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.
Story
The game begins with you playing Aloy as a child during a lengthy tutorial section in which your adopted father, Rost -- a fellow outcast -- takes you on your first hunt and teaches you the basics of harvesting resources from the wild to craft basic supplies, as well as how to sneak past and take down machines. During this sequence she falls through a hole in the ground and winds up inside an old pre-apocalypse bunker -- a remnant structure from the pre-historic "Metal World" as it's known to the local tribes -- and discovers a device called a "Focus," which allows her the unique ability to read old-world messages and interact with the various doors and mechanisms inside the bunker. Just as the Nora tribe shuns Aloy for being an outcast, so too do they shun the use and exploration of Metal World technologies, but since Aloy is not bound to the Nora traditions she develops an affinity for it and insists on using its perception-enhancing abilities to great effect. At one point she witnesses a group of other Nora children gathering berries and, wanting to belong, gathers a small harvest of berries herself. She presents them to the Nora mother who promptly rejects her offering and hurries off with the other children, leaving Aloy with heartbroken determination to figure out why she's been outcast and who her parents were. This prompts her life-long resolve to train in the ways of the Hunt so that she can participate in a Rite of Passage known as the Proving so that she can join the tribe as a hunter, when she'll be able to talk to the matriarchs who know more about who her mother was and why she was orphaned.
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The catalyst that sets the game in motion is therefore a personal quest of self-discovery -- even though she's attacked by assassins who seem to be involved in some kind of greater plot or conspiracy, the whole reason she follows through on tracking the assassins down and avenging the Nora is really because they have potential clues that might help Aloy discover her own identity. And that's what comprises the bulk of the main story -- Aloy simply following leads and trying to find information about who she really is. It's a pleasant change of pace for a game of this style to center the main plot around the protagonist's character rather than some sort of forced conflict with some sort of evil super villain you don't know or care about, or the main character being told from the outset that they have to save the world and that for some reason they're the only one who can. It turns out that both of those latter tropes come into play with this game, as you eventually discover that Helis, the leader of the assassin organization, Eclipse, had nefarious motives for trying to kill you, and as you can already guess there's a reason Aloy is special enough for him to want to kill you -- Helis is basically trying to seize tyrannical control over the world, and you're the only one who can stop him. On a surface level that's kind of a boring, cliche premise, but by the time we get to those revelations, the cliche premise feels earned because the game has taken the time to establish the main character's motivation, and the narrative progressively builds to the point that "becoming the destined hero to save the world" feels like a natural extension of the character's journey as opposed to simply being an awkwardly forced video game trope.
That being said, I wasn't fully on board with the story, for a few reasons. The first is that it felt really slow in the early stages and took a long time before it reached a point when it started to actually hook my interest. It takes the better part of an hour sitting through the title cutscene and childhood tutorial sequence before it gets to something resembling the start of the actual game, and then it takes a few more hours before it gets to the catalyst that actually sets the main plot in motion. From there it's several hours of following quest markers so that you can follow some lead to reach the next remote location to find some person or thing so that you can get one step closer to getting answers for why the Eclipse tried to kill you. It's not until halfway through the main missions that it starts getting into the backstory of how this world came to be and how events of the past relate to current events, when it starts setting up the main threat that I found myself finally caring about the main plot. That point came like 20 or 30 hours into my playthrough because I was also exploring and doing side-quests with each step in the main quest line, which is a long time to go in a video game before the story presents any kind of compelling hook. Obviously there was enough interesting things going on in the world to hold my interest for that long, but I persisted in spite of the main plot, which wasn't doing much for me until it started getting into deeper concepts beyond the basic revenge premise that it initially sets up. Maybe the main plot has better pacing if you were to ignore side-quests and exploration and just focus on the main missions, but that mid-point in the story would still take a dozen or so hours to reach doing that, and those peripheral bits of content are important for fleshing out the world and setting, so you would also miss out on other things by skipping the optional stuff.
My second issue is that I wasn't really sold on Aloy as a character. The whole point of her background is that she spent her entire life in complete isolation from society, with her only human interaction throughout her 19 years of existence being with her adopted father, Rost, plus a few odd interactions with one or two individual tribe folk who broke taboo to speak with her, and yet she grows up to be a perfectly well-adjusted and socially affluent person. She's had pretty much zero experience in her entire life meeting new people, interacting with strangers, talking in a group setting, or being in society, and yet she makes friends with new people easily, understands subtle social cues, psychology, humor, and group dynamics, makes witty retorts, and can be extremely empathetic to people she doesn't even know, which all seem like things you wouldn't necessarily learn growing up with a single parent as your only source of human interaction. Rost, in particular, doesn't seem like a socially affable person as seemingly all of his interactions with Aloy are rigidly pragmatic, so it seems like she would take after Rost and be more withdrawn and to-the-point around other people, and should be more awkward in unfamiliar social situations -- like in groups, or when someone is flirting with her. So by the time we get to see her as a grown adult she acts like a stereotypical quippy video game protagonist and actually seems more social and outgoing than the average person, when she should really be more of a fish out of water struggling at least a little bit to understand and cope with a society she's only ever seen from a distance but never actually been a part of.
Besides being more logically appropriate, it would also give her an opportunity to grow as a character by starting the game as a socially awkward fledgling who becomes more socially competent as the game progresses. Although she does grow mechanically through the leveling system that grants her new perks and abilities to become a more capable hunter, and she does gain newfound knowledge of the greater world outside the Nora's sacred lands, her character writing maintains a relatively flat trajectory over the entire game where she seems to act about the same from beginning to end. It's like she comes into adulthood at the beginning of the game already fully developed as a character when the Proving should realistically be the start of a whole new life for her and she should change more radically, not just compared to her previous life before the Proving, but also over the rest of her adventures. In essence, she starts the game as an already amiable, confident, assertive, effective badass when it would be far more engaging from a writing standpoint to show her struggling and having to overcome obstacles early on. It's understandable that she would be a highly proficient hunter by the time we take control of her as an adult, since she's been training for the Proving her whole life, and to be fair she does go through a lot of hardship growing up ostracized by society, but it's mostly stuff that we don't get to see or experience ourselves and none of that really pertains to the events of the main story from the Proving onward, which is where the main plot actually begins. It's extremely contrived, for instance, that a kid who threw a rock at Aloy when she was six year old grows up to be her main rival in the Proving, and that that kid is still holding a grudge against her after all these years, based on a single interaction they had as children. A lot of her preliminary growth as a character is actually glossed over in the form of an expository training montage where we get only the briefest glimpses of her struggling before it instantly cuts to her doing all these awesome badass moves that we don't get to experience for ourselves through actual gameplay at that point, because it's merely shown to us in a cutscene while interactions with other characters like Karst are merely implied off-screen.
Part of the problem might be that the game's open world design just doesn't allow for very dynamic character writing. A more linear game like The Last of Us is able to portray substantial character growth and development because the writers have complete control over the order in which events occur as well as the overall pace of the story -- the story and gameplay are interwoven and follow along the same trajectory, in other words -- but if you're free to go off and experience content in whatever order you desire, then you might run into inconsistencies with how Aloy is written by doing things out of the intended order, because the gameplay and story are more independent of one another. If Aloy's character development is tied to the main quest, for instance, and you chose to put it off in favor of completing a bunch of side-content and leveling up a bunch, then it would be jarring to return to the main quest later in the game and discover that Aloy is suddenly acting awkward and naive when she should have more worldly experience at that point by virtue of your other adventures. The solution, therefore, is to have her be the exact same character at all times so that she'll always act consistently no matter what order you've done things in, with major character moments being mostly self-contained within specific quests. It's fine and effective in the context of an open world game, but felt like a missed opportunity to do something deeper and more meaningful with the character.
That being said, she also has a couple odd moments of dialogue that completely threw me out of the game because I just could not follow along with the game's logic. There comes a point in the story where Aloy is befriended by a mysterious ally named Sylens, who communicates with her remotely over her Focus, and the two are trying to find a way to disable the Eclipses' focuses so that she can infiltrate their base undetected. Sylens is trying to tell her that he can't just deactivate their focuses, and tries to explain the concept of a "network" to her by describing it as a giant invisible web connecting every focus together. So she tells him to just cut down the web, and he goes "Oh, that might work." And it just seems really implausible to me that the character who didn't even know what a network was until about five seconds ago would realize that the solution to their problem is to simply disable the network, and that the tech-savvy hacker couldn't even conceive of that option until an ignorant layman suggested it. I get that she's supposed to be really smart for plot reasons, but did the other, far more knowledgeable and experienced character have to be so stupid in this situation to portray her supposed genius? Then later, at the end of the game when faced with a world-destroying cataclysmic event, a bunch of old acquaintances show up offering their assistance in taking down the final boss, and Aloy says "this is my fight, I can't ask you to come with me." Which would make sense if she were talking about fighting Helis to get personal vengeance on him for murdering her father, but not when she's talking about fighting a generic robot enemy so that they can stop a computer program that's about to destroy the entire world. Like, does she not understand that every single person on the planet will die if this thing isn't stopped? It isn't just some personal matter, these people have as much at stake as she does. And mind you, this line happens AFTER she specifically seeks aid from other people to help defend against the onslaught, so it's just a pure WTF moment that had me literally yelling at her through the screen. This isn't the only time I blatantly disagreed with Aloy's interpretation of things, mind you, but this was definitely the most notable example.
