It finally (Horizon Zero) Dawned on me (Horizon Zero Dawn Review)

     Alright, folks, this is the big one. I've gone from thinking that Horizon Zero Dawn was a boring slog and not really my style to realizing that it's actually a really interesting and well made game. That's right. I, Jonathan Bowers, am in fact not perfect as I'm sure people have assumed about me, and I'm willing to grow and change my mindset. It's not a perfect game, for sure, and it has a lot of issues to discuss, but overall it was a good experience. The people involved at Guerilla Games have taken a bold step here away from the Killzone series that made them a well known second-party publisher for Sony, and their bet really paid off in this game. They have truly come up with an amazing idea, and although the wind was taken out of this game's sales by The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which came out a week later, it's clear that people were really invested in Aloy and the world she inhabits. The sequel to this game has already been announced, and as the ending of the first game definitely gives some hints as to what we may be facing in the second game, I won't be speculating about any of that, but rather just focusing on the product that we already have.

Background

    If you're thinking that Aloy looks like "alloy" without one of the 'L's, well... yeah. In a world with giant robotic animals and where the gods are giant machines, it makes perfect sense. Welcome to Horizon's crazy world, where prehistoric civilization and futuristic technology coexist in not-so-perfect harmony. You have to give the developers credit for the amount of creativity and effort they had in creating this world for you to explore, in addition to another civilization that's hidden in text and audio files for Aloy to discover with the help of her Focus, a device from before the fall that she uses to scan the objects and animals of the metal world. The fallen world was exactly like the world that we live in, and you can still see the ruins of different famous landmarks, that you can see better from Vantage points that show you how the original structure looked. It's an amazing feeling to see a giant coliseum, only to realize that it's built on the structure of what used to be a baseball stadium. The game as a whole is full of weird and exciting new discoveries like these, including when a friend of mine actually had been to one of the places that appeared in one of these vantage points. It's a really neat touch, and one that very few games have accomplished with such grace (Though The Last of Us and Enslaved: Journey to the West come to mind). The setting is amazing, and it's perfect for the story that they're telling. It's very sci-fi, though it's pretty incredible how they slowly pull back the curtain and reveal what actually was happening behind the scenes in this pre-apocalyptic world.

The Tale of Aloy

    Aloy is an incredibly strong character, one that I didn't even like all that much when I first played it, but she really grew on me. Raised by a man living outside of the embrace of the local tribe, the Nora. Aloy wasn't able to enter the Nora's gates because it was said that she had no mother, and as the mother was the most important member of this apocalyptic society, they viewed her as an outcast. There were so many scenes of people being mean to her that I got angry on her behalf. She obviously didn't have anything to do with this situation, but she was treated so wrongly for her circumstances. It's heartbreaking to see things like that going on, so to see Aloy eventually accepted into the tribe, you feel elated for her. Of course, two seconds later, all of the other participants in the ritual that she won for the privilege are murdered, as well as her surrogate father, but for a moment, you feel happy for her. She's worked hard to get where she is, though she has a long path ahead of her. She's given the highest honor of the Nora tribe to become the seeker and find what's happened to make some other tribe attack the Nora people, and ultimately stumbles across a huge conspiracy, leading to an issue that was begun long before Aloy was born. I won't spoil anything past this point, but just know that it's truly an incredible story, and I especially loved the fact that based on the side quests that you do, it changes some of the allies that you'll be surrounded by for the end of the game. 

    Aloy is a really endearing character, brought to life by excellent voice acting by Ashly Burch, and though the facial animation is sometimes a little wonky during dialogue (as is to be expected when there are so many conversations in games like this or Assassin's Creed), the voice acting really pulls through. Burch and Lance Reddick (who voices Sylens, a character that I don't want to spoil) both give incredible performances, with Burch punching up some lines that may have fallen flat in less talented hands to the point where I couldn't help but laugh. Reddick, on the other hand, voices a very serious and no-nonsense character, and one that we'll almost certainly be seeing more of in Horizon Forbidden West if the after-credit teaser is to be believed.

