Horizon Zero Dawn: A review in pictures

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, 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.

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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.

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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.

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Horizon Zero Dawn: The world of Aloy in pictures

Horizon Zero Dawn is out tomorrow on PS4 – and it’s good. Very good.

I’ve played for a few hours in the Nora shoes of main character Aloy, an outcast who must save the people who abandoned her from a robotic evil, and the game looks stunning. It’s probably one of the most visually arresting games I’ve played on a console.

So, to make the most of those sumptuous visuals, developer Guerrilla have included a rather neat photo mode that lets you tweak a whole lot of settings so you can get that perfect screenshot (including determining the time of day, moving the camera up or down as if on a crane and, nicely, an option to remove the HUD and characters from the scene).

I’ve played around with the photo mode so thought I’d post a few of the images I’ve captured so far. Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that makes you want to stop and take screenshots.

Enjoy.

Thanks to PlayStation for the review copy of Horizon Zero Dawn.

Halo Wars 2: RTS returns to Xbox

Note, this is a review of Halo Wars 2’s campaign. I haven’t had a chance to look at the multiplayer or the new Blitz mode, which melds RTS elements with a collectible card game, yet. I’ll give my thoughts on those when I get the chance. Enjoy.

halo-wars-2-campaign-crossings Halo Wars 2 is proving that real-time strategy games aren’t just the domain of the PC.

And it does a pretty damn good job, actually, showing that an RTS game can be played with a controller pretty well, despite the controls not being as tight as if you were using a mouse and keyboard.

This isn’t the first time a Halo RTS games has appeared on a console, though: The original Halo Wars launched on the Xbox360. The game feels unmistakably Halo, with all the sounds, effects and characters you’d expect. It feels like a part of the Halo universe.

The story opens with Captain Cutter and the crew of the UNSC Spirit of Fire being woken from cryosleep after the ship starts orbiting the Ark, the place where the rings from Halo are made. Unfortunately, it seems the Ark has been invaded by a disgruntled band of the Covenant called The Banished, led by a brute called Atriox.

Coming from the new wardens of the Halo franchise, 343 Industries the company handed the game making duties over to acclaimed RTS specialists, Creative Assembly, and fans of the genre will find much to like with Halo Wars. Missions are a good length and generally involve things like hold this position until help arrives or take out these objectives but it does little to move the genre forward. The story feels a little well trod, too, seeing as it’s essentially a disgruntled alien that wants to destroy humanity.

halo-wars-2-multiplayer-battle-fog The game is beautifully presented graphically, with the level of detail on units and structures just wonderful. I never got tired of seeing a base being constructed, UNSC Pelican’s dropping in with resources before swooping off for the next section of the base. Like all RTS game, resource collection and management is key here: Collect enough resources and you’ll continue building units. It’s that simple.

halo-wars-2-multiplayer-defend-the-base Controlling and selecting units is made simple using the Xbox One’s controller: Use the left stick on the controller to sweep the units you want to select then press the A button, while a double tap on the right bumper highlights every unit on the battlefield. Your troops are competent as well, attacking enemies without prompting.

If I’m being completely honest, I spent most of my time playing Halo Wars on my PC just because, for me, the mouse and keyboard will always be king when it comes to role-playing games and the control is just more precise than an Xbox One controller, especially if things turn pear-shaped and you have to quickly get your view back to a base that is under attack.

Sure, Halo Wars 2 suffers a little from the limitations of being on a console and it doesn’t reinvent the RTS rules, but overall, it’s a solid addition to the Halo franchise.

Thanks to Xbox NZ for providing a downloadable copy of Halo Wars 2 for review.

Horizon Zero Dawn developer interview: Making a world full of robotic dinosaurs

Senior producer on Horizon Zero Dawn Joel Eschler.

Joel Eschler, a senior producer on Horizon Zero Dawn, the PlayStation 4-exclusive third-person action RPG from Dutch video game developer Guerrilla, readily admits he’s a control freak but it’s a trait that he believes helps make better games.

On Horizon Zero Dawn, Joel oversaw the game’s environment art which included managing the teams responsible for the game world, lighting and the creation of assets for the game. “My general day-to-day is managing the team at large and managing our goals and making sure we’re shipping the game on time and having it looking awesome. He joined Guerrilla at the beginning of 2016, having worked for 2K in Australia.

Joel says he’s a naturally organised person and a “control freak so a lot of what I do in my day-to-day sort of comes from that OCD side of you that something’s not being done in the best way and you need to correct that. I mean, that’s the most basic level of my job.”

Aloy confronts a watcher.

