Developer: Guerrilla Games
Publisher: PlayStation Mobile
Rrp: £39.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic)
Released: 28th February 2017 (PlayStation 4 release) 7th August 2020 (PC Release)
Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic
Played Using: An Xbox One Control Pad
Approximate game length: 40 Hours
Console exclusivity, I could write a whole essay on the good and ills of console exclusivity. Generally speaking I’m against titles being exclusive, be they console or digital store. Its just a way to force people into a ecosystem by holding a title (or set of titles) to ransom. I have a slightly more lenient attitude to ‘timed exclusives’ because at least they eventually become accessible to everyone.
Horizon Zero Dawn is an open world adventure game set long after an apocalypse of some kind has happened. At this point the world has regrown its flora and what’s left of humanity has reverted to a more primitive way of life. However along with the new flora are machines that look a lot like animals. You play as Aloy, a young woman who was born an Outcast from her tribe. Early on in the game Aloy finds a device from the past called a Focus that allows her to analyse the machines that inhabit the world, along with many other functions that become apparent as you play.
Originally Horizon Zero Dawn was exclusive to the Playstation 4 and I have to say I really hope that Sony release more of their exclusives. It only makes sense to release them to the PC after a few years, anyone who was going to buy the console and the game has already done so by now, releasing to PC just allows them to mop up some extra cash. Consider that it sold 716,000 copes in the first month of its PC release. This move could work very well for Sony as it introduces a whole new group of players to their various titles, and in the case of Horizon Zero Dawn it was released on PC just as the sequel was announced for the Playstation, which could very easily drive some extra sales of PS4 and PS5’s just for that game alone.
Unfortunately before I can go into all the things this game does right I have to cover its flaws, or at least the ones I’ve witnessed. The big one for me being that every time you start the game up it will begin to optimise it’s shaders, this process took up to ten minutes each time I booted up the game on my system. You can choose to play the game so that it does this process in the background but I found that it caused it to run at an abysmal framerate (about ten to fifteen fps) which rendered the game virtually unplayable. However I did find a way to at least shorten the time it takes to only a few minutes, which was to run the game in admin mode. I only wish I knew why that worked for me as upon researching it not everyone had success with this method.
Another, far smaller, issue was that the lip syncing for the character models was a bit off and no amount of graphical tinkering could fix that for me. Thankfully, as flaws go this one is something I can overlook when the rest of the game is just so gorgeous and fun to play.
Now that we have that unpleasantness out of the way its time to cover what might be the most important part of an open world game, the world itself. I think that Horizon Zero Dawn might feature the largest number of biomes I’ve seen appear in the genre. Of course, the proximities of them all make no sense since you can travel from a desert into a verdant grassland and then into a frozen wasteland on foot within a day, so some suspension of disbelief is needed. That being said the world map is definitely on the large side. In fact I was curious as to how large so I ran from one side to the other in the most direct route possible. That journey took nearly 25 minutes at full sprint the whole way.
I also have to say the Guerrilla Games have really excelled with creating such a beautiful world to roam around in. Even on my system that wasn’t running the game at anywhere close to full graphical fidelity (prioritising framerate) it all looked absolutely stunning.
Of course like any open world game there are an absolute ton of icons on the map screen, although many of them relate to where a specific herd of machines are located.
Unlike other open world games the fast travel between campfires or settlements isn’t free. Each time you utilise the fast travel mechanic a ‘fast travel pack’ is consumed. This might sound like the game is punishing the player for making use of the mechanic, and in a way it is, but this encourages the player to explore and travel the world on foot (or by riding a mount). Also these packs can be bought cheaply from any merchant, are easy to craft and can sometimes be found on human enemies.
Later on in the game you can purchase an item that allows unlimited fast travel use, it’s quite expensive but then by the time you reach the point to want to buy it it’ll likely be easily within your budget.
The majority of the time your main opponent in this game will be the various machines that wander the world. Most of these have the form of animals from the old world including some from the extremely distant past. It should be noted that even the smallest and weakest of the machines, the watcher, isn’t a foe that you can take lightly even in the late game they can hit quite hard and be the cause of some major trouble and that’s before they alert everyone about you being around.
Every machine has at least one weak point, its just a matter of having the right weapon to take advantage of it. Shooting these not only damages the machine considerably but can also disable certain attacks it could perform. In addition to this, often you can search for the parts you shot off and salvage a component that just killing the machine is unlikely to give.
One of the main things to remember is that Aloy is primarily a hunter and a tracker, not a warrior. She is at her best when she can ambush her prey at the right moment after studying its movements or at least strike at a critical weak spot. To aid with this Aloy can hide in tall grass to avoid detection, though this only goes so far if you miss a shot your target can work out where it came from and may even begin to attack the location.
As you complete quests, do side missions and kill enemies you’ll gain experience and thusly gain levels. Each level gives you a skill point that can be spent in the skills menu. There are a variety of skills you can spend these points on, ranging from ones that increase the damage your melee attacks do through to the ability to repair your mount.
As I mentioned before machines once killed (or if a weak point is destroyed) will drop components. These components can be used to craft ammunition while in the field as well as be used as items for trade with merchants. Another thing that both machines and your human opponents will drop are metal shards, which act as currency.
You can buy more weapons and armour as well as upgraded versions of existing items in shops. However, sometimes metal shards aren’t enough and a resource such as an animal skin or a machine part is also needed to purchase an item. This becomes especially true for equipment the further into the game you go.
It’s very tempting to treat any open world game with a third person perspective like its an Assassin’s Creed title, especially one that puts such a large emphasis on stealth. The thing is that unlike the Assassins Creed series you can’t just clamber and climb anywhere, instead this game is more in-line with Tomb Raider where there are clearly marked places for you to climb, usually depicted with yellow in some way.
Because this is the Complete Edition this game also comes with the Frozen Wilds DLC that introduces a new area. Unfortunately I have no idea how well integrated this DLC is into the game since I never played the game previously and to me the Banuk tribe felt like a natural inclusion rather than something tacked on. This new area is known as ‘The Cut’ and is much more challenging than the base game. I went in with a character who was ten levels higher than the ‘suggested level’ and was fully equipped and I still struggled.
The one unfortunate issue that comes from this DLC is that once you complete it you should have some even better equipment than when you started. It sounds like an odd thing to say but having such equipment can and does make the base game feel much less challenging. Good thing you can crank the difficulty up whenever you feel like it.
Once you complete the game you can play again on New Game Plus, this will give you all your equipment and skills from when you completed the game.
This comes with the added benefit of being able to get ‘adept’ weapons that have more customisability and cosmetic items like face paints etc.
This is the first game in a while where I didn’t just finish the game but went out of my way to get all of the collectibles and complete every mission I could, and I did it all because I wanted to continue exploring the world.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Nier: Automata
Tomb Raider
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
