Horizon Zero Dawn: Review
Earth. Year, unknown. A bleak future is before us. Humanity had survived, bereft of all benefits it used to enjoy. With no electricity, and with only basic resources available to them, armed only with a strong urge to survive, humans fight every day to progress and better their lives. This serves as the plotline for Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Horizon is a third-person open world game, and action-adventure with light RPG elements. The strongest asset of this game are definitely the spectacular visuals, because the game looks beautiful. Every location you visit radiates beauty and will make you wish you were really there. The chirping of the birds, various fauna species, amazing flora, all small details that enhance the immersion.
Like every other open world title, Horizon offers a great variety of activities. Along with main and side missions, there are also hunting challenges, bandit camps to overtake, hosts of audio and video tracks that provide additional evidence to life as it used to be, as well as the events before and during the cataclysm.
There’s about twenty kinds of metal enemies that you can face. Each one of them has their own characteristics and weak spots to help you when you encounter them. Some animals are armed with ranged weaponry, other will attack you with their bodies, claws, head, teeth… There are flying predators as well, so the game has a truly wide spectrum of enemies and you practically won’t feel that enemies and fights are getting repetitive. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock three groups of characteristics that you can upgrade and adapt to your own playstyle. Most missions can be completed with a stealthy approach, but good old frontal assault is also an option. You’ll collect resources which are used to craft and upgrade equipment and clothes, provide extra ammo space, various tasty morsels to sell to traders, arrows, potions and traps.
The game’s map is of decent size, and doesn’t feel too big or chaotic. Still, most of the side missions boil down to finding missing family members, or collecting some resources, so there’s a feeling of a lack of creativity that accumulates over time in this regard, which can sometimes prove to be a turn-off to their completion.
However, no matter how interesting the story is, and it is, no matter how much it draws us to follow it, there’s a visible lack of interesting fleshed out characters to meet along the way. Everyone more or less sounds and even sometimes looks the same, so many of them would fade into obscurity. Similar could be said about the game’s villains, as none of them has “that special thing” to elevate him from a sea of characters with wacky hairdos and neatly trimmed beards.
Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the most anticipated games this year. The second PS4 exclusive has justified expectations and is a quality game. Not faultless, but what errors it has aren’t vital to the final product. We definitely recommend it to the fans of the genre, and even to those that aren’t. Even though there was a possibility that the game wouldn’t have anything else to offer beside spectacular visuals, it proved those fears wrong.
Verdict: 9/10
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Check out the awesome trailer for yourself below!
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