Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4, 2017)
Before I went into Horizon Zero Dawn I didn't really know anything about it. I knew it had a redhaired girl as the main character. I knew it had a world filled with machines. That was pretty much it. I've since learned the girl is called Aloy, the machines are all eerily similar to animals from Earth's present and past, and as she sets out into her third person action adventure she finds out who she is and why the machines are there.
Aloy is born a member of the Nora, one of the tribes that inhabits the game world. The Nora are extremely snobby however and Aloy is an outcast, doomed to be raised by another outcast until she reaches 18 and can run in The Proving, a sequence of tasks people that age partake in in order to become a Nora Brave, and properly join the tribe. Sadly right at her moment of triumph some bad guys turn up to kill her and Aloy's world is turned upside down. The Nora instead make her a Seeker and send her out into the world to discover what's going on.
Like all open world games nowadays, Horizon offers the player complete freedom on how they approach the game's various quests and activities. There's a levelling system which allows you to unlock skills, with quests tied to that in an advisory manner rather than required. The problem I always have with open world games, especially large ones like this, is that I'm overwhelmed. I barely know who Aloy is, who the Nora are or why every location in their area is called Mother's Something or other, now I'm out into the world meeting the Carja and the Oseram and the Banuk and various individuals within those tribes and I'm doing quests for all of them and I'm doing hunting trials and I've got different weapons and outfits and upgrades with different categories to improve and there are loads of locations with funny names to find them all in. If reading this feels fast and poorly explained, now you know how I feel.
This isn't really something that improves as the game goes on. In one session you could spend two or three hours just doing side quests, visiting various places on the map and getting the life stories of various different people in the process. Then the next time you play you go back to the main story and you've no idea who anyone is, something not helped by there being two separate main quest threads in the early game. Is this a problem I have? Is it because I don't play games like this very often, and is this why I've always preferred a more linear experience?
I think something which limits any real sense of connection I had with the characters is how you interact with them. There's an air of the Betheseda open world RPG about things, where you talk to people and have a list of conversation topics to work your way through in lieu of exposition. The voice acting isn't that great (Aloy's in particular can be downright weird, and the amount of talking she does when you're controlling her in the world is irritating) and during these conversations the people have that classic Fallout dead eyed thousand mile stare the entire time. Near enough everyone you speak to has the same look, same mannerisms and same vocal delivery, and they all look ridiculous while they're doing it. As a result, I don't pay that much attention.
Now that I've finished the game I'm in two minds about the world. I spent 70 hours in it across my first playthrough, the Frozen Wilds DLC and New Game+ and I like it. I like the premise of the story and I'll expand on why later, and the gameplay loop of fighting machines and scavenging in the open sections remained satisfying through all those hours.
Gameplay is your standard modern-day open world action adventure fare. There's a crafting system based on scavenging from the environment as well as defeated enemies, allowing you to make as much ammo and health potions as you like. There are a range of weapons to provide different strategies for approaching both human and mechanical enemies. This is also slightly overwhelming in the early game because there are lots of different types of weapons which all do different things and, for me at least, there was a sense I should be using all of them. I realise this isn't the case, I realise most games have problems like this where the default weapon is the best option despite whatever else they can make you try to use, but my experience with the weapons was similar to the characters and locations. There are a lot, and it's a lot to try and process when you're new to the game.
Once you do though, it's worth it. Finding some machines you need to take out and planning your assault beforehand, laying down traps and tripwires then baiting them to run into them while you finish them off with arrows, this is very satisfying when it comes off and it remains satisfying for the whole game. The combat controls are solid, and different ammo types easy to switch between. Aloy also has a melee weapon which is about the most useless weapon I've ever seen in a game - it starts off an uninterruptable movement animation that takes about four seconds to finish and does no damage. Terrible, especially if you accidentally trigger it while you're trying to aim your bow.