Before starting work as a tester with 2K 10 years ago, Joel was studying astrophysics in Sydney. He agrees that it was quite the career shift. “Yeah, I guess it goes to show that when you’re growing up as a kid and you think you know what you want to be that you have no idea. I always grew up playing and loving games but never really thought about having a career in them. I always thought I wanted to study the universe but I had a gap year in university and started work as a tester at 2K and I kind of got sucked in and it’s 10 years later, still going and enjoying it more and more.”

Joel thanks his astrophysics background for helping in his game industry career.

“I think that logical way of thinking and being organised and driven towards certain goals and looking at things as a puzzle to solve maybe, and also being able to recognise patterns, if you drill mathematics down to its basic looking for patterns , I think it has helped. Making games you need to be creative and passionate but you also need someone to be organised. When you kind of put all those things together, a game comes out.

herd_1434425337 Asked if making a game like Horizon Zero Dawn was a big risk for Guerrilla, a developer more known for its first-person shooter Killzone series, Joel agrees, adding it was a huge risk for the Dutch development company.

“Not only for the scope of the project, but there was also an existing risk of playing it safe as well. I don’t know what the size of the studio was when HZD started but I think if you make the same kind of game, even if you layer on new features and make it look better and everything, sometimes, I think, people start to look elsewhere for bigger changes and differences so I think there was difficult for the studio staying on the same track but at the same time the pitch for HZD was so huge and open world.”

Joel says while Killzone Shadowfall added a lot of colour to that universe that the previous ones didn’t have, Horizon Zero Dawn was on a “whole different level, going from that muted pallette to the huge amounts of colour”.

“I think it sparked that interest and that passion within the team really early on and when the pitch was made, I think people really wanted to make it happen. It had all the risks [technically] but it was managed really well with the planning and hiring externally with people who had experience with chained quests and open-world story building.”

Making the game wasn’t without its challenges, says Joel.

Aloy and Rost from Horizon Zero Dawn.

” I think Guerrilla had skills in building tactical games but it was all very linear and you knew what to expect: If you had the player come around this corner, you could have this event happen but going from that to building a world where the player can almost do anything and everything, and to make it fun, I think that was definitely a challenge for the designers. ”

As the game progressed, Joel says the development team had to build a system that took into account the way the ecology was in the world, how the machines moved around, the skills that Aloy had in it.

“That was a challenge and I think that’s been solved by a number of different systems interacting together. On the technical side, there were a lot of challenges, especially the building of a world of this size and populating it with foliage and interesting landmarks. We didn’t have time to hand place every tree and every bush so they had to build a procedural system that would interact with the location in the world, that would determine what the weather would be, that would tell them what type of trees and bushes would be there. The programmers had a real field day testing themselves and coming up with systems that could build a world that didn’t need any hands to touch it. I thought that was really cool.”

scouts_1434425345 So, why robot dinosaurs in Guerrilla’s new game?

“I think in its simplest form the original pitch for HZD given within the studio was the post-apocalyptic world which had been overgrown by nature. Aloy and the machines, and the concept art, that was enough for people to start think ‘Why wasn’t society around anymore?’, ‘Who is this character?’, ‘What happened – and what the hell are these machines?’ It all sparked from there, with people speculating about the world narrative. It was a snowball that kept on growing.”

Guerrilla games hasn’t been know in the past for its ground-breaking narratives so with Horizon Zero Dawn the development team pulled out all the stops, recruiting John Gonzales, the writer who penned the story for Fallout New Vegas, to head the narrative team.

” Aloy’s story was one that was worked on really hard and Guerrilla did a big recruitment drive to expand out the narrative team. We have John Gonzales, who is our narrative director, and we recruited other people as well who had experience doing immersive narratives within open-worlds. The approach to the narrative was kind of two-fold: There was the world building, which was the tribes that are around Horizon’s worlds, their history, their beliefs, their political structure, that sort of thing, and then there is Aloy’s story, and then on top of that the more personal stories of the inhabitants of the world. So there was definitely a huge focus on building the narrative.”

aloy_village_logo_1465873567 Joel says the game’s lead female character, Aloy, was part of the game since inception and the narrative was written as a coming of age story with her having to discover the world and her purpose in it. “I really hope when people get the game that they really latch on to her. We’re really happy with the by-product of having Aloy as a character and showing that anyone can be a hero, that anyone can be interesting and you don’t have to limit yourself to bold, space marines.

“We tried to create this living, breathing world and think about how they would see their place within it and Aloy is our hero in the traditional video game sense but really as you start out the game she’s actually an outcast from society as a child and you find out pretty early on in the game how that happened so it’s more her trying to prove to herself and prove to the world that she’s living in that she is worthwhile she works on making herself invaluable in the world.”

