I’m enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn a lot. A great big lot, actually. The world is beautifully realised, leading lady Aloy is a great character and the narrative is intriguing. I hope this is the start of a great series.
, Horizon Zero Dawn is developer Guerrilla Game’s first open-world action role-playing game after a history dominated by tightly controlled first person shooter Killzone and it’s far from the perfect game, but it’s clear with HZD that Guerrilla has taken inspiration from other games – Far Cry, Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed – but added its own small touches. .
There’s no doubt Aloy is the focus here, and rightly so, but the game’s beasts, mechanical machines based on real life animals, are stars in this game, too, each with weaknesses, smarts and vulernabilities.
Snapjaw (crocodiles), Longleg (ostriches), broadhead (cattle), sawtooth (tiger): Mechanical beasts made from metal, cable and glass – you can shoot off individual components, provided you have the right weapon, which will slow them down, revealing weak points. They’re roaming the wilderness in HZD and nine times out of 10 they want to eat you. That’s when you hot foot it out of where they are, or take them down – or die trying.
Horizon Zero Dawn treds familiar paths that gamers accustomed to open-world games have walked before, but I don’t have a problem with that: It does it so well, so stylishly and with stunning visuals, that Id rather play Horizon Zero Dawn than Assassin’s Creed 95 or Far Cry 12. Sure, the game has flaws: fighting the human enemies isn’t as nearly fulfilling as the beasts, the voice acting is hit and miss at times, and some of the NPC AI is questionable at times, but the side quests are entertaining and Aloy is a genuinely interesting character.
So to that end, Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that deserves a special kind of review, so that’s what I’m going to give it. I’m not rabbit on for paragraph after paragraph telling you what I did, how I did it and what happened. I’m not going to write clever prose. I’m going to show you the world in pictures, taken using the game’s photo mode.
Enjoy.
Aloy caught mid-rappell down a ravine.
A fire bellow back so, so close to Aloy (you can just make out her head in the foliage). This is one of those time the AI is a little wonky: I’m actually surprised the creature didn’t spot me – He was pretty much on top of me.
The same image as above but using the photo mode’s sepia filter.
Aloy atop a longneck, Horizon Zero Dawn’s version of Far Cry’s towers. Once overridden, the map opens up a little bit more, revealing a little bit more.
The photo mode lets you adjust things like camera position, colour balance, time of day and even remove the HUD.
One of my favourites. The game world is littered with remnants of the “metal age” when man was dominant. Times have changed.
