Horizon: Zero Dawn

Most characters look completely fine and sometimes great, but the motion capture and lip-syncing often make them look strange and rigid, almost toy-like. The facial capture is so close to amazing that it’s constantly dipping into the uncanny valley. Aloy, who you’ll be looking at for 90% of the game, is an absolute abomination as a child and otherwise stiff as a board the rest of the game.

Horizon’s world is bursting with life and detail with deep colors and tons of movement to the point that it can sometimes look a bit busy with how much is going on, though this is aided by a number of artistic considerations that add some clarity. One that comes to mind is how Machines’ eyes glow a bright blue, making them especially visible in fog and at night, and also just looks super cool!

One of the most impressive graphical achievements here is an extremely sophisticated animation network. Aloy’s animations dynamically adjust to her surroundings, so if a machine’s corpse is at chest height, she won’t kneel down to loot it the way she normally would if the machine was at her feet.

It provides a ton of options and customizations to get that perfect shot: adjusting the position of the sun and moon, lots of camera filters, and the ability to pose Aloy.

This game’s climbing system aggravated me from beginning to end with its vast restrictions and poor environmental telegraphing. I would often attempt to jump onto surfaces or grab onto ledges that seemed perfectly within reach, only for Aloy to miss and fall back to the ground. You do learn that the actual climbing system is only possible on terrain and objects marked yellow, but there aren’t enough of these predetermined affordances to feel useful or reliable, and one would reasonably expect your acrobatic character to be able to jump over something that’s merely at knee height. For such an advanced movement system, this restriction feels contradictory to the entire exploration experience. If the developers needed to keep such a tight grip on climbables, then the visual design language of the environment should have been tweaked so the player knows immediately what can and cannot be climbed, reached, or jumped on to before they attempt.

Factions assert dominance across the playable setting, each with their own governing body and set of religious beliefs. Aloy belongs to a tribe very similar to Native Americans, who worship the living Earth, respect its creatures, and are incredibly proud. In this world, though, humanity is kept at least one peg lower on the food chain by the animal-like machines.

Aloy dons a device on her head that gives her insight into her enemies and surroundings, and I really like the way the game plays with this idea. My favorite detail is that the device, called a Focus, actively translates foreign languages for Aloy and thus the player, which can be seen in effect on every road sign. It treads a unique line between believability and player convenience, and means some of the game’s HUD is diegetic which I’m a sucker for.

I may be giving Horizon a bit too much credit, but it seems to have developed a new aesthetic in the same vein as steampunk and cyberpunk. For lack of a better or official term, this primalpunk aesthetic is pretty cool and very unique, opening up a world of possibilities for not only this game’s future, but other works as well.

Among all of the game’s content, I found the Cauldrons to be major highlights. These brief, optional dungeons reminded me of exploring Isu ruins from Assassin’s Creed, but with a more Matrix atmosphere and vibe. They’re oppressive, tightly-designed, and brief enough to remain interesting and not outstay their welcome.

Personally, I found the open world to be overwhelming. I was too intimated to do anything but the main story, but the difficulty was always outpacing me, forcing me to slow down and look for side activities that I simply did not want to do because the game failed to earn my interest.

I’m usually pretty opposed to using fast travel in games when I have the choice, but because exploring this world was so tedious, I found myself clinging to the mechanic only to be smitten by its own restrictions. Fast travel is only possible through the use of a consumable item, which on one hand I think is a neat idea because it deters overuse and therefore encourages natural exploration. On the other hand, though, traversal is a chore that I had hoped to avoid, so being forced to trudge through the world on foot was disheartening.

When the objective isn’t in direct sight, its waypoints are placed on the screen in the direction of the objective rather than on the objective itself while also displaying how many steps away you are from it so you aren’t being tricked. I like this a lot, and it always worked really well regardless of how complex the environment or where I happened to be in relation to it.

I can see what the developers were shooting for with this idea, but I found it more annoying than useful especially in the heat of battle.

The camera distance is also a bit too close to Aloy, making it difficult to take in the surroundings. I can appreciate that it closes in while in towns since there’s a lot of architecture and characters, but in the wild it can be a bit of a hindrance.

Exploiting weaknesses and vulnerabilities can be exhilarating, but fights often devolve into rolling out of the way of the machine then frantically trying to shoot one of its weak points until it eventually collapses.

I will give the artificial intelligence some praise: human enemies appropriately call out tactics based on what the player is doing, and machines behave believably animalistic.

My interest in the game’s combat was kept somewhat alive through the skill tree, which is actually pretty solid. You’ll learn tons of actually useful skills and passives that can completely turn the tide of battle.