Now that the game is almost in shops, Joel says the team has lived up to their expectations. ” People were leaving other studios to come and work at Guerrilla. A lot of team are really happy and having a chance to play the game at length for the first time. They’re talking about machines that they ran into on the world that they didn’t know we created, and quests that they didn’t know were there.”

Horizon Zero Dawn is out on the PlayStation 4 on March 1. I’ll get a review up as soon as humanly possible.

Impact Winter: Survival in a winter wonderland

I can’t say Impact Winter was really on my games radar until an email dropped in my inbox today with a new trailer and a date for the PC version.

The survival game lands on PC in digital format on April 12 and its isometric view has really piqued my interest. It’s art style is pretty neat, too. The game is coming to coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this year.

Here, watch this latest trailer to see for yourself.

Here’s the skinny from publisher Bandai Namco on what the game is about: “An asteroid has collided with Earth, and the world we once knew is now nothing more than a snow-covered wasteland. Almost everyone and everything perished in the harsh, sub-zero temperatures. But you didn’t. And you received a radio transmission that has filled you with hope and the will to survive the next 30 days.

“Take on The Void as Jacob Solomon, a lone survivor wandering around the frozen wilderness when he stumbles upon a snow-buried church sheltering four other survivors and their robot, Ako-light. Each with their own unique field of expertise, they’ll form a makeshift team, hunting and scavenging to stay alive despite the weather conditions and slumping morale, while furiously focusing on lowering the Rescue Timer.”

Apart from the blurb above, I know very little else about Impact Winter: Whether there are enemies that try to get you while you wait for a rescue; Whether you can die if you don’t scavenge enough food or resources; How exactly can you lower the Rescue Timer?;

So many questions, so little answers. Here are some images to look at.

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Omen X desktop review: Supercharged computing but at a price

HP’s Omen X desktop computer makes me not want to play games on a console or even my current desktop PC ever again – it’s that powerful and that beastly.

Actually, the Omen X is a beast, both in respect to the hardware inside and the sheer size and weight of the thing. Seriously, this thing is a monster so make sure you have the room for it.

The review unit came running an Intel Core i7-6700 CPU [@4Ghz], 32Gb of memory, and – get this – two (yes, two) nVidia GTX1080 GPUs. That’s a helluva lot of computing power, especially when placed alongside my home PC, which is running an Intel i7, 8Gb of memory and a many generations old GTX660Ti.

Design & features

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The Omen X’s cube shape isn’t going to endear itself to everyone with the way it looks but it’s nice to see a PC manufacturer looking outside the square (excuse the pun) when it comes to case design.

As the image shows, the Omen doesn’t sit on a side but is tilted on an angle thanks to a build-in stand at the bottom.

Once I’d found the right spot for the Omen [on the floor, next to my day-to-day PC], it didn’t look too out-of-place in the lounge were my normal PC lives and blended in with its surroundings, at least until I turned on the in-built LED zone lighting that illuminates it with a variety of colours, that is – then it became a visual focal point.

The lighting is controlled by a desktop app and you can have all four front panels shining the same colour or have a different colour for each one. It’s a nice touch, even if the app is a little finicky when you try to fine tune the colours using a wheel interface.

HP has thought about all the heat such a monster PC will generate as well and thermal management includes a tri-chamber design to separate components and optimise thermals with dedicated cooling in each chamber. The Omen X also includes support for up to three 120mm liquid cooling radiators with top mounted exhaust vents.

The way the Omen X sits on its stand also helps with airflow, meaning your gaming beast will stay [relatively] cool when the frame rates are ramping up.

Testing

A monster PC needs monster testing, so I found the most graphically demanding game I had to thrown at it. So, I tested the Omen XP on games Titanfall 2 (EA), Battlefield 1 (EA), the new Tomb Raider and Gears of War 4, and benchmarked it using 3D Mark’s Timespy and Firestrike tests and UniEngine’s Heaven and Valley bench marking tools. All games were tested at a resolution of 1080p as that’s the maximum my LG IPA monitor can handle.

With Timespy, the Omen XP returned a score of 87.65 frames per second on the first graphics test and 77.63 on the second graphics test. The lowest frame rates it reached was 16.42. Firestrike returned a graphics score of 36, 949 and a physics score of 12, 033.

In UniEngine’s Valley benchmark, the Omen XP returned a score of 5222, with maximum FPS of 183.3, average FPS of 124.8 and a minimum FPS of 38.7. All tests were done in Direct X 12 unless that wasn’t available, where DirectX 11 was used..