Now don't get me wrong -- I found her actual personality to be pretty likable and relatable, and generally speaking I enjoyed playing as her. It's nice to play a protagonist who's kind-hearted and well-intentioned enough to be willing to help people in need, but who's also capable of experiencing impatience and frustration with other people's ineptitude or dishonesty. In fact, she demonstrates a pretty wide range of emotions, which helps to flesh her out and make her reactions feel more real and appropriate. More often than not her reactions to things felt similar to how I might handle situations, and her confidence, determination, grounded approach to situations, and her general indignation over how she was treated as a child made it really easy for me to root for her. Her growth and performance are both par for the course for most video game protagonists who're depicted as incredibly capable and competent heroes from the start, so I really can't criticize her flat arc too much, but it just seems like if they were going to put so much emphasis into the writing, and animating all of these elaborate cutscenes, and giving her so much of a developed backstory, even going so far as to have us play as a six-year old version of that character with a story spanning literally her entire life, that they could have or maybe should have done something a little more interesting and developed with her character. She's a decent character as it is, but it just felt like something was missing the whole time, like there either should've been more focus and time spent on her growing up, or she should've been a little different than she was presented by the time we cut to her as an adult, or else they could've just dropped the whole "telling her saga from birth" angle if they were just going to skip past 98% of it, and just started us off with Aloy as an adult preparing for the Proving, progressively filling in the necessary backstory through interactions with Rost and other Nora, and maybe occasional flashbacks.
The other thing that held the story back for me is that all of its major twists felt incredibly predictable, which is problematic when the entire point of the story is the mystery of figuring out who Aloy is and where she came from, and also what happened to humanity a thousand years ago to cause a mass extinction of nearly all life on the planet. The game tries to string you along on both of these fronts for serious chunks of the main quest line, attempting to be vague with hints and teasers meant to pique your curiosity while never fully answering your questions until the grand revelation several quests later. Unfortunately those early hints are just so on-the-nose that I was instantly able to figure out where the plot was going, which then made it somewhat tedious and uninteresting going through the motions of uncovering more information to confirm what I already knew while watching Aloy struggle to cope with things that I intuitively understood from the beginning.
After Aloy is attacked at the Proving, she takes a cultist's Focus and discovers she was specifically targeted because she has a 99.47% DNA match to an unnamed woman who looks exactly like her and has the same voice actor, and I was immediately like "Well, that woman is obviously not Aloy's mother because then her DNA would only be a 50% match, and we saw Aloy grow up as a child so that rules out the possibility of her being that same woman coming out of cryostasis with amnesia or something, which is also reinforced by the fact that the DNA is not a perfect 100% match, so she must be a clone of that woman, with an expected margin of error in the cloning process. These vaults seem built to withstand any sort of disaster and apparently have the technology to create new life, so I'm guessing this was part of humanity's plan to survive the apocalypse. That woman must have played an important role in that process if her DNA is being used as a security key to enter these vaults, and Aloy having a near identical DNA match means she's probably the only one who can do something to stop the bad guys' plans." All of which turned out to be true, and I was able to draw those conclusions based entirely on a single number. Thus the game's central mystery unraveled and the suspense deflated before I'd even left the starting area. It takes Aloy far longer to figure all of this out, which created a disconnect between myself and my character because we were never on the same page and were basically always experiencing very different emotions and reactions to how the story unfolded. That's understandable, of course, since she has a unique background that I can't relate to -- she is going to react to things differently than I would in her situation -- but since I'd already solved the mystery I wasn't even along for the ride, so to speak, and couldn't even share in her shock or surprise at these perception-altering discoveries.
Later on we discover that a military arms corporation named after its founder, Ted Faro, had been building peacekeeping war machines whose programming essentially glitched out, causing them to become sentient and turn against humanity. Critically, these robots had the ability to self-replicate using biomatter as fuel, thus causing the swarm to grow exponentially larger while rapidly consuming the earth's natural resources and killing more and more life on the planet. After numerous failed attempts to stop them, Faro turned to Elisabet Sobeck -- the woman whose DNA Aloy shares -- for an alternative solution. The game progressively builds up the backstory with rather engaging detail as you encounter assorted logs from various perspectives at different stages of the Faro plague, as it was known at the time, but then it skips over the explanation of Sobeck's plan to save humanity in the interest of creating more drama and suspense while only teasing its name -- Project Zero Dawn. All we see are Faro's stunned and horrified reactions, with him saying that the cure is worse than the disease while Sobeck insists that, although it may be grim, it's their only chance. And I immediately concluded that the name "Zero Dawn" is supposed to foreshadow that there's no future in store for these people, and that her plan is therefore to cause an extinction event of her own to exterminate not just the machines, but all life on the planet, or possibly to let the machines run their course and eventually shut down once they've harvested all resources from the planet, thus wiping the slate completely clean for life to begin anew, which would presumably happen in the vaults where Aloy was created. Which is basically what Zero Dawn entailed, and I was able to draw those conclusions based entirely on a single proper noun. Once again, a simple teaser meant to add to the suspense ended up having the opposite effect by spoiling its own mystery before getting to the grand revelation.
The final battle likewise proved extremely anticlimactic and underwhelming. The whole game builds towards the finale where we discover that Helis has been unwittingly working for HADES, a subroutine of Sobeck's Zero Dawn in charge of creating new extinction events to reset the earth again if new attempts at creating sustainable life prove unsuccessful. It turns out HADES was maliciously awakened and went rogue, now creating hordes of new war machines to start tearing down the ecosystem, and Aloy -- as the only person with Sobeck's genes, created by the GAIA protocol to be the savior of the new world -- is the only one capable of stopping it. This sets up a final showdown where Aloy works with the Carja Sundom to shore up defenses to fight against the horde of war machines and to stop HADES from taking control of a broadcasting tower to send out the extinction signal, while also getting vengeance over Helis for killing her father, Rost. And then the fight against Helis plays out like an ordinary battle against an ordinary human opponent in a relatively small and mundane environment, and the defense of Meridian -- a massive city with hundreds of guards -- only involves a half-dozen other NPCs fighting by your side while you basically just lob an infinite number of OP-bombs at a handful of enemies that come at you in small waves, and then the final boss is just another Deathbringer, of which you've already fought close to a dozen previously. They had three opportunities to do something exciting and interesting in the finale, with an entire "calm before the storm" segment as you prep for the final battle getting you hyped up for an epic conclusion, and none of them paid off in a satisfying way.
Where the story really excels is its detailed lore, backstory, and worldbuilding. Beneath the main plot of Aloy trying to discover her own identity and save the world, there are two entire other stories: one detailing the events of the old world with Sobeck, Faro, and assorted other minor characters leading up to the apocalypse as the Faro plague comes into form and humanity tries unsuccessfully to stop it, while also setting up the Zero Dawn project, and a second one detailing the history of how civilization evolved from early life in the vaults to the tribes and societies they've formed today. You can actually read up on hundreds of years of recorded history if you so choose, which just goes to show how much care and effort went into creating this unique fictional world. What's most impressive is that this history plays an important role in current events, with the current political landscape and cultural tensions having been shaped by the past few generations of leadership -- people actively talk about and reference these historical events, weaving the lore into the very fabric of the world as opposed to being something irrelevant that's been superfluously added on.
All of this world-building happens through a variety of different media, too, from news articles to text logs and audio logs to holographic recordings, such that the delivery of lore never gets to feel repetitive, but unfortunately the quality of the world-building can vary greatly depending on the delivery method. The vantage points are great because they show you what dilapidated old ruins used to look like before the apocalypse, while also telling the story of an aerospace engineer leaving a trail of diaries, basically, during what he calls his "Apocashitstorm Tour." The history of the Carja Sundom can likewise be really interesting if you care to read up on it, but a lot of it occurs through incredibly long tomes that read like dry history text books. A good portion of datapoints depicting what life was like in the old world, before the apocalypse, occurs through advertisements for different fictional products and services, which don't tie into the plot and can feel pretty uninteresting. Knowing that the Metal World had dating apps with RPG-style leveling systems, or virtual reality gloves with tactile feedback, or that you could get a pizza delivered to you by drone, didn't add anything to my enjoyment of the world or the gameplay, so they got to feel more annoying than enjoyable over time.
World Design
Horizon: Zero Dawn takes place in an open world, post-apocalyptic version of the Southwestern United States, with many of its in-game landmarks and environments being based on real locations, which I imagine would be fun easter eggs for anyone familiar with Colorado and Utah landmarks. I'm a huge sucker for this type of imagery, where human structures and machinations have crumbled into ruins and been overtaken by nature, and so it's a pleasant experience to play a post-apocalyptic video game with a lot of natural beauty in it, as opposed to a lot of similar games where it feels like you're wading through trash and rubble the entire time, which can get to feel pretty miserable after a while. The world, here, is full of scenic vistas and awe-inspiring landscapes enhanced by a realistic -- if somewhat idealized -- sensibility. You can tell they took liberties with the actual geography to create denser, more visually interesting environments than what you would find in real life, but they're still guided by that realistic design where it feels like these could be real places, just enhanced slightly for the sake of video game functionality. It's not exactly realistic, for instance, that you can run from green plains into a snowy mountain pass, then into a desert and then a jungle in the span of 15 minutes, but the transitions are gradual enough that it works in the context of a video game and feels pretty natural and seamless. Those different environments also lend the game a lot of atmospheric variety while still feeling cohesively tied together by a consistent visual aesthetic.
The size of the world, likewise, strikes a reasonably good balance of being large enough to create a more realistic sense of scale for the world and its lore, while still having enough structure in its layout to guide exploration, such that it doesn't get to feel overwhelmingly large. You can't have the Carja Sundom right next to the heart of the Nora Sacred Lands if they're supposed to be distant cultures who never interact with each other, so there's a giant mountain separating them, and to get from one place to the other requires a long, circuitous route that feels like an actual journey, as opposed to just walking to the next town. At the start of the game, before the Proving, you're confined to a relatively small area in Nora territory called the Embrace, which is still big enough to allow plenty of open-ended freedom in exploration while tying all of its content to that area's central narrative, and then once you become a Seeker and gain authorization to leave the Embrace, the map has a somewhat linear progression from area to area as you work your way counter-clockwise around the map towards the Carja Sundom. These areas are effectively divided into different zones that you can tackle in a sequential order, with the main quest guiding you through this counter-clockwise path from the starting area to the capital city of the Carja, Meridian, thus lending the exploration a feeling of direction and momentum such that you feel actual progress exploring the world, as opposed to just wandering around in aimless directions as you would in a more open, unrestricted world.
