The combat mechanics are difficult and exhilerating, every battle feels epic. Sound, level, and enemy design are top notch! The soundtrack is immersive and beautiful, and the graphics are gorgeous. Not to mention the story is a very unique take on the post-apocalypse, and the ending is superb. The Frozen Wilds DLC is just as amazing as the main story, and gives you a fresh challenge. The dialogue sequences in the DLC are interestingly more detailed than the base game's, but it doesn't affect gameplay in any way, but it does affect the immersion. I would definitely play this again once it comes to PC.

I've tried to play this game 3 separate times. Each time I got a little further, but I couldn't get very far in any of my attempts. It's just... such an open world came.

But I watched a let's play of the game, and I found out that I love the story. The premise of a post-post-apocalypse serves into the themes of religion vs science so well and it's fascinating because I don't know of any other games or movies that tackle the subject the way this game does.

If the game had been more interesting, this might easily be one of my favorite games. But I can't get into it, so all I can really say is please watch a let's play because the story is the best part

I gave it a good fifteen hours but was bored. It's not terrible or anything, there's just nothing that feels new or interesting for me.

Feels like another game that's a variation on the same open-world "narrative epic" I've played a thousand times before. Picking shit up and crafting. Pinging my radar thing to find items, climbing big shit to unlock map stuff. Repeat.

No thank you.

PS Now. Completed on normal both base game and frozen wild's in 53 hours.

The game has very good combat. I went to frozen wilds as soon as possible which meant by the time i returned to base game material, I was 30 - 40 levels above quests. I had far superior weapons than necessary but oddly enough, my defense was the same. Armor doesn't actually protect much against attacks, instead just gives some resistance. The fact that enemies 30 levels lower than me can still severely damage or kill aloy leads me to believe that damage is calculated by percentages and not flat numbers.

Another thing I should've done before going into frozen wilds is buying every weapon type. I never got rope caster or the shotgun thing. Ropecaster is an immense advantage against the big animals.

The game does a good enough job with its currency by mixing it in with its crafting. Money and crafting parts are the exact same meaning making ammo eats into money to buy stuff. Granted, there isn't much you can buy instead of fighting enemies to get it from them but the rng nature of loot means I ended up spending the larger amount of metal I got in frozen wilds buying parts I needed.

Unfortunately this game has that remedial scripted quest design. A quest that has the hawk machines assaulting a village happens because someone planted a signal device drawing them there. I can see the device and know what it fires because at this point in the story, Aloy has come across fun numerous times, but I can't interact with it at all until I question the mayor, then return to the place and get a scripted cutscene with another character messing with said device.

Pretty much all the worst aspects of open world AAA game design. Pointless level system with quite a few skills that will either never help you or that you will never use (or at least it so rare you will use them that they shouldn't have been a skill requiring 2-3 level up points). Frequent bugs with enemies and characters getting caught on or in things, with horrible hit detection that constantly has your and enemy's attacks not registering damage when they hit or registering it when you or they miss (you will frequently get hit, knocked back, have Aloy yell in pain, but have the game just forget to damage you). Depending on the area enemies might attack you through large solid objects as parts of them just clip through it. Unbalanced cheap dull combat that gives you some extremely powerful weapons that make enemies really easy to fight and a skill that gives you a knock down ability with your heavy spear attack (there is no reason to ever use the light attack). Human enemies have terrible AI and fighting them is like playing a lower quality Tomb Raider (the two newer ones obviously).

Terrible buggy traversal system where you can only climb up pre determined spots in the environment when you should be able to easily grab onto smooth flat services that you can almost jump onto, actually climbing things cause Aloy to behave awkwardly as she intentionally misses easy jumps to grab lower handholds in the chain. Climbing tends to be worse and look worse than even the old Assassins Creed games, even going into slow motion for no reason to show off Aloy making safe generic leaps to the next platform that require no interaction from you. Even though you have weapons that fire ropes, shoot wires across areas, and you have a grappling hook (that you carry by magic and is of infinite size apparently) you can't use any of it to move around the environment or in inventive ways against enemies. Because of a device you wear you have a generic Batman Arkham series detective vision mode which does at times hilarious things like telling two experienced hunters that couldn't find any tracks without the aid of technology that maybe the giant robot went in the direction of all the recently smashed and knocked over brush and trees. The game has an awkward camera that stays way to close to you at times making it difficult to see enemies in combat (the camera might move behind you when you draw your bow in such a way that it suddenly moves brush or trees in your way all of a sudden so you can't see). Pretty much every game needs you to move your brightness setting a few notches above the recommended level to actually see anything in darker areas, but even doing that is can be near impossible to make out handholds when night comes.