In terms of games, the Omen XP was able to comfortable handle perhaps one of last year’s most graphically demanding PC games, EA’s Battlefield 1 with aplomb, running the game at its Ultra presets in DirectX12 without skipping a beat. I guess with two GTX1080s it should be able to do that without running up a sweat.

Top be honest, the Omen handled Gears of War 4, Tomb Raider and Titanfall 2 all with the graphics settings at the highest possible, making for some stunning visuals, something my GTX660Ti can’t come close to.

Verdict

omen-by-hp-cube-chassis I loved the Omen X: It’s a beast of a gaming PC that in the review configuration will have no trouble playing any current or future game at its highest graphical settings. I like that HP has taken a risk with its design, too.

That power comes at a price, though.

The Omen X retails in NZ for $5999 [Noel Leeming currently has the single GTX1080 Omen X 900-070a for under $5000], but the review unit – which isn’t available in NZ with the configuration it came in – would set you back $6999 [if you could get it here, of course].

Yes, the Omen X was blazingly fast and I loved playing games on it – and it was sad going back to my usual desktop with its ages old GPU – but maybe I’m out of touch with how much a top-end PC costs [because I’m old?] but personally, $7000 is a crazy money to me to pay for a computer. If you shopped around for components, chances are you could build a comparable PC for a much, much less.

That said, I doubt HP are targeting the PC building crowd: It’s targeting gamers who want a blazingly fast gaming PC with top-end components, that looks a little different and is prepared to pay for it. I’d happily replacing my current PC with the Omen X but in the harsh reality of the real-world, my budget doesn’t stretch to it, sadly [I’d have to do a lot around the house and buy a few bunches of flowers to score enough brownie points with my wife to even pluck up the courage to ask if I could buy one!]

It’s clear that HP’s Omen X isn’t aimed at everyone but for those with the money, the Omen X is a fantastic option in terms of computing power and interesting design.

Astroneer: The mining/resource collecting/building game that is my go-to game right now

My base in Astroneer is coming along nicely. To the left is the rover I created with extra storage attached to carry more resources. The blue lines radiating off structures are oxygen lines. If the Astroneer runs out of oxygen he, well, dies. The space ship is directly behind the Astroneer.

Astroneer is a space exploration/crafting/resource gathering game that’s in pre-Alpha. That means it a long way off being finished but it’s been my go-to game lately.

I don’t want to compare it to last year’s disappointing No Man’s Sky, because the two only share a few similarities, but Astroneer’s developers, System Era s Softworks, made the right decision by putting the game into Steam’s Early Access program. It cost me $24 and I have to say it’s perhaps the best $24 I’ve spent on a game in a long, long time. It’s also available on Xbox One and from the Windows store.

In Astroneer, you blast off from an orbiting space station and land on an uninhabited planet. There you use a space vacuum to suck up resources like resin, compound, copper, aluminum etc to build a base. As you explore, you’ll come across wrecks of space craft that you can scavenge for parts and resources as well as deep caves that while containing vital resources, often contain deadly plants that spew poisonous gas.

As your base gets bigger you can make things like a 3D printer that lets you print a rover so you can drive farther, weather vanes and solar panels to power all your equipment and, eventually, a space ship that lets you blast off and explore other planets in the solar system.

As you explore the planet, you’ll come across crashed space ships. They’ll often contain much-needed resources and parts that can be used on other vehicles.

It’s a hell of a lotta fun. I’ve got some videos here of my base in progress, driving the rover around and one of the randomly generated sand storms that will kill you pretty much instantly unless you’re hiding somewhere safe. Oh, it also has online co-op so you’ll be able to explore and create with a friend.

Astroneer isn’t perfect: It glitches out every now and then and my Astroneer has got stuck in structures forcing a restart, but dammit, if it isn’t fun. Even the way your Astroneer dies is comical: He can suffocate when he runs out of air and he sort of grabs his throat then spirals around, falling to the ground. It’s hilarious.

The developers have said the game could be in pre-Alpha for a least a year but they’re firing out patches pretty frequently to fix some of the problems people have encountered. I’ve noticed frame rate drops when I’ve got too many of the game’s tethers laid out and while my Astroneer is carrying a research item.

I’ve attached three game play videos I took while playing: The first one shows the progress of my base as I build; the second is footage of me driving a rover across a planet’s surface; and the third shows a violent storm as it ravages my base. I’ve seen video and photos of some people sculpting as variety of things using the game’s vacuum gun.

Look, I’m loving Astroneer and I’m excited to see where it goes in the coming months and see whether I can boldly go where no man has gone before …

GamejunkieNZ [2.0]

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Author: Gamejunkienz