After a certain point in my playthrough, however, I began to wonder if this game really needed to be set in such a large open world to facilitate its two main focal points: that being its richly detailed story and its intense, highly tactical combat against robot dinosaurs. After all, it seems like you could tell the same story and facilitate the same type of combat system in a more linearly structured game, but there are definite positives to putting this story and combat system in an open world setting. For one thing, the size of the world plays an important role in establishing the scale of the main plot -- the stakes of a potential world-ending cataclysm feel much more dire and consequential when you've had the opportunity to travel the world to see it for all its beauty, and to freely experience all of the different cultures that would be lost to time if the world were to suddenly end; it's a lot more difficult to grasp that sense of grandeur and worldliness in a more linear game where you're constricted to more corridor-like environments as you simply go from mission to mission, as if you're running around a series of movie sets as opposed to exploring an actual world. A more linear structure can work well or even better with a simpler, more personal story (such as Joel and Ellie's budding relationship in The Last of Us), but for a story of this nature where the world itself is practically its own character and the main plot has major consequences for the entire world, then I think you really do need an open world to bring that characteristic to life and to depict the epic scale of the plot.
With regards to the combat system, the open world also gives you freedom to focus on the combat as much as you desire. A more linear world design can set up some really unique and interesting setpiece encounters, but it's usually impossible to re-experience those encounters without replaying the whole game, whereas with Horizon, if you have a fun encounter with a special type of enemy that you want to experience again, you can just go find another one somewhere else in the world. And even though it's the same enemy, it'll be in a different environment with different combinations of nearby enemies, thereby creating its own unique situation such that it doesn't feel like you're just doing the same thing again. With respawning enemies, that means there's always freedom to just go off hunting whenever or wherever you feel like -- it was not uncommon for me to spend 30 minutes at the start of any given session just fighting random robots for the fun of it before getting on with whatever quest or task I was intending to do from the start. That freedom doesn't just apply to the combat, either, since the open world allows you the freedom to spend your time doing whatever it is you really want, whether that be fighting robot dinosaurs, or hunting local wildlife to craft upgrades, or just wandering around taking in the sights.
The problem, however, is that if you don't enjoy those things then they can create a pretty substantial impediment towards reaching content you might find greater interest in, because they literally get in the way of other things you might enjoy more. Even though that kind of side content is technically optional, you're still forced to engage with it whether you want to or not. Say you don't care about all the open world fluff and just want to focus on the story and characters -- you're going to have to make long treks across the map to reach your next quest destination because you're probably not going to be exploring the world fully enough to have nearby warp points, and you're going to have to make large detours around herds of enemies or mountain ranges that force you off the shortest path to reaching your destination, and you might even have to stop to fight certain enemies that are literally faster than you or that can shoot you at range, which slows down your progress even more. Then, between every quest you'll probably need to scavenge the environment at least a little bit for plants, animal parts, and/or machine parts to craft more supplies and restock on things like potions, healing salves, fast-travel packs, or ammunition that you spent in the previous quest, before you can set off on a new quest.
Even when these sorts of things are purely optional, they're still kind of required if you want the game to be less of a tedious slog, which is ironic because making the game less of a tedious slog requires a fair amount of tedious busywork and item farming. If you want to be able to fast-travel places to save time instead of running everywhere all the time, then you'll have to periodically go hunting animals for meat to craft more fast-travel kits (until you unlock the option to buy an unlimited fast travel pack, which again, doesn't happen until you reach Meridian more than halfway through the game); if you want to be able to actually survive during combat, then you'll have to periodically forage the wilds for healing plants; if you want to use some of the game's more fun and interesting weaponry, you'll have to periodically go hunting machines to get parts so you can craft more ammunition (at least, until you amass such a vast stockpile of resources that that no longer becomes a necessity); if you don't want to be constantly making trips back to merchants to sell off excess materials, then you'll have to go hunting animals for parts to craft greater and greater carrying capacity. Sometimes an optional side quest will task you with harvesting a particular machine part, at which point the game devolves into an RNG-festival as you have to kill the same enemy type over and over again until you randomly get the part you need -- the same goes for the upgrade system that requires randomly-dropped bones and skins from specific types of animals. Even if you enjoy all of this stuff -- foraging for plants, hunting wild animals, battling machines, traversing the world, crafting new supplies and upgrades -- you do so much of it over the course of the game that it all starts to feel tedious and repetitive after a while. This might be an exaggeration, but it felt like I spent about a quarter of my time in this game just foraging for materials as basic upkeep just so that I could keep playing, and I got particularly sick of how much time I had to spend wandering around looking for healing plants.
Making matters worse is that there aren't a whole lot of other worthwhile activities to do in the world besides going around fighting random enemies and collecting resources. Besides that, you can clear out Corrupted Zones and Bandit Camps, which are just concentrated areas with tougher enemies, and once you've done one the rest are essentially the same concept but with different enemies; or you can climb Tallnecks, which are mobile map towers that reveal the fog of war in that area and are all simply a matter of climbing to a high point in the map and then jumping on the Tallneck as it walks by; or you can clear out Cauldrons, which are kind of like subterranean dungeons where you fight your way through a short, linear environment to reach a boss chamber, and after the first one the rest are all pretty similar in design; or you can do Hunting Ground challenges which task you with completing gimmicky objectives like "kill three machines while they're frozen" under certain time limits; or you can collect a bunch of pointless, worthless collectibles like Metal Flowers, Ancient Vessels, and Banuk Figures; or you can visit Vantage Points to see holographic images of what the world used to look like before the apocalypse; and that's about it, apart from side quests which I'll cover in more detail in its own section.
That sounds like a decent amount of variety, but the problem is that these activities make up a relatively small portion of the game's open world content, in terms of the time and space dedicated to them, and each one gets to be repetitive rather quickly. The only one of these that offers any sort of notable mechanical variety are the Hunting Grounds, since each one has three radically different objectives, and the Vantage Points at least have some interesting storytelling told from the perspective of the guy leaving those logs behind, but everything else is pretty bland to begin with and just gets more and more bland as the game goes on. In the game's defense, it shows a little bit of restraint by not going completely overboard peppering the landscape with these things; compared to other, similar types of games, there are only five map towers to climb, as opposed to literally dozens, and only 48 collectibles, as opposed to literally hundreds, so these activities thankfully don't wear out their welcome nearly as much as they do in other games. The problem is that there just isn't enough mechanical variety in terms of how you complete each type of activity or how you earn each type of collectible, as they're all mostly the same process each time but with slightly different level layouts and slightly different enemies in your way. Breath of the Wild, for instance, has an absurd 900 korok seeds to collect, but they're tied to over a dozen different categories of puzzles, each with its own somewhat unique solution, so you can easily collect 50-100 seeds before it starts to feel like you're doing the same things over and over again. Whereas in Horizon, collecting Metal Flowers is the exact same gameplay for every single one -- walk to a point marked on the map, look around for it, and press X to pick it up -- which gets to feel samey after only a half-dozen, and doesn't feel as actively engaging as solving a puzzle in Breath of the Wild.
There's not much reward for doing any of these activities, either, which makes them feel especially pointless if you aren't already enjoying the activities themselves. When you complete a Hunting Grounds challenge, all you get is a generic reward box filled with random, generic crafting materials which you find literally everywhere, and it's possible that you might have spent more resources completing the challenge than you got back as a reward. Depending on the challenge, you might actually get better rewards from just defeating the machines and harvesting their corpses than you do from actually completing the objective. The reason you would want to do these challenges (apart from the thrill of the challenge itself) is to unlock special Hunting Lodge weapons, which are stronger versions of normal weaponry, but you only get these weapons once you've completed every single challenge at every single Hunting Ground. These Hunting Grounds are spread out in every corner of the map, so you have to play the vast majority of the game before you can start to get any real reward from the Hunting Grounds, and by that point you may have already unlocked better weapons, anyway, especially if you own (and have played) the Frozen Wilds expansion. Those weapons really should have been doled out more progressively, with each individual Hunting Ground granting its own unique weapon once you complete all three of its challenges at the highest level; that would give you incentive to actually do them as you encounter them, while also giving you a taste of what's in store for later Hunting Grounds, with the expectation that you'll likely get a similar (but even better) reward with each new one you discover.
In fact, there's absolutely zero new equipment to discover while exploring, because all weapons and armor are exclusively purchased from merchants. That makes sense, since realistically there should be tons of other hunters and scavengers picking the world clean of valuables before you come along, and people aren't going to leave a bunch of valuable equipment just lying around for no reason. It does mean, however, that there's almost zero practical reward for exploring the world because all you'll ever find are random crafting materials and pointless collectibles. If you're lucky, maybe you'll find a new random equipment modification that will give you a minor, invisible, passive boost to mundane stats, but that's about it. Otherwise, all you're really doing to acquire new gear is farming money and crafting materials so that you can buy something at a marked, predictable location, which doesn't have that same moment of euphoria as when you find a cool weapon at the end of a dungeon or after defeating a difficult enemy in a hidden area.
