For their first new product from a new IP since 2004, there's been a lot of buzz around Guerilla Games' Horizon: Zero Dawn since it's reveal almost two years ago. A studio known for making first person shooters moving into third person action, and an RPG at that was an exciting new direction to see explored. Although those RPG elements end up being very light, and more akin to the recent Tomb Raider or Far Cry games, Guerilla has created a lush open world full of inventive and cool looking robotic inhabitants to populate it. With all that said, I sure wish the rest of that promise had been built on in a more satisfying way to fully take advantage of the neat premise they started with.
Horizon opens in a world hundreds of years in the future from the present world we know, where robotic animals have retaken the land from man, and humankind exists in primitive tribes. It's into this world that Aloy, a young girl with no mother who is made an outcast at birth from her tribe, the Nora, finds herself seeking answers to her origins and undertaking an adventure that ends up involving saving the world. If that sounds sort of cliche to you, you're not alone. If you think you know where the story is going, you probably do, and that's not a great feeling to have. With so much you can do with this blank slate of a post-robot-apocalypse, its disappointing to see so little done with it. The writing and dialogue veers wildly from boring to just plain corny depending on who you're talking to, and Aloy isn't much better.
Most Western RPGs tend to let you, the player, make a lot of choices not just in how you spec your character and their growth with regards to the gameplay, but also in the actions you take and the things you say as far as your impact on the world and/or story. Horizon, however, doesn't really give you a lot of input, and the protagonist suffers for it. There are times when you are presented with ways of dealing with things, always given to you as a ternary option of aggression, cunning, or compassion, but these moments are far too few and scattered (and often don't amount to anything either way) to really allow you to shape Aloy into "your" Aloy the way one would craft their own Shepard or Hawke, for example, in Mass Effect or Dragon Age II respectively. Which would be alright if Aloy - voiced by Ashley Burch - was a compelling, bespoke character who existed in her own right, but she barely does. Even having finished the game, I struggle to think of characteristics that would describe Aloy without going into her physical description. She's determined, I guess, and... scrappy? She usually had a tone when dealing with people so I guess you could describe her as having "an attitude". It shouldn't be this hard to identify the traits of the character you'll be playing as for 20 or 30 (or more) hours.
This isn't localized entirely to Aloy, either, the villains of the game suffer as well, although that's mostly because they're barely there. Taking inspiration again from Far Cry 3, but in the worst way, main human villain Helis appears on screen three times, maybe four if you stretch, and he's never as cool or threatening as the first time you see him. It's especially a shame as he's voiced by Crispin Freeman, one of the most talented voice actors I can think of, and if someone was going to make for a dynamic villain it could have been him. But alas, Helis is no Vaas, and if you're expecting the robotic antagonist HADES to pick up the slack, you'll be let down there, too.
The deficiencies in story-telling and character work can be overlooked with good moment to moment gameplay, however, and while your mileage may vary on some aspects of that, this is where you'll find the real enjoyment to had in Horizon. While the early parts of the game can be very easy - the whistle ability is laughably effective and enemies will walk towards you one at a time no matter what, even if there's a pile of three bodies in front of the grass you're hiding in - the later parts of the game can become challenging, and require you to find a playstyle that fits you. There are a bunch of different types of weapons with different variations therein which allow you to figure out a game-plan that works for you. I personally never used the trip-wires after the first few hours as it always seemed like the enemies would just step over them, but it's totally viable to take on most encounters with just traps and mines. Early enemy types (which do persist) can be killed with one stealth kill, but soon enough you're dealing with robot tigers and robot T-Rex enemies that can mess you up in one hit. This can be frustrating at times, but it's usually 'punishing' more than it ever is 'unfair'.
Skill points aren't too hard to come by - you get them both by leveling up and also most critical path quests - and there is a fairly robust skill tree to spread through, but if you're like me and figure out the way you want to play pretty early on, there's a chance you'll have everything you want long before you're done. I was just under ten hours in when I basically had every ability I wanted, and used the rest of my points as I kept going on things I might have wanted, but I often ended up not using them (being able to use my bow while tightrope walking seemed like a good idea, but there aren't very many tightropes anyway).
The crafting is also handled in a smart way, making it easy to do on the fly and unobtrusive to really be a problem when you need more ammo in the heat of battle. One annoying thing, however, is that fast travel is initially governed by a consumable resource simply called fast travel packs. They can be crafted, and there is an item you can buy eventually that just let's you fast travel indefinitely anyway, but there's no reason to limit fast travel. Seriously, there's no impetus or possible benefit to doing this, it's just irritating. Another minor shortcoming is the ability to generate quests to find resources. It's useless. I was in need of a type of resource that drops from a boar and created a quest to find said boar hide, thinking it would direct me to an area where the boar were plentiful, or increase the drop rate of this item from the boars I did find, but no. All it did was put a little note in the top left corner of the screen where your current objective is letting me know I still didn't have the thing I was looking for. There was no objective marker, the boar did not come to me, and I had to manually seek them out and hunt them for more than twenty minutes before I got the drop I wanted, so I really could have done that without the quest generator. The option to create a quest with the reward you want is an awesome idea, I just wish it hadn't been such a tease.
Just like all open-world games, there's a fair amount of jank to be found, but I'm the kind of person that tends to find that endearing more than anything, even when NPCs have weird, plastic faces. Your allies getting up on top of enemies that now can't see them, enemies getting stuck in the geometry, lighting freaking out and causing a future-prehistoric rave, all funny. The one bit of a screw-up that did irk me was my healing pouch, a constant meter of healing I can fill up and trigger at any time - which, by the way, is a great mechanic I hope to see adopted in more games - on two non-consecutive occasions was empty after a load when I know it shouldn't have been, like the game just forgot that I had it.
For some, the idea of "robot dinosaurs" is enough to sell Horizon, but I was honestly hoping for a bit more. Don't get me wrong, there's no shortage of stuff to do and things to kill, but that's not what I mean. It sometimes felt like Guerilla Games mistook "content" for "substance". With a premise and world as bizarre and fantastic as this one, it's surprising how how rote the whole thing is. Aloy is a do-gooder hero, Helis is a fanatical zealot of a baddie, Sylens - wassup, Lance Riddick! - is a stock mysterious benefactor, etc. The plot wraps up pretty nicely, and most of the backstory and history of the intervening years between the fall of civilization and the present is addressed, but there's just enough left over, as well as a post-credits sting, to let you know there will be another one. And I hope there is, because there's a lot to build off of here. The potential is there, and I believe they can find it, although I hope there are some improvements. Despite this, even with all my griping and minor complaints, I kept coming back to the game, which says something. We need more new things even when there are missteps along the way.