengthier combat scenarios and wanted to collect the occasional rare item of value. At some point, I stopped looting bodies for anything other than the ammo parts because I didn't want to spend time to make room for more crap I didn't really need. As I have mentioned in other game reviews, if you're going to make loot such an instrumental part of the game, why do you have caps on the amount you can have at a time? It just forces me to spend more time micromanaging all of it to make sure I'm not missing anything useful and spend less time playing the actual game, until I get fed up and don't care about the loot anymore.
Essentially, while the opening sections of Horizon are satisfying and fun, as you learn the ropes and mechanics while exploring the vast and rich world, the end game is less rewarding. There's a new DLC expansion out at the time of this review that adds more skills and weapons to the list of rewards and for good reason. One of the main justifications for why I decided to plow through the main story was that I realized that I was running out of reasons to keep playing the game.
Image: Sony
Presentation
Before we get to the parts of the presentation of Horizon that I don't like, let's talk about how great this game looks overall. The environments are certainly stunning on their own, but I always get caught up looking at the outfits of different characters. I also tend to focus on the details of the various machine animals that prowl the landscape. Even the weapons of the people and of Aloy have a story to tell with their designs and features.
Image: Sony
The different tribes of people have their own common characteristics that are interesting to look over. Aloy's tribe is the more traditional in terms of looking like a basic tribe of people with face paint and animal skin clothing, but a lot of their clothes are still tied together with the colorful tubing of a robot's insides. The wealthy Carja tribe is more ornate and flamboyant with big medallions and headdresses made with the "bones" of robots and topped with colorful feathers. There are even some tribal people who have the robotic tubing woven through their own skin. It's weird and it grabs your attention.
As for the robots, it reminds me of the Michael Bay Transformers, but in a good way. They're all very busy looking with the various pieces and parts that make up each robot animal, but they're also brightly colored so it's easier to see the intricacies. The robots are really the stars of the show when it comes to the look of Horizon. A lot of great sound effects are emitted by these things as they prowl the area and attack. If you want to hear some unique and interesting sounds, just turn up your speakers as you get into combat with these things. The way many of them move is also extremely convincing. A lot of it seems natural for an animal and appropriate for the creature design, to the point that even certain robots will take a tumble after missing an attack. Even when you hit them in a sweet spot with a weapon, the way they animate as they fall or react is very convincing. All of these little details about the robots make it easier to get pulled into the world.
Image: Sony
Unfortunately, there are significant parts of the presentation that cause some issues with the experience. I don't like to be a person who gets hung up on how a game looks or sounds; I think presentation is somewhat minor in comparison to things like gameplay and story. However, there are certain aspects of the presentation that negatively impacted my experience with Horizon, namely the characters themselves. For as cool as the clothing is and as rich as the culture seems to be, emanating from the characters themselves, as soon as they start talking I am immediately uninterested and annoyed.
The voice-acting ranges from very good to, well, this:
And if you didn't notice in the video, the animations don't help. It didn't take long for me to see the algorithms running as the characters spoke. Certain gestures or weird little head shakes would keep occurring as people talked, and facial animations would rarely match up in a realistic fashion with how the voice actors were delivering their lines. For as good as the faces look in a still shot, as soon as they start moving, the uncanny valley takes hold and becomes a big distraction. It is somewhat ironic that the movement of the robot animals seems natural and acceptable, while the movement and facial expressions of the people seem robotic and stiff. Other than Aloy, who was still an uncanny valley girl at times, I couldn't care less about any of the characters and their problems because of how unnatural they all appeared. Had the camera pulled back more, away from all the unsightly details of a conversation, instead of zooming in to marvel at the facial motion capture technology, I might not have minded the stiff animations, but I still would have had to deal with some shoddy voice work.
Image: Sony
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Horizon: Zero Dawn starts off pretty strong in the beginning with some fun mechanics and all-too-familiar story beats. While exploring the world and learning new ways to hunt robot animals is its own reward that keeps the game fun and interesting for a time, the enjoyment can start to wear thin. Once the core mechanics aren't enough to keep you interested, all you're left with is a story that is only half interesting with characters that may have some depth but fail to express it in a way that seems remotely human. It's a gorgeous game with some obvious failings that manages to stay fun for a long time and is easily recommended for most players interested in a lengthy, open-world, single-player experience.
Do you agree or disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments!
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