Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017)

 

Genre: Open World Action RPG | Players:1 | Developer: Guerrilla Games

     Tribal humans fighting mecha-dinosaurs? Quite a pitch. Sign me up. I see why they put that as the first trailer for the game. That child's dream premise is the setting of Horizon: Zero Dawn, where an unspecified apocalypse has left humanity on the brink of extinction. Those left have reverted to tribal stone age societies that survive by hunting animals and scavenging the mechanical beasts that now roam most of the land.

    At the center of this is Aloy, a girl cast out from her tribe at birth for unknown reasons. Raised by her adoptive father figure and mentor, she trains to be able to take place in a tribal tradition that will win her re-admittance to the tribe as well as the right to demand answers of the matriarchal tribal leader of her past and banishment. Things go wrong tho when the contest is interrupted by outsiders raiding and slaughtering the contestants and other warriors who have seemingly come specifically to kill Aloy. This spurs her to journey outside tribal territory on a journey to find answers to not just the attack, but to her own heritage and how it connects to the legacy of the "Old Ones"; the humans of the pre-apocalyse who are both semi-worshiped for their technological knowledge and feared for their downfall that has left only ruins.

    Players control Aloy in an open world setting where they can do quests for NPC's, follow the main story, fight machines both stealthily or openly with a wide variety of weapons and skills, or scavenge resources to craft items, weapons, ammo and outfits. The combat is decently fluid and the skills and weapons give many ways to take down enemies. Each enemy type has strengths and weaknesses that Aloy can scan to learn the best way of taking them down and leveling up gives skill points that can be spent for Aloy to learn new abilities which gives the RPG part of this action RPG. The enemy AI is decently challenging, but can feel a bit stifling when multiple enemies attack patterns overlap effectively stun-locking until Aloy dies. The world is large and heavily explorable with villages, bandit camps, cities, landscapes and the ruins of the Old Ones. More chances to run into the more colorful NPCs. The characters are all interestingly designed and acted as they go about their lives like the man who pays players to collect "artifacts" which are actually just ancient coffee mugs with corporate branding on them because he thinks they were part of a sacred ritual. Too bad Aloy is the least animated of them. Natural given she has lived isolated for 18 years, but she never seems to grow out of it. Ashly Burch gives great emotion in some dialogue, but Aloy's whole personality can come off kind of flat. There are also some technical bugs like voices sometimes going out of sync with mouths, or Aloy becoming torso-less when an outfit change won't load. Nothing unseen before in video games and it doesn't dampen what is an excellent science fiction story and adventure with varied combat and deep exploration with a bit of replayability in different dialogue trees and choices to be made.

Buyer's Guide: Was a PS4 exclusive for years until a PC port was released. The PC port was super buggy. It has since been patched, but is still the slightly less stable version with more versatility in technical options being on PC. Later editions come with the Frozen Wilds DLC already included.

4 Corporate Sponsored Apocalypses out of 5