Horizon: Zero Dawn is an open-world action-adventure game with RPG elements, set in a post-apocalyptic future after a cataclysmic event wipes out virtually all life on the planet, leaving humanity to start over as basically prehistoric civilizations while beastly machines roam the earth. You play as Aloy, an outcast orphan from a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe, who, while performing a Rite of Passage to join the tribe, gets attacked by a group of assassins who believe her to have a genetic link to one of the ancient ones who built the sealed metal vaults embedded in the mountains. The rest of the game sees Aloy exploring the world beyond her tribe's Sacred Lands, doing battle with fearsome machines, completing quests and favors for various people, gaining experience to improve her fighting and survival prowess, and collecting natural resources and machine parts to craft upgrades to her equipment or to trade with merchants, all while tracking down the assassins who tried to kill her, uncovering the mystery of what happened to humanity 1000 years ago, discovering her own identity and why she was orphaned at birth, and ultimately saving the world from another apocalypse.
There's a lot to enjoy in a game like this, with such a compellingly beautiful world full of interesting lore and backstory and a bunch of tactically exciting combat encounters against uniquely-designed robot dinosaurs, but there's also a lot holding it back and preventing it from reaching its full potential. The RPG elements and melee combat system feel underdeveloped and therefore a little underwhelming, for instance, but the bulk of the issues deal with its open-world design, where it feels like the developers relied a little too much on genre tropes when creating this world, while not putting a whole lot of interesting or worthwhile things to do in it. Admittedly, Guerrilla Games executed a lot more restraint with their open-world than some other developers, and the game is better for it, but I still had this lingering feeling throughout my whole playthrough like it wasn't quite as good as it could've been.