Weird busywork inventory system that lets you hold up to 100 things but each thing has it's own individual stack that can hold a certain amount so when you pick things up you might see that your space is 99/100 but then you will pick up eight different things. You need to pick things up to craft ammo or for medicine which ends up just being busy work since you should typically never run out of material to craft ammo (even without me taking the skills that have you scavenge more until the very end of the game). I finally realized you can just quickload your last save to heal yourself which stopped some of the wasted time of trying to find and pick the healing plants. To make the inventory system even more out of place you can hold dozens of reward boxes from quests, trades, and merchants that hold items for you outside of your normal inventory, you just need to scroll through each box and select items you want to move to your inventory from each one. The only reason I can even thing of for why this is a thing is because some people give you unique weapons in them and they wouldn't know what to do with them if your weapon inventory was full at the time of your quest reward. The game has one time use travel packs for quick travel between campfires and for some reasons tries to hide the fact that merchants actually sell an infinite use travel pack at the very bottom of a section of their buy list that you will probably never have a reason to look at. There are three different levels of weapons for some reason (and six special ones as part of a hunting lodge quest and the DLC) with the better ones giving you additional ammo types it can fire, meaning there really is no reason for an inventory system for your weapons and it should just give you or sell the best when it feels is best (if it gave them to you for the story instead of needing you to buy them then they could have been used for more environment interactions).

It gives a large good looking world with very little to do but find useless collectibles that you bear with for some good side quest moments. There really aren't that many side quests (really not that many main quests either, the length is just padded by travel and busywork) and a lot of it is such fetch quests and marking and following tracks with your Batman vision. You can find six figures and 30 metal flowers that can be traded to merchants for useless equipment you will never use.

I can't really say that I like Aloy as she is such a combination of smart, stoic, and whiny that whether or not I like, dislike, or don't care about her at all changes by scene, but I did like some of the side characters, it's a shame you spend almost no time with any of them. Some good audio log collectibles, that typically have a better story and more emotion than the main game. I was going to say the backstory for how the robots were made to be peacekeeping robots, that can self replicate, and can consume living material to power and make more of themselves is the dumbest series of potentially apocalyptic decisions someone could possibly make but then I remembered people like Elon Musk are a thing so I guess it's perfectly plausible.

Horizon's biggest mistake is that it launched the same year as Breath of the Wild.

No new IP could ever compete with Nintendo; much less Nintendo handing Zelda's reigns to its playerbase. This has resulted in HZD leaving a sour taste in many's mouths, because who would ever want to play HZD when BOTW is right there?

Me. I do, I'm the insane hypothetical person. HZD's personally the better game because I like plot and I like consequences to my actions. Don't misunderstand; I enjoy both games for each of their own unique merits but I prefer influenceable questlines and a plotline.

(Not to mention, there isn't some arbitrary limit over arrow count.)

I could go on for far too long about both HZD's negatives and its positives, but if you aren't repelled by more a story-driven game and you like open-world games: give HZD a chance.

BELATED AS HELL EDIT: I was re-reading my reviews and my snarky arrow limit comment made me, the very writer of this review, annoyed. What I should've said was 'you can craft arrows and can technically have enough materials to have a truly unusable amount of arrows,' because there is a faux limit. In practice it isn't really there, but nonetheless.

Open world is beautiful and the gameplay mechanics are good enough to push me through a forty-hour playthrough but the story and presentation are so meh it almost killed the experience to me. Learning about the past was interesting at first but each mission where you delve into old research facilities are all the same.

The main human villain is also laughably dull and is given barely any screen time. My biggest gripe has to be the presentation however, not graphically, but with how conversations and cutscenes are in this game. they're so static and almost every human model except for Aloy is laughable in how awkward they look. The mouth animations in particular made me bust out in a fit of laughter more than once during scenes that weren't meant to be funny.

Apart from that, this was a fun time. It's the most typical 8th gen open-world adventure game but that's not a bad thing. This is the foundation for something much greater, so I'm hoping a sequel or sequels really deliver on what this concept has to offer, not only in gameplay but also in cool robot animals.

It has a fantastic story with one of the best protagonists I have ever seen in a game, it has a very beautiful and very detailed open world, the combat is also sensational and I like how each type of enemy has its weaknesses. There are some bugs that I suffered the whole game that really annoyed me, like the mount would always lock at a specific point and stay frozen for a long time, something bizarre was also how all the human npcs in conversation scenes looked like static robots talking, really bizarre.