Outside of the full attack option on machines and humans alike, there's little viable variety in the gameplay. You can kill human and machine enemies with stealth - either with well-placed arrow shots or contextual melee strikes or over-riding the machines to make them fight for you, but even on lower difficulties it's hard to take out more than a couple of enemies before you've alerted a whole area full of them. This often leads to you being swamped from all sides, and it can be easy at times to be physically overwhelmed by machines, being pushed around. It doesn't help in this regard that most of the machines you can't take down in one hit are all absolutely huge, but these ones can move just as fast and as suddenly as the smaller ones.
The final note I'll make on the combat is that there's an elemental system in the weapons and outfits. You can use ice, fire and other kinds of ammo and certain machines are vulnerable to them and it's almost completely pointless because fire works pretty much perfectly against all of them. Spam a few fire arrows until the flame or thermometer symbol above the machine fills up, then spam its weak spots with regular arrows. Job done.
Now that I've said "machines" about a thousand times, what of them? What of the story that put them there? I'm a big fan of dystopian fiction and as Aloy explores the world we start to find the ruins of what is clearly, or was, Earth. We discover that throughout the 21st century mankind became more reliant on increasingly sophisticated robot technology. Then the biggest robot manufacturing company in the world made a line of "peacekeeping" (read: military) robots that had a glitch in their software. They're fuelled by biomass and they can self-replicate at will. And now they can't be shut down. Whoopsie.
The biggest thing I can say about the story for this game is that even though, perhaps because, it took me a long time to uncover it as I was going about the map that it felt properly momentous. I realise that mankind dooming the planet to lifelessness then enacting a successful plan to counter it is about as large-scale as it gets, but the pace you uncover the details and then the remnants of it feels well-paced in a way that's surprising for an open world game. By the time you discover what Zero Dawn is (we know what Zero Dawn is, still not sure about the Horizon bit) Aloy isn't just a clueless Nora wandering about the world anymore, so there's a reasonable amount of character development tied in with the story details.
That said, the manner in which the story is presented is... well, let's call it convenient. Aloy has a Focus, a device from the pre-apocalypse days she found when she was young. This lets her scan the area around her and interact with old technology, and forms a useful part of the gameplay as you scan areas to find out where enemies are and what their weaknesses are. Rather than Aloy exploring the world on her own and finding out the truth about herself - an admittedly daunting task - the Focus starts talking to her. It starts talking to her in the voice of Cedric Daniels from The Wire, who conveniently has spent several years scouting locations and gathering information and perhaps more things he's not being honest about, and he guides her through everything she has to do. I realise it might have seemed implausible for Aloy to find out so much on her own, but it's probably worse to just put a voice in her ear which gives her all the answers.
The Frozen Wilds DLC offers a new location, new story and some monsters even more irritating than before, purely by virtue of their size. It's alright. It raises some questions about the game's geography, since it seems to have a volcano in it which was once Yellowstone National Park. But the rest of the game is set in and around Colorado and Utah. I might be completely off with this, I'm sure if you've read this far you care about the game enough to know if this is nonsense and will tell me as much. You get some new weapons here too and elemental combat comes into play a bit more, but for the most part it's just more of the same. And that's fine, since I like what I had already.
Despite everything that I've said here, I know what the best compliment you can give an open world game is. It's how much you want to be and spend time in that world, how much you want to be the character you're playing as or spend time with them. After playing this for a bit I had a day where I was really immersed in it, I sunk a good few hours into it. The next day I was out and while I was walking down the road I realised I was looking at cars and automatically scanning them as if they were machines. I was looking at the lights and body panels as areas to target, as weak spots, and I didn't even realise I was doing it. That makes up for all the dead eyed conversations, convenient plot delivery and surprisingly underwhelming final boss fight.
I'd love to say my positive experience with one of the most celebrated PS4 exclusives will make me more eager to seek them out in the future, but my backlog's big and there's always something else to work through first. It's a hard life, this.