Gameplay Impressions

    Now that I've gotten through the amazing stuff, I have to say, this game is great specifically because of the story. The gameplay is a lot of fun for the most part, but there were way too many side quests that just bordered on tedium. The classic goose-chase style of fetch quest is here in full force, tasking poor Aloy to do a task that's as exciting as picking up someone's prescription from the pharmacy far too often. They're never quite that dull, certainly, I'm just giving an overall feel of a lot of the quests. There were some great quests as well, with some tasking you of teaming up with a psychopath to take out a camp of bandits, there's a psychic who can supposedly have visions if he drinks the "blood" of different machines, and even a full on Romeo and Juliet style romance going on at one point. The way that Aloy is able to react to this cast of weirdos makes the story more immersive, especially considering the Mass Effect-esque system of being able to choose different dialogue options based on either intelligence, sympathy, or aggression. I've never been big on any game like this, I never played much Dragon Age or Mass Effect, but the dialogue options do add a good bit, even though they don't change anything about Aloy's relationships from what I understand.

    The platforming as a whole is not great. This game is full of cliffs and ruins that you have to climb, though you're given specific handholds that you can grab onto, and they blend right into the environment. Some are really obscure to the point where I had to just jump around a cliff and hope that Aloy would grab onto one even though it didn't look like there was anything there. Some were more obvious than others, such as yellow bolts and ropes, but even they would be really hard to see when the sun was setting, it was a lot easier to find them when the sun was either completely up, or the moon was out. That's really more of a complaint about the lighting system I guess, but still, it made things really annoying. Speaking of platforming, this is another game relying on the "climb up a big tower and unlock the map" model of map progression, although it's an interesting take with mechanical giraffes called Tallnecks. This mechanic is really all about position and timing, where you have to climb up to get to a spot where you can jump onto one of the platforms on it's back, and once you're on, it's fairly simple to climb up the neck and get on top of the platform which is it's head. Normally this works alright, but there were several situations where I climbed up and waited for a Tallneck to pass, but when I jumped on, Aloy missed the platform entirely and somehow ended up on its back, then glitched through the metal beast and died. This is a perfect illustration of the issues that I had with platforming in this game, and one that I sincerely hope that Guerrilla fixes in Forbidden West.

    The combat is very original in this game. I really liked the whole mechanic involved with removing different components from the metal beasts which would disable different abilities. The human enemies weren't quite as interesting to deal with, but there was definitely something satisfying about completing combat or stealth challenges posed when taking on bandit camps. The collectibles I felt could be a bit tedious to find, especially some of the later ones since because I didn't understand what I was supposed to be doing for a lot of them due to the confusing platforming that I spoke of earlier. That being said, however, finding the collectibles was just a nice little challenge that I dealt with mostly after beating the game, I thought of it kind of like a victory lap. Aloy had seen me through the end of the campaign and I thought it would only be fair to treat her to some extra collectibles which ultimately didn't give me anything too special except the platinum trophy.

    Horizon Zero Dawn was a great game, though definitely not without its flaws. I had a good time with it, though I wouldn't say that it holds the same masterpiece level as the God of War reboot from 2018. I talked to a friend of mine about this game and decided that there seemed to be a meeting where they had to decide on whether to spend more time and money on the story and voice acting or on the gameplay. The impression that I get is that they definitely went the story route, while a game like Breath of the Wild went way more for gameplay with a much more subdued story. I would most likely recommend this game to someone else, though I would issue a caveat about the beginning, which is pretty boring, but you have to get through that before anything better arrives. By the time that the credits roll, I can almost guarantee that you'll be emotionally invested in the weird circumstances surrounding Aloy's life, even while thinking of all the cliffs you had to hop up along the way. 

    Thanks so much for reading this post, and I hope you liked Horizon Zero Dawn if you've checked it out already! Let me know if you have any recommendations for me to check out in terms of games that you feel like haven't gotten enough attention overall, or if you just want to shout out some personal favorites. I hope you all have a great week, and I'll talk to you next Friday!