On a similar level, the various collectible items you can find scattered about the world are completely worthless until you gather an entire set and deliver them to Meridian, which is located on the other side of the world from the starting point. So you don't start getting any kind of reward for them until you're about 75% of the way through with the game, and even then your reward is just a generic reward box where most of the time you'll just get a relatively common, less useful equipment modification than what you already have. They don't even come with much in the way of interesting stories or bits of lore attached to them; the Ancient Vessels are just ruined coffee mugs with a logo of one of the old world's corporations printed on them, and the Metal Flowers just give you random excerpts from poetry taken out of context, which was of no interest to me personally. There is some decent storytelling with the Banuk figures, since collectively they serve as spiritual offerings from a man to a son he'll never meet, and that backstory gets told one offering at a time, one paragraph at a time. And really, it's surprisingly poignant for how simple his story is, and how little text there is to convey it, so that's nice. Unfortunately, there're only six Banuk figures in the game, meaning they make up only 12.5% of the set collectibles you can find in the world. At least the Hunting Grounds have some sort of exciting gameplay premise surrounding them, which can make them decently fun even if you don't care about the rewards, but the rest of the set collectibles mostly amount to to "go to the icon marked on your map and search around the environment for a thing to pick up which will be completely useless to you until you've explored almost the entire world already."
Which leads me to my next point: exploration in this game relies way too heavily on icon hunting. Horizon uses an Elder Scrolls-style compass bar to assist in navigation, not only showing you what direction you're facing in the world but also showing icons to indicate interactive content somewhere nearby that you can't quite see yet. I typically don't like it when games do this, because it often feels like a crutch to compensate for poor world/game design, but it's almost a necessity in this case, especially if you want to stand any chance at discovering any of the game's assorted datapoints -- the little bits of text logs that expand on the game's lore. Those things are incredibly tiny, being about the size of a smartphone, and they're often sitting around random locations in the huge open world, often in piles of rubble, making them incredibly difficult to spot unless you see the icon on your compass or happen to wander within a few meters of one. Sidequests likewise pop up on your compass as a green exclamation point, usually before you even have an opportunity to see the quest-giver, telling you pre-emptively that you should go a certain direction so that you can do a thing. Otherwise, Tallnecks reveal every major point of interest on your map in their respective area and you can also buy treasure maps that indicate where you can find other important things, such that there's essentially always an icon somewhere in the game guiding you to the next Thing Worth Doing. You don't have to follow them, of course, but without them you stand little chance of even noticing a lot of the game's content because so much of it is so small and blends into the rest of the world design, and you're unlikely to find much of interest if you ignore them and go off searching for content in unmarked areas.
I'm a huge fan of exploration in video games, especially in open-world games because that gives you the freedom to shape your play experience into something more unique since no two players will ever go to the same places and do the same things in the same order. It's particularly satisfying to stumble into hidden content that feels like a secret that other people might not discover as easily, and it's rewarding to find something in a hidden area that might give you a unique edge as compared to someone else's playthrough, whether that be some type of mechanical bonus like a new weapon or rare crafting material, or just a special quest that grants you an unusually fun gameplay scenario. I love that feeling of "what's around the next corner," and being able to find something intriguing off in the distance and then actually going there and discovering what it is. But those feelings were mostly non-existent in Horizon, as I never really had the opportunity to discover things on my own since there was always an icon specifically marking all of the game's content, and more often than not I found myself disappointed when exploring interesting areas between icons that looked like promising places to find special items or hidden quests, only to be rewarded with nothing at all.
So many potentially fun and exciting places in this world are just empty wastes of space that only exist to look pretty on the horizon, or possibly to imply deeper lore and world-building elements while never giving you the opportunity to actively engage with those elements. There's no greater example of this than the Spire, a huge monolithic tower twisting in upon itself that acted as a sort of guiding beacon for the Carja people of where they should settle when they were wandering in the desert. It's an incredibly important artifact from the old world and is mentioned a few times by characters and in Carja glyphs -- people even seem to worship it, with Meridian's temple built facing towards the Spire -- and yet when you go there, it's completely empty with not a single soul there to interact with. You can't enter any buildings, you can't talk to anyone there, there's no worthwhile loot to pick up, there's just literally nothing there. It seems like something as important as the Spire, which is regarded as a holy symbol of worship, would have at least a couple stewards and guards there tending to the grounds around it, and would even serve as a sort of Mecca where Meridian citizens would occasionally make pilgrimage to offer their prayers more directly to the Sun. It seems like a place where you should be able to at least talk to someone to learn about its lore through a more interactive way than just reading about it in a dry history text book, and where you might even be able to pick up an interesting side-quest, but apart from its role in establishing part of this world's history, it basically only exists as an elaborate arena for the final battle, sitting there completely lifeless and inactive until it gets "activated" for the final boss battle.
This same principle applies on a smaller scale to a plethora of other areas as well. There's a pretty sizable harbor near a market place, for instance, with a dozen or so guards posted there and a large building you can actually enter (which is a rarity in and of itself), and yet there's not a single interactive thing to do there apart from saving your progress at a bonfire, and trading with a generic merchant. At one point an NPC spawns there for a quest, and then you go there and talk to him for a minute, and there's a glyph somewhere that you can scan to learn more about Carja history, and that's about all the "content" I was ever able to find in that harbor. Then you've got other places like outposts and huge, cordoned-off fields that seem like there should be something of interest to do in those areas, which likewise sit completely idle and inactive unless you go there following a specific quest objective, leaving you with nothing to discover if you set off to explore those areas on your own. Even some of the towns and settlements end up feeling oddly lifeless and devoid of meaningful interactivity, being filled to the brim with NPCs you can't talk to and buildings you can't enter, with maybe only a single generic merchant (who has the exact same stock as every other merchant in the region) and, if you're lucky, a single quest-giver. Mother's Cradle, for instance, seems to only exist so that everyone there can die in a main quest event, making the loss of that settlement feel pretty inconsequential when you had no opportunity to do anything there previously to develop any sort of familiarity or attachment to anyone (or anything) in that settlement.
The worst offender when it comes to exploration is its archaic restrictions on mobility that prevent Aloy from climbing onto or over surfaces that she realistically should be able to. Instead of using a free-form system that would give you the freedom to explore the world in whatever creative means you desire, Horizon opts to use an Uncharted-style of climbing and platforming, where you can only climb very specific surfaces that you're specifically intended to be able to climb, and which are marked by either white paint or yellow ropes. This system is almost a complete deal-breaker for me, because a world this beautiful just begs to be explored in a more intimate fashion, and so it becomes incredibly deflating to feel so restricted on where you can go and how you get places. Instead of finding a cool thing somewhere and devising your own clever means of reaching it, the gameplay becomes a matter of "find the one specific climbing path," effectively turning this huge open-world game into a "hidden object" game where you just scour cliff walls in search of the one, specific rock that Aloy can actually grab onto. I seriously had numerous occasions when I was trying all kinds of sensible options to reach a certain location but was stumped because I didn't notice the one brick jutting out from the wall, or where I had to run nearly halfway around a mountain to find the one specific path that would let me actually ascend the mountain. Likewise, there's no convenient way to descend a mountain except to follow that specific path in reverse order, unless the designers were kind enough to leave a grapple point somewhere, which are incredibly rare and, as with everything else, you're only able to use the grapple hook in those exact, specific places.
And it's not like the platforming is particularly fun or engaging gameplay, either, because it all happens automatically with practically zero regard for your own input. All you have to do is be standing in the general vicinity of a platforming hotspot, then press either "forward" or the "jump" button to watch Aloy automatically do everything herself. You don't have to gauge distance or direction for yourself, or time your jumps, or toggle a button to grip onto a ledge, or manage a stamina gauge, or anything that would qualify as active gameplay, because it's entirely passive and feels almost like a cutscene masquerading as gameplay. This is no more evident than when the game decides it's going to shift into slow-motion for particularly large jumps, as if to make those jumps more tense, dramatic, or exciting, but it's impossible for me to feel any of those emotions when I have zero control over whether Aloy makes that jump successfully or not, and when I know she's going to succeed every time. In fact, it's almost impossible to fail at the platforming because the game takes so much control over it that you can only really fail if you do something that the game didn't anticipate -- like trying to jump a gap from a weird angle -- which prevents the game from going into "auto-pilot mode," and thus doesn't even allow you to succeed on your own because the game has to be in "auto-pilot mode" for Aloy to actually grab onto the ledge.
This maybe wouldn't be so much of an issue if it weren't for that fact that 2017 also saw the release of Breath of the Wild and Elex -- two similarly large, open-world games that gave you immensely more free-form mobility to explore their worlds at your own pace, in your own creative way. Breath of the Wild famously has the whole "climb anything" system where you can climb basically any surface, of any height, as long as you have enough stamina for it (which you can supplement by cooking certain recipes with the right ingredients, or by gathering certain equipment sets, or by trading extra hearts for extra stamina), and it even gives you the paraglider so that you can drop from any height and catch the air for a soft landing, or even coast all the way across huge expanses of terrain. Elex allows you to jump and grab onto most ledges that look like climbable, but then it also gives you a jetpack with recharging fuel so that you can literally fly up to higher terrain or across the map. That's not even to mention the plethora of Assassin's Creed games to have come out before Horizon, with their "free-running parkour" that let you climb up to the top of buildings from just about any angle. Hell, even Thief: The Dark Project from 1998 had better mobility than Horizon, since that game let you climb onto any flat surface that you could reach by hand with a simple jump, and it even gave you rope arrows to use creatively to access out-of-reach areas. It may not have flowed as smoothly or looked as nice as Horizon's platforming, but it was far more engaging and gave you more freedom to explore off the intended path for secrets, as opposed to Horizon's platforming that only allows you to do the exact, specific things they intended you to be able to do, unless you do the old Elder Scrolls trick of flinging yourself against collision meshes until you land on enough surfaces to "climb" somewhere.
Combined with things like the occasional invisible wall or otherwise out-of-bounds areas, and it all just seems to actively discourage exploration, because you frequently don't have the means to explore places you might want to, while interesting-looking places often end up being completely empty and pointless, or else anything worth doing is typically revealed on your map in advance of you actually discovering it, and there's barely ever anything rewarding to discover when you're out exploring, anyway. Exploration, therefore, felt rather unsatisfying to me, like the gameplay just wasn't doing the open-world formula (or the game's beautiful world design) proper justice.
