Horizon: Zero Dawn - Review
Riding a mechanical bull across the pastoral highlands of Horizon: Zero Dawn, I spot a herd of grazing machines alongside a riverbed. Dismounting, I crouch in a patch of tall grass analyzing the composition of the herd. Laying a series of trip wires, I work my way around them to the opposite river shore and prepare to attack one, hoping to drive them into my traps. Just before I'm about to let fly my arrow, something catches my eye in the river, a submerged and rapidly approaching series of lights. Suddenly, a massive mechanical crocodile lunges from the river, smashing into me with deadly force and sending me flying. Moments like this really make Horizon: Zero Dawn shine and marks only a single moment out of many in one of the best games I've ever played.
Horizon: Zero Dawn focuses a lot on Aloy (pronounced Ay-Loy), the main character who Sony desperately wants to become another brand icon like Nathan Drake or the Helghast. Fortunately, Aloy not only delivers on being a seemingly invincible ultra-badass but also someone who has earned a real personality through her continued plight and mistrust of authority. At times, she is willful to a fault with a wonderfully amusing sarcastic streak and the kind of 'never-give-up' attitude that is necessary to drive a story of this magnitude forward. The voice actress behind Aloy, Ashly Burch knocks it out of the park conveying her lines with appropriate amounts of emotion and plausibility. There are even a smattering of moments where you are given control over how Aloy reacts to a situation, choosing between the generalized options of empathetic, logical or angry. These don't necessarily change either her character or the subsequent action but are there simply to add some personal flavor to some of the dialogue and it works well in those moments. However, it has to be said that, on occasion, the magnification of her greatness feels a bit forced, almost manufactured. One particular moment that stands out to me is a Rocky-style training montage that drags on entirely too long especially since we didn't really know this character yet. Okay, enough, we get it, she's a badass. As the story progresses, we are force-fed less of these moments and the game allows her (and your) actions speak for themselves. Regardless, Aloy is a character who I came to care deeply about, who I empathized with and who I wanted to see succeed throughout my journey.
The superb plot of Horizon: Zero Dawn delivers on both being a personal drama about self-discovery and being a grand-scale, on the brink of apocalypse, narrative. The true genius of the story is the way that it masterfully entwines the inherent mysteries of the world (such as where these dinosaur machines come from) with the more personal story that Aloy embarks on. She doesn't set out to discover the reasons behind the fall of mankind as we know it but comes to them naturally and they eventually become a driving force in the main tale. The world itself even helps tell the story with fallen skyscrapers and hidden mechanical dungeons giving you a peek behind the curtains to glimpse the lore of a clearly well crafted and well thought out future. It is absolutely enchanting to come across a herd of deer-shaped machines grazing alongside a river and know, with utter certainty, that you're going to unravel the mystery behind that machine's existence. The main thread of the story is told primarily through cutscenes and missions with a myriad of optional audio, video and text logs scattered throughout the main quest areas. I highly recommend that you spend the time acquainting yourself with these various logs as they will give you both a deeper understanding of the world and a wider perspective from which to view the main narrative. There is an overarching theme of hope and longing that resonates in both the immediate story with Aloy and the slowly revealed history of the past. Honestly, I found it immensely and emotionally poignant. It grows on you over time and if you let it, it will speak to your core humanity in a way that games rarely can.
Simply put, Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of the most spectacularly beautiful games I've ever had the pleasure to play. The absurd level of detail that encompasses the entire game is honestly mind-boggling and I would often find myself seriously considering how it was technically possible. The way that beautifully animated mechanical beasts roam through several climatic regions from the windblown, rustic desert to the frigid, snowy highlands to even the swamp-like rain forest is truly a marvel. Weather patterns come and go, each dependent on your current location with dust storms ravaging the arid climates while blizzards blow through the mountainous areas. Vibrant lighting extends even through nighttime where a distinctly bright moon illuminates in beautiful blues and greens solving one of my age-old problems with open-world games: nights never look as good as the days. Sincere recognition needs to also go to Guerrilla's sound design team who had the daunting task of creating the sounds of a full bestiary of metal animals and their terrifying screeches and deafening crunches in battle. With the sole exception of facial animations, I'd say that this is the most universally stunning game that I've played in recent memory.
Throughout Horizon, there diverse and delightfully distinct settlements strewn across every corner of the map. As you progress, you'll encounter a myriad of new and wonderful places populated with wonderfully voice acted NPCs who will react dynamically to a variety of things. Passerby's will comment on your widely known accomplishments, the status of a certain faction or even on something as small as your choice of clothing. If you were worried that the 'native' theme from the trailers would grow stale, rest assured that the settlements and people from the various cultures that you encounter throughout the world are completely different with each one as fascinating to discover and learn about as the next. Perhaps one of the greatest design decisions that Horizon: Zero Dawn makes is that it isolates its main character, Aloy, right from the beginning. She has no knowledge of the larger world, just as we, the player don't. So when she is experiencing these wild new lands and peoples and places, so are we. Because of this very reason, I'll leave that sense of discovery unperturbed and I won't spoil anymore than I already have but, rest assured, you will be amazed at the massive scale of worldbuilding that Horizon undertakes, masterfully fleshing out entire cultures and their corresponding histories.
