As part of Sony’s never-ending assault on our wallets this spring, Guerilla Games, the studio behind the previously mediocre-to-good Killzone series, brings us Horizon: Zero Dawn. A neat game with many interesting things going on under the hood and a unique world that needs more fleshing out than this game actually does.
In Horizon, you play as a hunter named Aloy, an outcast from birth because of the bizarre circumstances of her birth. She lives in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by giant robots and must find out what happened to the world in order to discover who her mother was, but not before tangling with some good old-fashioned death cults.
The combat of Horizon is perhaps its strongest quality. Centered around the gimmick of killing these mechanical beasts with an array of highly advanced bows and arrows, along with a few other neat toys. If you're spotted, the game’s light stealth ends and the combat becomes about literally ripping pieces and components off the robots, damaging weak points in order to disable the moveset of your opponents, while using traps and elemental weaknesses to gain the upper hand. Fighting humans in this game is a disappointment in comparison.
The open world format itself was room to worry before release, due to bad memories of games like Assassin’s Creed Unity, but it turns out the game works more like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt combined with very deliberately toned down elements of "The Ubisoft Sandbox." It's an RPG with levels, experience and side quests with collectibles, climbing and radio towers.
Luckily, unlike "The Ubisoft Sandbox," they’re greatly reduced in number and time per item, allowing for more interesting things per tower and collectible. This means the game is able to be 100 percent completed in just the right amount of time to be worth the effort without being tedious.
Unfortunately, the side quests are fewer in number and less in overwhelming quality than the Witcher, and since we’re on about animation lately, this game doesn't do animations as well as Witcher.
The main story doles out revelations at a compelling pace, and one thing I found interesting is that the events of the game feel like the sequel to at least a couple of other stories, that of the current world’s politics and the story of the world that came before.
Unfortunately, and this was something the Witcher and most Bioware games did so much better, you don't get much time to stop and have fun with the characters. Scenes where Aloy and company have drinks, talk about goofy stuff and create connections are absent. If those scenes were here, the story might have been the stuff of legends. Instead, it holds the interest and engages the mind to some degree, but it doesn't inspire outside of the excellent conclusion to the Old World storyline.
Horizon is a fundamentally solid game, but it won't set your heart on fire like other RPGs with fixed protagonists and nice graphics. $40 at most is what you should pay for this, and before you ask, the PS4’s original model is no worse off in terms of performance.
And before you start complaining that I don't know anything about this game because I didn't play it enough…
Writer's Note: I was going to review Mass Effect: Andromeda, but my money is decidedly finite, and it's blatant budget cuts, poor writing and animation turned me off hard. Evidently, that is the first game by the B-Studio, and they didn't have the clout the main Bioware team had to avoid getting screwed by EA, or the experience and skill needed to do even the studio’s famous LGBT representation right. For example: in Andromeda, a transwoman gives out her dead name in the very first conversation you have with her. Dragon Age: Inquisition from a few years prior makes Andromeda look like amateur hour in nearly every respect.
Logan Graham is a junior studying media arts with a focus in games and animation at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Did you like Horizon: Zero Dawn? Let him know by emailing him at lg261813@ohio.edu.