Quests
Besides exploration, side quests are typically the main appeal of open world games for me. A lot of these games treat the main quest as a bit of an after-thought -- an obligatory chore that ironically ends up being entirely optional, and which often doesn't live up to what you would expect of a main quest, with many of the best and most memorable quests being the side quests. That pattern is actually reversed in Horizon, where the main quest line is clearly the main focus, and the side quests are the obligatory inclusion to give you more Things to Do™ in the open world. Unlike some other open-world games, the main quest actually works well with its open-world format, because it doesn't start things off with some type of impending cataclysm that completely breaks the narrative pacing when you choose to ignore the time-sensitive threat for hours on end doing utterly trivial things like hunting fish with a bow and arrow or go mountain climbing just to revel in the scenic vistas.
The main quest does a good enough job stringing you along with narrative details that progressively reveal the game's lore and backstory (even if its major twists are all easily predictable), but it also sets up some decently interesting scenarios with unique level designs and gameplay elements that give those missions a sort of dramatic spectacle -- like in "To Curse the Darkness" when you have to sneakily infiltrate an Eclipse base to disable the Focus network and then suddenly have to mount a quick exit once you're caught by frantically running from hordes of enemies, or in "The Terror of the Sun" when you're dropped into a gladiator ring and have to defeat a massive Behemoth without any of your usual skills or equipment. The main quest, therefore, is pretty engaging to follow, not just because of how it expands upon the game's richly detailed backstory, but because you're almost always doing something new and different that you don't typically get to experience elsewhere in the game.
Side quests and errands, on the other hand, tend to follow a basic pattern where the quest-giver presents you with a problem, and then you follow a quest marker to a starting point and bring up Focus Vision to examine the environment for clues, and then follow the trail to another location where you'll have to fight something fairly mundane and ordinary, much like you experience just by encountering random enemies as you explore the world. The only mechanical "twist" is that these quests give Aloy the opportunity to show off her tracking skills, and I have to stress that these are her skills and not your own, because the game doesn't give you any opportunity to solve quests on your own. The idea is that, much like Geralt's "witcher senses" in The Witcher 3, you press a button to bring up a viewing mode that enhances the protagonist's perception, allowing them to see things that would ordinarily go unnoticed to regular people. This effectively turns gameplay into a matter of pressing a button to highlight all of the important things in an area, walking up to each one, and then pressing the action button to let Aloy make all of the critical deductions on her own, and then following a glowing trail to your next destination -- procedures so simple a five year old could do them. There's no critical thought or observation required on the player's end, as it essentially plays out like an interactive cutscene; until you have to fight something, you are an entirely passive agent pressing basic inputs to make the game move forward on its set trajectory.
It would be one thing if the Focus Vision were simply a crutch that you could use to help you when you're stuck, but it's practically a required part of solving quests because all of the quest solutions were designed with Focus Vision in mind. The quest objectives even specifically tell you to scan areas with the Focus. Although there are sometimes physical trails that you can actually observe and follow on your own, they tend to be so incredibly subtle that you might never notice them and would have to slow down to a snail's pace to keep track of them, or else are so spread apart that you have to guess where the next bread crumb is and hope you don't wander too far off from your previous one and lose track. Most of the time, however, the footprints you're supposed to be following don't actually exist anywhere in the world, meaning you're forced to bring up Focus Vision and highlight the track. It's incredibly shallow gameplay and gets to be pretty boring most of the time, when it would feel far more satisfying and engaging to have to make logical connections on your own, or else use some sort of actual problem-solving ability to resolve the issue. As it is, you're literally following a glowing line on the ground to your next objective, which is even more degrading than following a waypoint marker on your compass.
The side quests at least attempt to set up interesting scenarios for each one, usually in some kind of context that expands upon the world-building, or by giving you some kind of special character interaction. In "Honor the Fallen," for instance, you learn more about the Carja religion and history by talking to various priests and outsiders in the process of purifying religious shrines, and "The Forgotten" involves helping a woman find her mentally ill brother who may or may not pose an inadvertent danger to her where you eventually get to make a choice about whether to let the brother into his sister's care, or convince him to retreat further into self-isolation. However, the actual gameplay involved in these quests is simply a matter of following waypoint markers and glowing trails on the ground, and killing a bunch of incidental enemies who just kind of happen to be in the area, while the finer details of their narrative premises are delivered through relatively rigid dialogue sequences by completely forgettable characters.
One of the game's more interesting side quests, in terms of its premise, revolves around a sort of deranged lunatic who sees visions of how the various machines came into being by drinking their blood (or rather, their oil), but the gameplay loop for this quest is a repetitive string of "Go kill this machine you've already killed dozens or hundreds of times and bring him a special thing that only drops now that this quest is active, and then return to the quest-giver so that you can listen to him spout dialogue while he stands almost completely still, and where you can only see his lips and nose, and then repeat the process four more times." The expanded lore of those visions can be decently interesting if you believe them to be true, but the actual gameplay involved in unlocking those visions is tediously shallow, repetitive, and completely unexciting, while the presentation of those visions proves to be pretty dull as well. This guy could've been an interesting character that made this quest worthwhile and interesting, but they wasted the potential of having an actual character that you could interact with by treating him basically like an audio log. To be fair, his vocal delivery is sufficiently macabre that it really sells this guy as a disturbing weirdo, and his hut has a creepy, almost horrific vibe with all of the machine parts strewn about the place like gory innards illuminated by ritualistic candles. I suppose his headdress is visually symbolic, as well, with the red accents looking a bit like blood dripping from the machine skull. So there's that, at least, but I would've liked to have seen him animated a little more theatrically as if he's reenacting parts of his vision, or else if he could've done some kind of actual ritual with the "blood" that we'd actually get to see, or if he could've drawn cave paintings on his walls to illustrate his visions with dynamic camera pans across them, or if Aloy's Focus could magically let her see those visions, too. As it was, I feel like they could've just given me a paragraph of plain text and it would've had the same effect as the guy just standing there talking and doing nothing.
Another quest seems like it would be of extreme importance in terms of its story, since it involves you liberating a child king from the nefarious grip of a splinter faction of Carja, who were still loyal to the previous regime and were using the deposed king's youngest son as a figurehead to represent the true Sun King lineage, and so reuniting him with the rest of the royal family is supposed to help unify the Carja and put an end to the rogue Shadow Carja's legitimacy. However, this quest plays out with utterly mundane gameplay consisting of "talk to a guy you don't know, kill a sand worm, fight off a wave of dudes, then fight a thunderjaw" -- all stuff you've likely already done several times previously. Granted, the sand worm and thunderjaw are more rare, special enemies who're usually pretty fun to fight in any context, but the whole quest is nothing special in terms of its gameplay. Meanwhile, I never felt invested in the narrative premise of the quest because you spend around 75% of it fighting generic enemies that barely have anything to do with the plot, and the other 25% talking to people you don't know because you only just met them five minutes ago. And really, a quest like this should probably be the second-most important, consequential thing you do in the world, apart from saving the world from total destruction at the end of the main quest, but it's treated like a random one-off side mission that comes out of nowhere and only lasts about 15 minutes. Something as important as this should really be a much longer quest, perhaps spanning multiple quests so that you can have more time to develop familiarity and camaraderie with the characters, and so that it can actually build towards its grand, epic conclusion. It would be a lot more fun and engaging, for instance, to have to rescue Vanasha from a Shadow Carja prison after she's been found out for a spy, then work with her to sneak into Sunfall and find a discrete way to sneak the child king out of town, before cutting to the final chase where you're being pursued by the Eclipse and have to fight off machines while getting to the river. But instead of something like that, we basically skip all of the buildup and cut right to the climax, which makes the climax by itself actually anti-climactic.
Sadly, those two side quests are probably two of the best that the game has to offer, and yet they fell completely flat for me. Of the game's 36 side quests and errands, there're only three that I'd say I actually kind of enjoyed: "Sunstone Rock," where you arrive at a new outpost as it's being attacked by a pack of Ravagers, which then leads to a quest where you take up bounty hunting on three criminals who escaped during the attack, leading to three different scenarios as you encounter each of the three convicts; "Sun and Shadow," which acts as sort of a Romeo & Juliet-style romance story about star-crossed lovers, where it's hinted that the woman was planning to kill herself with poison after discovering the fate of her lover; and "Robbing the Rich," which is ostensibly a matter of retrieving a stolen heirloom sword but ends up taking several twists along the way. In fact, when looking back over the game's 36 side quests and errands, I struggle to recall any more than the ones I've listed here in the review; most of the quests are just incredibly short scenarios with simplistic, repetitive gameplay, given to you by people you only ever interact with for a few minutes in the entire game, all of which happens during the span of that one quest.
They become even more forgettable when you factor in that the actual gameplay objectives are practically interchangeable -- apart from the unique narrative bookends framing the quest at the beginning and end, you could probably swap out the middle portions of most quests and it wouldn't affect their stories, because those middle chunks tend to just be "go to an area, follow a trail, fight generic enemies" as minor speed bumps along the way to completing the overarching goal. And fighting enemies really does get to be wearisome; by the time I got around to doing quests for the Hunter's Lodge in Meridian, for instance, I was already long burned-out from pointlessly fighting machines while exploring 75% of the world, which then made it exasperating to have all of their initial quests sending me out hunting a bunch of machines I'd already killed countless times just to "prove myself" before I could eventually go and fight a supposedly unique, special, super-strong Thunderjaw which wasn't really any different from previous Thunderjaws I'd fought, and which was actually much easier by virtue of having a quest companion fighting alongside me. Petra's quest, likewise, is decently interesting because she's such a strong and likable character, and it even gives you a somewhat unique tower defense gameplay scenario using an over-powered Oseram cannon to fight off waves of bandits, but because I didn't discover it until near the end of my playthrough I ended up completely bored and disinterested any time I wasn't interacting with Petra.
