Review
Played on: PlayStation 4Released: 2017
Moving away from their Killzone franchise, Horizon Zero Dawn is Sonys dutch, first party developer, Guerilla Games, first take on an open world game. With, what is perhaps, one of the worst and non-descriptive game titles in years. Set in an overgrown post-apocalyptic fantasy landscape blended with high-tech remnants of buildings and robotic animals. You play as the red headed Aloy.
All the way from her childhood she was taught by an outcast of a large tribe, which rule the lands you roam. She finds a hologram remnant device, which allows her to learn special abilities and connects her to the past technology of the ancients. Continuing in her adulthood, you learn to explore the world and the secrets it contains, not only about the present tribe conflicts, but the how significant the story and decisions of the ancient modern technology were.
HZD plays like a typical third person game, albeit, with a foot in many genres. Blending action, stealth and exploring adventure and many RPG elements. It's a bold change of landscape for the developer, coupled with a lot of daring ideas put into the mix. To summarise, it's an almost stone age setting, with stealth action gameplay featuring bows against massive robotic animals. It's different alright. Does it succeed though, at it's ambitious scale and incredible visuals, shown in it's preview trailers, prior to release?
The short answer is yes. A technically impressive title through and through, but the long haul of a playthrough perhaps dampens the experience somewhat. HZD delivers what it promised, breathtaking visuals and scope, plus solid gameplay. But it falls into the dangerous pit that plagues a lot of open world game, outstaying it's welcome with repetitiveness in an empty shell of a vast landscape. Don't get me wrong here, it's one of the finest releases this year, a real PS4 system pusher.
Let's take a closer look though.
NZDs gameplay is based on a melee and bow shooting. Stealth is heavily emphasisede, taking down the pace compared to what I expected. You're forced to scout the environments, lure enemies into one-on-one fights and take them down without bringing too much attention to yourself. There's a lot of extra skills to unlock with XP points and varied selection of bows for close, fast or sniping combat and various explosives to aid the player.
There are human enemies too, however, they seem more of an after-thought and work as stupid cannon fodder. The animal robots bring the much needed variation and are the stars of the show here. Each robot type attacks in different ways, some are even peaceful until you engage them. Others are so huge you need to climb up to scale them, a breathtaking experience the first time you try!
There's no doubt that HZD is a visual treat for the eye, the engine beautifully renders extremely detailed characters and close up details of nature and robots. Wind blowing in the trees and the dense foliage makes for the most impressive parts, especially when the sun bounces it's reflections off various surfaces. It's an impressive scale to the world too, with lots of detail far into the distance.
Clearly, most of the detail is best shown up close, but the game successfully balances the landscape depicted into the horizon too. It's one of the prettiest releases on the system, especially considering the 1080p resolution, double that for PS4 Pro owners. Another example that exclusives for both PS4 and XB1 end up looking a step above the multiplatform titles.
I really appreciate how detailed they have made small features like Aloys hair and face too, it looks impressively detailed up close, as do all the characters that appear in cutscenes. The only visual gripe I have though, which kind of ties in with the actual enjoyment of the game, is that the world looks a little barren at times. There's a lot of repetition going on too, that red sneaking grass repeats itself everywhere and there's an alike desert, snow and woodland scenery repeated throughout the map. The latter two blend so much into each other, they basically feel like the same at times.
Often areas just feel like empty shells with a few robots thrown in. I guess this isn't unusual in for type of games, FarCry 4 had some of the same issues, but it sticks out at times. Especially, when there's little actual interaction with the world, you sort of just walk through it to reach places. I wouldn't have minded some more climbing and exploration like in a Tomb Raider game, to ground Aloy into a more believable and interactive world, but I guess this isn't that kind of game.
NZD is challenging, quite frustratingly so. If you for instance plan on simply brute forcing your way through and only sticking to main missions, you'll most likely hit a wall of difficulty at some point. The enemies will be at a far to high level, it's positive to see a game that at least tries to reward the player to do some grinding and side missions to level up.
A hard game, yes, and that's fair, but the forced stealth gameplay, which although brings the pace of the game down, becomes unforgiving and repetitive when enemies become alert of your presence. It goes from sneaky, bow shooting precision, to a repetitive melee mashing chaos as you desperately try to dodge roll over and over to avoid attacks and smash the enemies with your fighting stick.
I wish the enemies had been less arrow sponges too, some require tedious amounts of shooting to take down. Amidst a chaotic dodge rolling fight, I found the traps and trip wires difficult to use. As such, I had to take them down one standard arrow at a time, a painfully slow process. As I progressed the ability tree, it eased some of the frustration as I became powerful enough to survive even the chaotic brawls.
The boss fights though, man I hated them, they just throw everything you learned about stealth out the window and feel incredibly unfair. I ended up having to pull down the difficulty halfway through the game, something I rarely need to.
Overall, I really enjoyed NZD. It's a game that pushes a lot of new ideas into a truly ambitious setting. A strong female protagonist and a blend of high tech futuristic elements, set in a sort of stone age era, makes for a very unique fantasy world. The story takes you across icy mountains, dense woodlands and rocky deserts with enough variation within the main missions to keep you interested for it's roughly 25-30 hour ride.
While I did enjoy playing through the story for the most part, I found the world elsewhere repetitive and lacking depth. Side missions feel lacklustre and serve only as XP grinds. I never felt like I wanted to care much about the charcters that weren't in the main story. There's no real exploring or climbing around the environments to actually give the world a more engaging experience to make me stay for the long run.
The complaints, however, don't outweigh the fact that Guerilla Games have truly developed a great new series here, which I really enjoyed playing for hours. It's unique artstyle, setting and enemy design really intrigued me. I really couldn't tell how the game would span out.
If comparisons are to be made, I'd slightly recommend Rise Of The Tomb Raider over this, although ROTTR is more linear and tightly structured, albeit with better variation. For this year though, I doubt any exclusive for PS4 will surpass Horizon: Zero Dawn!
Overall, I really enjoyed NZD. It's a game that pushes a lot of new ideas into a truly ambitious setting. A strong female protagonist and a blend of high tech futuristic elements, set in a sort of stone age era, makes for a very unique fantasy world. The story takes you across icy mountains, dense woodlands and rocky deserts with enough variation within the main missions to keep you interested for it's roughly 25-30 hour ride.
While I did enjoy playing through the story for the most part, I found the world elsewhere repetitive and lacking depth. Side missions feel lacklustre and serve only as XP grinds. I never felt like I wanted to care much about the charcters that weren't in the main story. There's no real exploring or climbing around the environments to actually give the world a more engaging experience to make me stay for the long run.
The complaints, however, don't outweigh the fact that Guerilla Games have truly developed a great new series here, which I really enjoyed playing for hours. It's unique artstyle, setting and enemy design really intrigued me. I really couldn't tell how the game would span out.
If comparisons are to be made, I'd slightly recommend Rise Of The Tomb Raider over this, although ROTTR is more linear and tightly structured, albeit with better variation. For this year though, I doubt any exclusive for PS4 will surpass Horizon: Zero Dawn!
