Romping with robot dinos in the wilds of future Earth
First impressions (no spoilers)
It's an off-grid, post-survivalist life. The kind without running electricity and ready-made lunches.
You hunt for meat with bow-and-spear in quiet, pristine forests -- not at the local super, 'cos that was destroyed ages past in a mysterious apocalypse.
Horizon Zero Dawn (released 8 months ago on PS4) makes primitive survival fun. Leisurely, in fact, as you explore Nature, looking for herbs to pick, hunting dino-bots and natural wildlife, discovering the world around you and asking big questions. What are these ruins? Who were our ancestors? Who made the machines?
Indeed, why are there animal robots in a world where people dress and live like it's the Stone Age? Horizon's intriguing premise hooked me from the start.
The game offers not only exploration and discovery, but also palpable wonder and awe. Like the way your breath stops when you sight a new species of machine-creature on the horizon.
"Wow. Look at the size of that thing," you whisper, crouched in the safety of tall grass. Fifty paces away, Fire Bellowbacks are grazing on a hillside by wall ruins. Massive sacs on the Bellowbacks glow lime-green in the night. You wonder if they'll avoid you as deer-like Grazers do, or if they'll charge at you with the ferocity of Sawtooths.
I thought I'd gotten my outdoor fix from playing Dragon Age: Inquisition and Uncharted 4. But Horizon makes Dragon Age feel stale and plastic. In Horizon, you feel like a part of Nature. Hiking rocky cliffs, hiding in brush cover, peering through fog and darkness of night.
You feel a sense of body too. Your movements really count -- crouching, sprinting, dropping from a ledge -- they make the difference between a successful stealth kill and bumblingly alerting a herd of hostile Watchers.
Big-game hunter and her unbreakable spear
Though Horizon is essentially an action game (with RPG elements), combat is pretty manageable -- at least on "Story Mode," the easiest difficulty level.
I don't play many games with real-time combat and was happy Horizon didn't require too much finesse. Uncharted helped me get used to aiming, shooting, and dodging in the heat of battle, but I'm still pretty bad at that. Though Uncharted's combat is conceptually simpler, it required finer aiming and many unavoidable encounters with whole groups of enemies. I died a lot more. But Horizon presents easier fights with more interesting ways of fighting.
If you're a poor shot with the bow, just hammer away at low-level dinos with your spear.
If you don't like the chaos of melee showdowns, use tall grass for stealth. Then pick off dinos one by one using "Lure Call" and "Silent Strike," two skills you can unlock early. Set shock-wire traps to stun bigger dinos.
I'm not a combat junkie, but Horizon has been far from intimidating. In fact, I've found it mostly relaxing!
I like that the game doesn't bog you down with tons of instructions or text. There are many things you could craft, different ways to fight, optional artifacts to collect - but you can do them at your own pace, or not even bother at all.
Have no friends, will travel
When you aren't hunting machines, you're probably helping folks in distress. Usually, they've lost some sentimental belonging or some family member that needs tracking down. These form your RPG side-quests.
Horizon is more of an action game than an RPG to me because of the limited freedom to influence plotlines or customize your character.
In rare conversations, you can choose from 3 different emotional responses (compassion, tactics, or aggression). But I suspect these choices have little impact. There aren't diverging plotlines or different story endings. As for shaping your character's abilities, I have a feeling that my Aloy will look like your Aloy by the end of the game.
But where Horizon doesn't offer those choices, it offers an open-world map to explore at your leisure and discretion. You travel alone, companion-less, but there's a refreshing solitude in that.
The experience of Horizon is really more about getting to know the world and its lore than getting to know people. Yet, the story so far, which centers on Aloy's (outcast) relationship to the Nora tribe, is solid and supported by concise, well-written dialogue.
The plot engaged me from the get-go. It made me care about Aloy and her one burning desire. She's a distinctive personality, not a blank slate. The freedom to role-play is a minor trade-off; you can play traditional RPGs for that (like Dragon Age).
But what motivates me most is finding out what happened in the apocalypse. Mystery and discovery are what drive this game.
Savor the thrills of dino-hunting while uncovering Earth's tragic past! I'm up for more.
[Reviewed after 13 hours of play on Story mode, with a level 14 character and 19.62% completion.]