There also aren't that many side quests in the game, as the official tally comes to only 22 full side quests and 14 "errands," the latter of which are much shorter, simpler tasks with less story and character interaction. The errands tend to be more basic fetch quests where a character simply declares a need for a particular machine part for some quick reason, and then you set out to retrieve it for them, although some have a few extra steps like following trails or talking to someone else en route to completing the main objective. Ultimately these errands feel more like filler content because they realized that 22 side quests probably wasn't enough for a world of this size, and thus needed to create some more, but didn't have any more good ideas for stories, characters, or gameplay scenarios to flesh out the extra quests. I guess I'm glad they're specifically marked as "lesser quests" because that way it doesn't give them any pretense of being more than just basic tasks, and so it's easier to skip them if you don't want to bother with them. In the grand scheme of things I'd rather have 30-some mediocre side quests than hundreds of bad ones, but normally when you sacrifice quantity like that you're able to improve quality -- by not having to work on as many side quests you're able to put more time and focus into the quests you do have -- and so it's kind of disappointing that there are so few in general, and that they're still not remarkably good.
Combat
Most of the game's combat centers around fighting beastly machines, many of which are wild animals like robo-deer, robo-horses, and robo-cattle that are pretty docile and tend to run away if you get close enough, although they will occasionally turn and fight. These tend to be pretty easy to defeat in a raw fight, but the difficulty stems from trying to take them down before they run away. As such, combat in the early stages deals more with stealth tactics where you try to sneak up on enemies or lure them into traps so that you can eliminate them silently one-by-one. You don't have to take that approach, of course, as the whole combat system is completely free-form and allows you use whatever tactics and weaponry suit your enjoyment best, but I found that stealthy approach to be most effective in the early stages of the game because it conserved resources, kept me out of harm's way, and allowed me to take out entire herds just by hiding in some bushes and whistling. Which, admittedly isn't very fun or engaging gameplay to spend most of your time sitting around waiting for enemies to slowly walk over to you so that you can press a button to effectively one-shot them. They're not meant to pose much of a danger to you, as they're meant to be weaker enemies that you hunt at lower levels for machine parts to craft ammunition and equipment upgrades, so they're not especially fun to fight unless they're mixed in with other enemies or if you're trying to complete a particular challenge in a Hunting Ground.
Where the real fun comes into play is when you start fighting bigger, more aggressive machines like Sawtooths, Stalkers, Bellowbacks, Ravagers, Behemoths, and Thunderjaws, among others. Combat against these enemies has a uniquely exciting and engaging quality that isn't found in a lot of other games for what I would consider to be three main reasons: 1) enemies all behave differently, as indicated by their unique mechanical designs, which leads to 2) a lot of tactical play in terms of how you engage each enemy's individual weakpoints, with 3) a variety of weapons allowing for a variety of different approaches to every combat situation.
In most other games, enemies are just giant health bars that deplete every time you damage them, with some body parts like headshots dealing more total damage, and thus winning the fight is simply a matter of dealing more damage to the enemy than they deal to you; in Horizon, enemies are built from specific mechanical components that dictate what they're capable of doing, and so targeting different parts of an enemy will disable different types of attacks, which can give you more of a tactical advantage depending on how you disable enemy components. You can see most components plainly just by looking at them -- Ravagers, for instance, have a very obvious cannon mounted on their shoulder blades, and Bellowbacks have giant sacs and gullets from which they spew elemental attacks at you -- but you can learn a lot more about each enemy's capabilities by scanning them with your Focus, which will highlight the individual components while telling you what each one does as well as their damage resistances and weaknesses. It might not be as obvious, for instance, that if you shoot out a Longleg's antennae, you can disable its ability to call in reinforcements, or that shooting it in its wings instead of its legs will disable its charge attack.
There's a great deal of tactics involved since each fight can play out a little differently depending on how you engage enemy weak points. Fighting a Stalker presents a bit of a unique challenge, for instance; they constantly drop mines throughout the area which greatly hampers your mobility, but they can also shoot you at range and turn invisible -- so when you catch a glimpse of them uncloaked, which component are you going to try to disable first? You might want to prioritize its stealth generator, but you might not have a clear shot at it because of the way the Stalker is moving, so do you hone in on the stealth generator and wait for an opportunity to take it out, or switch up your tactics to try to expose the stealth generator, or shift gears entirely and focus on something else? When fighting a Thunderjaw, do you target the freeze canisters first so that you can inflict greater damage on all subsequent attacks, or go for its disc launcher so that you can disable some of its ranged attacks while also allowing you to run in and grab the disc launcher to shoot back at it? If so, will you try to disable its tail attacks before getting in close, or try to keep a safe distance and expose high damage weak points like its data nexus or heart?
Variety is key, here, because you have 24 different machine enemies to fight, every one of which has its own unique weak points and special capabilities that affects how you fight each one individually, and the game does a pretty good job of introducing new enemy types at a reasonable pace such that for a good portion of the game it feels like you're always encountering something new, which will require a different approach. But then, you've also got a variety of different weapons and ammunition types at your disposal that can also alter your approach. The bow and arrow is your bread and butter for dealing basic damage, and you can also shoot fire arrows to inflict damage over time; freeze arrows to make enemies take greater damage while frozen; shock arrows to stun enemies; corruption arrows to turn enemies against other machines; tearblast arrows for knocking machine parts off; harvest arrows for producing greater resources from machines; plus more powerful (but more expensive to craft) regular arrows. Then you've got slingshots that fire different types of explosives like impacting grenades, proximity grenades, and timed grenades, or AOE blasts in all three primary elements; a ropecaster for tying down enemies and pinning them to the ground, thus making it easier to target specific components or simply to remove a machine from a fight for a little while; a tripcaster that can do fire, lightning, or blast damage if you can lure an enemy into the wire; the rattler that acts kind of like a shot-gun with a spread-pattern of bolts; and various types of traps that you lay. That's six different main weapon categories, each of which has a few different subcategories yielding around two-dozen different firing modes based on ammunition types, thus offering you a ton of different possibilities for desired loadouts, plus lots and lots of options for how you'll take down enemies.
Impressively, the tactics aren't just limited to sniping those obvious glowing weak points; the game also rewards you for trying things that might not seem so obvious when you scan an enemy. When fighting Shell-Walkers, for instance, if you can knock the armor plating off one of their legs and then shoot their leg for enough damage, they'll fall over onto their backs for several seconds, giving you opportunity to take out other weak points, or else shift your focus to another enemy. Similarly, when they have their shield up they're almost completely guarded behind it, except for their lightning gun poking out around the edge of the shield, but what do you do if they're guarding and you've already destroyed their lightning gun? What I figured out was that I could aim an explosive slingshot at the ground slightly to the side and behind the shield, which would damage them enough to possibly disable their shield, or else damage other components or just get them to switch up their tactics and lower their guard. If I'd just been aiming for glowing weak points the whole time, those fights against Shell-Walkers would've been a lot harder, but the combat system has a surprising amount of room for creativity such that it rarely feels straightforward.
New encounters against new enemies are particularly exhilarating, because they all behave so differently and you have no idea what they're going to do until you see them in action. You can scan them in advance to learn more about what they might be capable of, which can help you plan a better strategy, but that doesn't tell you how they move around, how quick they are, or what other types of melee attacks they might have. There's an improvisational element to it as well, even against enemies you're familiar with, because you might set up an elaborate plan to try to lure it into some tripwires and traps only to find it suddenly going a different direction and ignoring your traps. Other times you'll be in a fight with a common enemy and then suddenly have a new enemy type wander into the battle and catch you completely off guard, where you're frantically trying to scan them in the middle of an intense battle while avoiding attacks and shooting at things that look like they might be weak points while not really knowing whether they actually are or what mechanical function they might serve. That balance between planning and improvising is pretty strong, here, because you're usually capable of seeing enemies in the distance before you engage them, which gives you time to plan a course of action, but then things rarely go according to the plan, at which point you have to think and react quickly under extreme duress.
Unfortunately, combat can sometimes move a little too frantically to the point that it starts feeling like a chaotic mess. It's not uncommon to wind up in situations where you have multiple enemies unleashing an incessant barrage of attacks at you, thus forcing you to constantly mash on the dodge button while rarely getting an opportunity to slow down to line up a shot. Granted, that's sometimes your fault for allowing yourself to get caught up in that sort of situation, but other times enemies just seem to go berserk, or completely unpredictable things happen in the fight, and once you get into that clusterfuck everything moves so fast it's a literal struggle just to get the camera spun around to face where you need to be looking as things run circles around you and race past you. Even with the game's handy slow-motion "concentration mode" meant for lining up more precise shots, things still move so fast and erratically that you can have a perfect shot lined up and the enemy will suddenly jerk out of the way right before you release the trigger. It seems like slow-motion slows everything down at the same rate, including Aloy, so you still have the same issues as before but now with a little bit more reaction time, which is certainly better than nothing, but it might've helped to slow the rest of the world down a little more relative to Aloy so you can have a little bit more of a control advantage during those brief moments of limited concentration.
