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Horizon Zero Dawn Game Review

Horizon Zero Dawn is a 2017 action role-playing video game published by Sony for PS4 and PC. It is a strong fresh IP that will undoubtedly start a great new franchise in gaming.

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“Change will not come in a single sunrise“

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The game was released back in 2017 for PS4, but I myself played the Windows version that was released at the end of 2020. To be honest, this port simply isn’t the greatest. While I am happy that I got the choice to play this game as a PC player, I still wished for a better conversion. The loading times were simply too long, the entire first section of the game with the whole cutscene opening was buggy as hell, sometimes the game would slow down significantly and, probably worst of all, it would crash from time to time, making countless half hour or so playing progressions worthless, and that frustrated me to no end.

With that being said, the game itself is great, and I am more than happy that I got to experience it properly. By far its biggest accomplishment is the story, which rarely happens, but here the storytelling was so strong and the world building was stupendous that I was more than content just to follow the plot and not focus too much on gameplay, which itself was too difficult, but more on that later.

Horizon Zero Dawn is set in the future where humanity is reduced to a primitive hunter-gatherer-type state due to a robot apocalypse that happened in the past. Aloy, the game’s protagonist, is a fierce young woman who must uncover the past and realize what happened to the old humans and how to stop the robots herself. Without spoiling anything, there is an amazing twist in the second half of the game that not only was unexpected, but it genuinely made sense. It was fantastic.

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The entire storyline is excellent and simply ripe for a feature film treatment, and I am holding hope that it will happen sometime in the future. The game plays as an overarching mystery where the protagonist uncovers more and more about not only herself, but the past of the entire planet, the catalyst for the apocalypse and eventually the key to destroying the main robot villain. Most of these uncoverings happen in the many rooms and areas which “The Old Ones” inhabited, and simply listening to numerous audio tapes and watching the holograms was very satisfactory. The lore is tremendously strong here.

The world building is also excellent. Yes, the cities are, well, primitive for the most part, and most of the time you will only encounter a tribe gathering or a village at best with a few exceptions. But this fits the post-apocalyptic setting perfectly. Having included anthropologists in the game’s production, this world felt sensible and lived-in. It was quite realistic in nature and the decaying of technology. Speaking of nature, the landscapes are lush and gorgeous while seeing the many different ecosystems was also wonderful.

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There are four tribes in the game with the main Nora tribe being the best developed one obviously, but all four have memorable moments throughout the story. Rost is a great father figure and his death was predictable, but emotionally powerful nonetheless. Sylens is a complex helper of sorts, but his motifs and backstory are intriguingly questionable. Erend is a fantastic character with a tragic backstory and I hope to see more of him in the sequel. Dr. Sobeck is a fascinating figure and most of the villains were excellent and quite formidable.

But this is all about Aloy herself, the plucky, ginger heroine who is not only phenomenally realized, but also a genuinely likable, even endearing and highly realistic creation as her fighting skills suit her weaker sex and her connection with the machines and high intelligence made her smarter than she initially seemed. The dialogue choices where you can choose for her to be either compassionate or merciless made for a powerful role-playing experience.

As for the gameplay, first things first, I am not a huge RPG fan nor am I terribly acquainted with the genre, so I wasn’t particularly adept at playing this game. I played through it as I was interested in the storyline and characters, but the overall level of difficulty was simply too much for me personally. At first, I played in hard mode and I played through the first third in that mode with great frustration and many failures, so I turned it back to normal, and eventually all the way back to easy where I could sail through it and enjoy the story.

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Why is it so difficult? Well, its battle mechanics are so intricately complex both to its strength and to its weakness. The game gives you so many options to play, but unfortunately a lot of these options are inferior to others, so that personally frustrated me. The fact that you have to stack up so many different weapons and that most of the machines are infuriatingly difficult and resilient only made things worse for me. I appreciated the game for this difficulty, but it was really hard getting myself through this vast world without dying pretty often.

Another issue I’ve had and this one is a true flaw that the game unfortunately never overcame is the lack of merchants that appear only sporadically on the map and they sell valuable stuff for way too pricey items demanded of you, but those items are limited in number in the stash that cannot be expanded at any capacity. That was highly frustrating. Even worse is that you have to buy a travel pack to travel from one point of the quest to another every single time, and almost each time it requires you to travel from opposite ends, which is counter-intuitive and needlessly complicated.

With that being said, the battle mechanic, though demanding, is still impeccably imagined in its complexity. The various bows and arrows are fantastic and they are your primary solution for most of the robot machines in the game while health is gained from certain plants that require grinding, but the flowers are at least quite abundant in the world. Making the arrows and weapons was also well realized, though most higher weapons demanded too many ingredients to make them.

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The stealth elements are fantastic, but underused as you are not asked to do those too often, but using the scanning for the robots’ weaknesses was superbly utilized. I loved that the game was in third person perspective and the mixing of action and RPG genres was so well done. The traps are interesting to use and the A.I. is quite intelligent, but the spears that Aloy can use are just horrendous. The entire close-combat mechanic in this game is almost pointless how weak she is at those, which is definitely realistic given her sex limitations, but not useful in the context of gaming, so the long-range option is pretty much the only legitimate one. Another problem is that she cannot jump all that well nor can she really climb. The choice to reduce your climbing option only to the marked spots was questionable to say the least.

One of the highlights of Horizon Zero Dawn has to be the A.I. What the creators did here was truly impressive as all of the robot machines not only look interesting, but they also behave in very peculiar animalistic manners. They are smart enemies through and through, thus making each and every one of them a formidable opponent. Finding out their weaknesses and proper ways of defence, attack and use of weaponry made for one highly advanced playing field while the overriding of the machines to use them as horses for travel was a very clever choice too.

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The open world is impressive. The natural landscapes are lush and gorgeous to behold. The graphical prowess at display here is incredible even in a lesser work that was the PC port. Everything feels fluid, lived in and gorgeously rendered. The backgrounds are by far the most admirable visual touches as sometimes I could not believe that I wasn’t watching cutscenes, but the actual game. The animals look great and are well integrated into the gameplay, the robots are immaculately designed and only the character designs felt inferior as some facial animations weren’t the best in rendering and the overall rough look.

The dialogue can also feel rather problematic in some pedestrian lines and badly framed imagery around these sequences. The voice acting is definitely terrific and the RPG choice of action was well realized, but these scenes still needed more energy and enthusiasm in the overall execution. Still, the characterization was strong and the emotion was definitely felt in certain powerful backstories and conclusions.

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There are too many controls, but eventually you will get used to them. The boss fights are simply incredibly well thought out given that they require quick thinking and strategy along with reflexes. The battles with many robots and/or people were particularly impressive audio-visually as you can feel the chaos and impending danger of these moments. The score is definitely strong in these parts, but otherwise could have been more epic and memorable.