Unfortunately, the facial animations simply are not up to par with the rest of Horizon's presentation. The faces themselves are carefully detailed and rendered but the lip-syncing is only accurate about half of the time. Most of the time, it's just minor slip-ups but sometimes minor characters' faces will start spasming in laughably bad ways while they're talking. And while Aloy never has these specific problems, she does have a different issue altogether. It feels like to avoid the same issue that some NPC's suffer with lip syncing, Guerrilla had to make Aloy less emotive when she speaks. It's a minor issue but sometimes it feels like something else besides her mouth should be moving on her face. For the most part, the story missions seem to have her face properly animated but some side quests don't have the same level of fidelity. She may be delivering the bad news to a grieving family member, voice full of emotion, but she'll still stare at you like a Terminator-1000 scanning for a target. Honestly this is a minor gripe but in a game so uniformly beautiful, it's a considerably more noticeable dent in the aesthetics.
Horizon: Zero Dawn boasts a veritable smorgasbord of side activities handily separated into a variety of categories that clearly identify what type of quest your undertaking. There are a handful of main quests that don't directly influence the primary narrative but that span over multiple missions and objectives and usually end up affecting the main characters in one way or another. Each of these is well paced and interesting with their own flavor and cutscenes to set them apart. On the other hand, there's the side quests, which spin short narratives but are usually multi-tiered and worth the time to investigate. For instance, there was a particularly moving one about a man searching for his missing daughter while another had me clearing out machines from an estate only to discover a dark family secret. Then you have the errands which are literally labelled 'Errands' and are your basic fetch quests and 'kill stuff' quests that vary in quality based on who or what your fighting. A new machine needs killing? No problem! A bandit camp needs clearing? Meh... As Guerrilla Games first open-world outing, the variance of quest archetypes and general high level of quality is admirable and I believe that as this franchise (hopefully) grows, they will only become more confident in their extracurricular activities, potentially matching the exceptional quality of CD Projekt Red.
One thing that all of this story and questing and adventuring requires, however, is fun, engaging and diverse minute-to-minute gameplay. As the architects of the Killzone series, Guerrilla Games knows action and gameplay is something that Horizon delivers on in spades... most of the time. Exploring a vast landscape filled with dangerous machines is consistently thrilling. You never know when you're going to stumble on a vicious new breed of machine that, if disturbed, will soon focus all of its attention on destroying you. My first encounter with the Snapjaw, a machine crocodile, was particularly memorable as I was completely oblivious to its lakeside approach as I was picking herbs to make into a potion. When it struck me like a hammer, let's just say that I would have given little girls a run for their money with the pitch of my scream. Aloy is able to scan each machine and determine weak points that will correspond with a particular type of damage indicating how you should prepare for the fight. And prepare you must. If you go half-cocked into a battle, trying to brute-force your way through, you are going to get smashed. Each foe requires a specific tactical response encouraging smart play and it really turns each battle into an experience, particularly when you're individually destroying components attached to a mechanical monster in order to make it less lethal. Occasionally, you can even use the various pieces of a beast that you've blown off to help you take it down in the long run. There's just something satisfying about this methodical take to action, something that resonates with me as a player that I find intoxicating.
The combat system itself is subtly deep and well-balanced throughout. You begin the game with only a spear and a basic bow but as you explore further and complete more missions, merchants will begin to sell more weapons or even some of the same weapons except with new elemental firing abilities. Despite the limited number of unique weapons, unlocking new elemental archetypes can completely morph how you'd approach a situation. Perhaps trying these new ice arrows instead of shock arrows will slow that monster down long enough to tether it to the ground with my Ropecaster. The ability to craft ammunition on the fly from materials you've gathered either from the wild or other dead machines allows you to test out new strategies with little downside. Additionally, there is an entire modification system for both your weapons and the various prefabricated armors available for purchase across the land. Modifications are rare early on but later in the game they become essential and you'll be able to tune your weapons just the way you like them. Here's a hint: use fire modifications on your hunter's bow to annihilate the corrupted machines you'll run across. Stealth plays a big role in most confrontations as well with the tell-tale tall grass spread across most regions. You can activate a stealth hit for an instant kill on small machines or significant damage on the bigger ones but, remember, once you've struck and unless you killed it, they'll know where you are and they're going to tell all their friends. Finally, the leveling system actually provides you with new maneuvers with most skill point assignments so you won't be spending your level points on boring shit like increasing your health bar. You'll be able to pull off new moves, or at least make the moves you know more deadly, with each new level. Basically, Horizon: Zero Dawn gives you all the tools to engage with these monstrosities on your own terms, challenging you to not only destroy them but to outsmart them.
While you'll spend most of your time fighting various beasts of the machine animal kingdom, you'll sometimes be forced to battle it out with human enemies and these encounters are far less engaging. The first few times, I actually enjoyed breaking up the machine action with a little more conventional bandit slaughter, sneaking through their camps, silently reaping bow headshot after bow headshot. But when you realize that that's literally it, with no diversity of human enemies outside of normal and brute, you'll be aching to get back to the machine battles. Additionally, some of the late game bandit areas are ridiculously overpopulated. I swear I must have murdered 30 dumbass bandits at one location. One thing you can do to make these events more appealing is use the deep combat system itself as a tool for enjoyment. Trying setting a bunch of electrical trip wires, riding in on a longhorn bull machine to get their attention, have them follow you into the tripwires, only to then go about running over their stunned bodies on that same bull. Funny shit. That reminds me about the entire override mechanic which another flavorful aspect to combat. Once you learn how to override specific types of machines, you'll be able to turn them against one another in combat. Let me tell you, watching giant mechanical tigers
take down a monstrous metal boar is a sight too awesome to describe with these meager words.
Characterization Done Right
Narrative Both Large and Small
The Beauty of Horizon
Places to Go, People to See
Facing a Problem
Questing 101
Well, is it Actually Fun?
Play How You Want
Depopulating Bandits
take down a monstrous metal boar is a sight too awesome to describe with these meager words.
Comments
Post a Comment