In fact, the general lack of gyroscopic aiming feels needlessly antiquated and makes combat a little more challenging than it ought to be. Per the story Aloy is supposed to be an elite hunter, but then when you're put in control of combat her aiming prowess is artificially restricted by the limitations of the joystick's rigid speeds and simulated acceleration. Joystick aiming is notoriously imprecise compared to mouse aiming, but console games have been innovating lately with gyroscopic accelerometers that allow you to make quick, fluid adjustments to your aim simply by tilting the controller, which gives you quasi-mouse-like control over speed, distance, and acceleration based on how far and how quickly you tilt the device. It's way more precise and responsive than simply relying on a joystick, and it's not like this is some kind of new phenomenon that Horizon coincidentally happened to miss out on, as it's been around since at least 2011 (if not earlier) with Ocarina of Time 3DS, and PlayStation Vita games from 2012 like Gravity Rush, Killzone Mercenary, and Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Hell, Breath of the Wild, which Horizon is constantly compared to by virtue of them releasing within days of each other, has gyroscopic aiming. And yet, Horizon is stuck with 2000's-era joystick aiming. Normally I wouldn't complain about that sort of thing because it's kind of what I expect from console games, but it's problematic in this case because of how quickly and erratically things move around, while also requiring you to hit really small weak points with extremely limited windows of opportunity -- it's a game that begs to be played with gyroscopic aiming or a mouse. Incidentally, a PC port was announced early this year which would completely rectify this issue, but it was unfortunately too little too late for me as I was already nearly finished with my PS4 playthrough when the PC port was announced.
Melee combat also suffers by virtue of extreme simplicity. Aloy only has two types of melee attacks -- a quick attack and a heavy attack -- and you can't really string attacks together for fluid combos, so it often feels like you're just whacking enemies with a baseball bat. There's not a whole lot of concern for timing or positioning, either, since the game has a sort of soft auto-target effect where the game will automatically move Aloy in to the nearest enemy when you press the attack button, closing the distance and turning however much is necessary to hit the target, as long as you're in the general vicinity of the enemy when you press the trigger. You can't really use melee combat to aim for specific components and it does so much less damage with none of the versatility that your ranged weaponry has, so it's not worth relying on in any capacity and feels like an underdeveloped concept.
Combat against human enemies likewise fails to live up to the grand spectacle and frenetic intensity of fighting machines. Unlike the machines, human enemies are all basically the same and follow the same AI patterns, with not much concern for self-preservation as melee fighters continually charge straight at you and easily get picked off with a ranged weapon, while bow-users tend to stand out in the open or else predictably duck in and out of cover. Also unlike the machines, they don't have a bunch of unique body parts and weaknesses -- you just aim for the head like in every other shooter ever made. It all feels rote and formulaic, and brings absolutely nothing new to the table, with generally simple and boring mechanics. The only real value that I found with human enemies is that it can be decently fun to try to wipe out an entire bandit camp with stealth -- watching enemy patrols, waiting for the right opportunity to swoop in for a stealth kill, picking off lone enemies at range with the bow and arrow, and so on.
RPG Elements
Horizon isn't strictly an RPG, but it has some notable RPG elements. The main thing is its leveling system, where you gain experience points towards leveling up with every defeated enemy and completed quest, leading to a new skill point with each level-up that can be spent in a few different skill trees to learn new abilities. It's an "ok" system in the sense that it has several different starting points and a few branching paths, with more advanced skills costing two and three times as many skill points to learn, all of which requires you to think strategically and prioritize your skill points based on your desired playstyle and what benefits interest you the most.
Unfortunately, the whole thing felt kind of bland to me, in large part because there aren't a whole lot of active skills that alter the way you play the game. The majority of skills are simply passive modifiers that enhance the output or efficiency of things you're already doing, such as "Low Profile" which further reduces your visibility to enemies when crouching, or "Heavy Lifter" that lets you move faster while wielding a heavy weapon, or "Gatherer" which grants you extra plants when foraging, among others. Other skills continue to enhance other skills with even more passive modifiers, like "Strong Strike" and "Strong Strike+," "Concentration+," "Critical Hit+," "Precision+," "Combat Override+," "Scavenger+," and so on. Some skills like "Balanced Aim" are almost completely worthless because of how infrequently you actually encounter rope bridges, while skills such as "Strike From Above/Below" have somewhat restricted viability by virtue of the game's restricted climbing system that doesn't allow you to climb outside of prescribed hotspots. A few skills even feel like they shouldn't even be skills at all, but rather feel like ordinary gameplay features that got shoe-horned into the progression system; why, for instance, do you need to spend a skill point to be able to pick something up while on horseback? It feels like a waste of a skill point just to get the game to stop wasting your time dismounting and remounting every time you need to pick something up. Likewise, not being able to remove equipment modifications without the "Tinker" skill (which is, for some reason, a max-level skill) means you almost can't use your best modifications in your weapons for most of the game because you never know when you'll get newer, better weaponry that will render your modifications obsolete.
So out of all the game's skills, there are really only five types of skills that felt like they altered the game in any significant way. Those would be the various "Strike" skills that let you execute critical hit animations under various circumstances (like when an enemy is downed, or un-alerted to your presence), "Double Shot" and "Triple Shot" that let you nock extra arrows to deal double or triple damage, "Lure Call" that lets you whistle to call unsuspecting enemies towards your position for stealth take-downs, "Concentration" and "Hunter Reflexes" that enable slow-motion for more accurate aiming, and "Call Mount" that summons a mount out of nowhere. And really, even those ones aren't all that exciting. The various "Strike" skills, for instance, are all basically the same gameplay function -- press R1 to watch a special attack animation -- they're just enabled under different circumstances. "Call Mount" and "Lure Call" are like time-saving shortcut skills that spare you the hassle of sneaking up on and overriding a robo-horse or throwing rocks to get enemies' attention. I really would have liked to have seen more varied and more active skills thrown into the mix, that would allow you to do more radically different and engaging things in the world.
As a result, the progression system felt somewhat bland and stagnant to me; I could definitely tell I was getting stronger as the game went on, but it all felt so passive that it was rarely affecting gameplay, apart from moments when I acquired a new type of weapon that let me do something different. Mostly, it just felt like my stats were increasing in the background, a lot of which could be attributed to simply acquiring better gear and better equipment modifications. It doesn't help that the somewhat linear map design means enemies follow a similar strength curve where they get progressively stronger the more you work your way counter-clockwise towards the Carja region, meaning that you're pretty much always going to be at an appropriate level to handle anything you might encounter as long as you're not skipping past content to go straight to higher-level areas. There's almost no opportunity, in other words, to encounter barometer-setting enemies that you're completely incapable of fighting at a low level, thus providing you with a gauge for how strong or weak you are relative to the rest of the world so that you feel some kind of goal or incentive to get stronger. Rather, you go about encountering enemies in a prescribed, intended order as they're presented to you without much opportunity to deviate from the main path of progression.
The other main RPG element is that you occasionally get to pick emotional responses in dialogue so that you can somewhat shape Aloy's personality over the course of the game. In certain situations, you're given the choice of reacting with your brain, heart, or fist -- or in other words, cleverly, compassionately, or aggressively. It doesn't really matter which one you pick, as there aren't any social stats governing Aloy's personality, although it does change the outcome of certain scenes in a superficial way, sometimes a little ways down the road. For instance, how you choose to respond after Aloy's hit in the face with a rock thrown by a Nora child affects how the scene plays out later on once you meet that boy again, before the Proving. The cosmetic effects of these choices are nice, to be sure, but there's not a lot of mechanical consequence for what you choose, except in a handful of situations. This is where the game really starts creeping into RPG territory, and while the inclusion is fine for just an open-world action game the strong emphasis on story and characterization makes me want to see more mechanical effects of these decisions -- either with branching consequences in quests, or with systems that affect Aloy's statistics or personality more substantially.
I should also mention there can be a dissonant dichotomy between Aloy's moralistic world view and your own role-playing options, where it feels like there's a separation in the character between gameplay and cutscenes. Sometimes the game gives you the option to show mercy or enact vengeance, or to take the moral high road or be petty, or fight fire with fire or let bygones be bygones, but then other times in cutscenes she's making bold declarative statements that I don't necessarily agree with, with no input from the player. There was one section of the game where Aloy was reacting all on her own and I found myself agreeing with Sylens (her remote ally who talks to her over her Focus) more than I did with my own character. If nothing else, it's weird that you play such a well-defined and established character as Aloy, but are then given random, sporadic control of her personality. It feels like it should be more of one versus the other; like either don't give us choices and just make her a stand-alone, independent character (a la Nathan Drake or Lara Croft), or else give us more consistent control over role-playing options and characterization in dialogue (as you would in an actual RPG). The whole "playing it both ways" just makes it feel jarring when those options show up unexpectedly, and then jarring when they inexplicably aren't there in other situations.
Controls/UI
Being a PS4-exclusive (at the time of this review -- again, the PC port was just recently announced) I don't expect to have the most elaborate or comprehensive controls available for a gamepad -- you only have so many buttons to work with, as opposed to a keyboard and mouse which give you a hundred more buttons and a fast, free-moving cursor -- but there are still some weird decisions with the controls and user interface in Horizon that don't even make sense to me from a console perspective.
For example: the game limits you to only four equipped weapons at a time -- you press L1 to bring up the weapon select sub-screen, and then aim the control stick up, down, left, or right to switch weapons. That four-directional item slot system is something you'd commonly see with directional pads which are physically limited to only four directions, but when it's tied to its own sub-menu and navigated with a joystick you have a full 360-degree radius in which you can slot items -- you don't have to arbitrarily limit yourself to only four spots since you can easily fill in multiple diagonals with the joystick. Prey, also from 2017, for instance, has a full-scrolling hotwheel that you can equip a practically infinite amount of items onto. In Horizon, you get four slots, and that's it. I suppose the argument could be that having only four active equipment slots forces you to plan ahead, such that you bring the correct tools for the desired job or else have to improvise on the spot with sub-optimal tools in hand, but in reality there's nothing stopping you from simply pausing the game and swapping weapons out at a moment's notice, even in the middle of a fight. You can effectively equip and swap between any and all weapons you might want in a fight; there's just a pointless, gameplay-disrupting extra step involved in doing so, all because of that arbitrary four-weapon limit on the quick-swap menu.
The actual directional-pad has its own separate function for cycling between consumable items like potions, traps, rocks, and so on; you press left and right to cycle between items, and press down to use the selected item. Pressing up will always use healing medicine from your salve pouch. This system is more typical of what you'd expect from a console game, except it's a nightmare to use because they automatically lump all of your consumable items (and even a few actions like "Lure Call" or "Summon Mount") into that one item wheel. Meaning that at any point you could be 6-12 button-presses away from selecting the thing you actually want which becomes extremely problematic in the middle of an intense fight where you're frantically trying to switch to a healing potion or a particular elemental resistance potion and have to furiously mash on the left and right buttons while simultaneously being unable to move except by rolling, cycling through two or three items, and repeating the process until you get what you want. As far as I can tell there's no way to unequip particular items, so you always have to scroll through everything at any given moment you want to use something, when it seems like they could've easily let you equip only what you want, or else put it into a similar time-slowing item-wheel like the weapons. For that matter, you're also incapable of using these consumable items from the pause screen, so unlike swapping weapons you're stuck fumbling around with awkward controls in real time.
The actual inventory system is without a doubt the worst offender. The icons don't always do a good enough job indicating what's what at a quick glance, seeing as all of the machine hearts and lenses look incredibly similar, so unless you meticulously memorize each and every symbol you can't tell at a glance whether you have a particular lens or heart without scrolling through each and every option to read the pop-up text. The sorting options are extremely limited, too, with no way to sort weapons and armor as they're all forcibly organized in the order you acquire them, meaning that towards the end of the game your primary weapons and armor are always going to be near the bottom of the window, thus requiring an extra button press to get to your desired weapons, or worse, they could end up in the middle if you held off buying certain weapons until later in the game. Different types of weapons and armor get scattered around essentially at random, instead of clumping all weapons of a certain rarity together, or of a certain classification together, with no way to sort them by any prominent category, or even to manually drag and drop into whatever spots you'd like. It would be nice, for instance, to put the top six weapons that I use most frequently at the top of the list, instead of having three kind of close together and then the other three spread out randomly where I have to hunt a little bit to find what I want. Equipment modifications at least sort by type, and then by relative strength values, so there's that at least, but the actual equipment sorting is non-existent. Granted, with only 20-some weapons and armor it's not a huge mess to sort through, but this is a really simple Quality of Life feature that would've been easy enough to implement, and which is sorely missing.
The resources window, on the other hand, is a huge mess because it lumps all kinds of different animal parts, machine parts, natural resources, certain consumable items, crafting components, and sell-able junk items into one giant window, when there really should be different sub-sections to better separate the different sub-categories of resources. As with the modifications tab they do auto-sort into like groups, and they do at least give you the option to sort by item value, rarity, and sell popularity, but those are simply not enough options. Old World trinkets and machine cores, for instance, only exist to sell to vendors for money, as they aren't used in any crafting recipes and aren't exchanged for more specific goods, and yet they sort into completely different spots of the window based on their sell value so you have to go hunting for each one individually every time you want to sell off your excess junk. These items are specifically marked as being only useful for "selling for metal shards," but they don't auto-sort into a "junk" tab, or give you a "sell all junk" option. It's nice that the game indicates what each type of resource is used for, but this information is sometimes so incredibly vague that it's of practically zero value; you can sell almost anything for metal shards, but likewise almost everything is also supposedly "used for trading with merchants," except there's really no indication of where, how, when, or in what capacity you might use those items in order to trade with merchants. This easily leads to a hoarder's mentality because you have no idea when you might need a particular item for a quest, or to trade for something of better value. I, for instance, held onto multiple stacks of Slagshine Glass, Desert Glass, Processed Metal Blocks, and other things throughout most of my playthrough because merchants supposedly would trade for them, and it turns out I barely needed to use any at all, so they just sat there wasting space in my inventory the entire game.
You're further incentivized to hold onto everything because NPC's sometimes request specific parts for quests or in trade, and those parts have a variable drop rate so you never know when a rare or uncommon item is going to drop, and if you have something already then you don't want to have to go out wasting time farming it again if you sell it and then discover later that you actually needed it. This issue is compounded by the fact that you don't have a whole lot of inventory space to begin with, which quickly fills up because of arbitrary stack limits for items, such that you're constantly running out of inventory space and having to drop, disassemble, or make a trip to a merchant to sell off excess goods, with no clear indication of what's worth keeping or not. I made an early decision to invest in skills that would grant me extra materials from gathered resources or downed enemies, realizing that the earlier I got those skills the more resources I would have in the long run, which ultimately just ended up cluttering my inventory even more and making me constantly stop what I was doing to scroll through the inventory one-by-one looking for junk to disassemble so that I could continue playing the game. Unlike games such as STALKER, or Resident Evil 4, or System Shock 2, where inventory management plays an important role in the gameplay by providing a fun, challenging puzzle with meaningful decisions, the inventory management in Horizon just feels like an obnoxious, tedious chore that simply gets in the way of the fun.
The Frozen Wilds
Of all the content in Horizon, I enjoyed its expansion DLC The Frozen Wilds the most, because it stepped up the overall quality of its content while also delivering it in a smaller, more concise package. It's basically the same gameplay formula as the base game except in a far more rewarding, engaging experience. You still have a bunch of collectibles to collect, for instance, but whereas the collectibles served practically zero purpose in the base game, the Bluegleam in The Frozen Wilds is used to trade for really powerful weapons and armor, and collecting Pigment is guaranteed to get you several high-level modifications and even more Bluegleam. The side quests are generally more interesting and memorable, with the game's single best quest coming in the expansion, when you explore an old water processing facility with an eccentric Oseram, working in tandem to navigate across platforming obstacles. It's a quest with mechanical character interaction and an actually memorable character, with audio logs that tell a fairly interesting story of the last girls on earth who form a punk rock band using the machinery as instruments. The other side quests likewise relate to the main plot of the expansion a little more closely and set up some other interesting environments to traverse. The platforming even shows hints of improvement, with whaterwheel-esque ledges that require you to time your jump at the right moment to cross the gap successfully -- it's a platforming challenge that you can actually fail at, and that requires actual user input to progress. Likewise, there's a little bit more of an emphasis on active problem-solving, with certain quests having actual puzzles that you need to solve to advance the quest. And the fact that it happens in its own self-contained zone means that it doesn't feel excessively spread out, while its smaller size limits the amount of tedious filler that you have to go through to get the good stuff.
Unfortunately it can have a pretty drastic effect on the progression depending on when you do it, because it gives you so much extra opportunity for experience and more powerful weapons, armor, and modifications that you can become insanely over-powered too early in the game, if you do like I did and complete The Frozen Wilds before entering the Carja Sundom. I went into The Frozen Wilds a little earlier than I should've because I was already becoming over-leveled for the main quest line, and figured I wanted to experience a little more of a challenge by jumping into more difficult content, which of course made me even more over-leveled for the main quest. And since I ended up enjoying the content in the expansion much more than almost anything else in the base game, it meant that I hit the game's high point (for me, anyway) about halfway through my playthrough, meaning that completing the rest of the game was all downhill from there. That's partly my fault for choosing to do that, but it doesn't help that the entrance to the DLC is placed tangentially along the main route to Meridian; it might have been better for the sake of pacing and progression to put the DLC on the opposite side of the map so that it's only accessible after entering the Carja Sundom, but I'll admit it makes better geographic sense to have your snowy tundra in the northeast, as opposed to somewhere out west jutting off from a sandy desert. Conversely, I suppose it's possible that finishing the base game first and then going into The Frozen Wilds might've still left me over-leveled for the expansion, but at least it would've left the more interesting content for last.
In Conclusion
Horizon: Zero Dawn is a decently enjoyable game with some really strong elements, which is made all the more impressive by the fact that developer Guerrilla Games had no previous experience working on open-world games like this, but at the same time you can also tell that they had never worked on anything like this before. The story, world-building, and combat are all excellent -- it's worth it to play Horizon if all you do is rush your way through the main quest and a few side quests so that you can get the major plot elements and fight some of the cooler robo-dinosaurs -- but the open-world gameplay formula felt like a missed opportunity to do something more substantial or more engaging with the experience. Most of the time, the open-world design just felt like it got in the way of my fun; even though I do think that the game benefits from being open-world as opposed to purely linear, the open-world is not executed in a way that takes full advantage of the open-world formula. Repetitive combat encounters, unrewarding exploration, forgettable quests from forgettable NPCs, tedious crafting, survival, and inventory management systems, and stagnant, mostly passive character progression made large chunks of the game feel noticeably bland and unsatisfying to me. I don't regret playing it and did have some really fun moments along the way to completion, but it's probably not something I'll remember too fondly, or ever feel the desire to replay in the future.
I would be interested in seeing a sequel, however, as the base game showed enough promise that I can't help but wonder what it might have been like with more fleshed-out gameplay ideas and better execution. The limited content in The Frozen Wilds expansion is already a noticeable improvement over the base game, albeit in small, targeted increments, which leaves me more optimistic about what might be doable with a whole new game starting from the ground up. With a pretty solid foundation already on their hands, they can pretty much keep the combat system the exact same, except add new weapons and enemies, continue the story with Sylens and the Horus Titans (which were merely teased throughout the base game), add more variety in activities in the over world, make exploration more rewarding, implement a more free-form climbing system with more tools to facilitate exploration, and tighten up the interface, among other things, while keeping the world about the same size (possibly even a tad smaller, as long as there's more worthwhile content in it), and it would be a significant improvement over the original, and would likely leave a better, more lasting impression with me. That's something I would look forward to playing. As it stands, however, I can only give a mild recommendation for the existing game, as it has some really great ideas and gameplay elements that are unfortunately in service of a fairly boring open world that ultimately left me feeling more underwhelmed than satisfied.
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