Played as part of the Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition. Link to my review here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/493357/
The Frozen Wilds takes place in a (presumably) unused section of the vanilla map; an icy wasteland known as the Cut where the vicarial Banuk reside. I’ll confess upfront that frost-based settings have always been a personal love of mine, and so I was immediately smitten by the depiction of the tundra Guerilla Games provided here.
Entering the location yields different dialogue depending on when you do it; however, Aloy’s purpose remains the same: to uncover more information about the Banuk. There, the story sharply takes a turn into Shakespearean territory as the heroine is caught up in an inter-tribal conflict arisen from the impending eruption of an adjacent volcano. What do the two have in common and why are there so many rogue machines? It’s up to you to figure that out.
Despite the seamless accessibility, it’s impossible not to see an uptick in graphical quality from the OG game. (Mostly) gone are the snap cuts and static NPCs who would barely move when conversing 1-on-1: there’s so much more life now, as though their performances were individually acted-out over being rendered by a baseline algorithm, with the camera capturing this anima perfectly. And while I didn’t have strong objections to the countenance animations of HZD, facial expressions are unmistakably improven as well. A final enhancement I caught was the generation of footprints in the snow. In Horizon, it was very haphazard as to whether or not they would even form, and your mount flat-out produced zero. It couldn’t be more opposite here. Enjoy leaving trails in the flurry banks, the snow having that shimmering aesthetic sighted at certain times of day.
Sound is much pretty much the same, with the music’s exploratory leitmotifs seeing a greater dip in caliber. However, courtesy of the aforementioned performance excellence, voice acting is a lot more consistent than before.
Gameplay, too, is largely equidistant. Frozen Wilds introduces some sweet meteorological particle projectors, but they don’t shake things up much. At the end of the day, you’re still going to be using your bow-and-arrow. A few new machine classes have been fashioned (two of them modeled after grizzly bears!), and I’d be lying if I said they didn’t pack a punch- you’re going to need to prepare before walking into these fights.
All those technical aspects aside, is the plot worth it? The answer is absolutely. Frozen Wilds tells a small scale story - it’s not that it doesn’t relate to your overarching odyssey, but more-so that it’s about personal relationships and less about macro events. The Banuk being organized into Weraks that emphasize adoption over bloodlines makes their openness to Aloy more organic, and Aloy exhibits a lot more spunk this time around, making her less of a follower when objectives need to be completed. Personalities, most notably that of Aratak and Ourea, are fleshed out, and it gives the undercurrents to everything real meat when conflicts arise. The momentum and mystery never drop, pacing is solid, and the resolution feels earned. By the end, I felt I understood the Banuk culture more-so than any of the game’s other tribes, its pros and cons included.
Sidequests continue the main game’s trend of being better than simple fetch tasks. They tend to dig deeper into Banuk lore, and the terrific performances ingrain that interlocution with memorability.
Tl;dr - Frozen Wilds is a great DLC.
The Frozen Wilds takes place in a (presumably) unused section of the vanilla map; an icy wasteland known as the Cut where the vicarial Banuk reside. I’ll confess upfront that frost-based settings have always been a personal love of mine, and so I was immediately smitten by the depiction of the tundra Guerilla Games provided here.
Entering the location yields different dialogue depending on when you do it; however, Aloy’s purpose remains the same: to uncover more information about the Banuk. There, the story sharply takes a turn into Shakespearean territory as the heroine is caught up in an inter-tribal conflict arisen from the impending eruption of an adjacent volcano. What do the two have in common and why are there so many rogue machines? It’s up to you to figure that out.
Despite the seamless accessibility, it’s impossible not to see an uptick in graphical quality from the OG game. (Mostly) gone are the snap cuts and static NPCs who would barely move when conversing 1-on-1: there’s so much more life now, as though their performances were individually acted-out over being rendered by a baseline algorithm, with the camera capturing this anima perfectly. And while I didn’t have strong objections to the countenance animations of HZD, facial expressions are unmistakably improven as well. A final enhancement I caught was the generation of footprints in the snow. In Horizon, it was very haphazard as to whether or not they would even form, and your mount flat-out produced zero. It couldn’t be more opposite here. Enjoy leaving trails in the flurry banks, the snow having that shimmering aesthetic sighted at certain times of day.
Sound is much pretty much the same, with the music’s exploratory leitmotifs seeing a greater dip in caliber. However, courtesy of the aforementioned performance excellence, voice acting is a lot more consistent than before.
Gameplay, too, is largely equidistant. Frozen Wilds introduces some sweet meteorological particle projectors, but they don’t shake things up much. At the end of the day, you’re still going to be using your bow-and-arrow. A few new machine classes have been fashioned (two of them modeled after grizzly bears!), and I’d be lying if I said they didn’t pack a punch- you’re going to need to prepare before walking into these fights.
All those technical aspects aside, is the plot worth it? The answer is absolutely. Frozen Wilds tells a small scale story - it’s not that it doesn’t relate to your overarching odyssey, but more-so that it’s about personal relationships and less about macro events. The Banuk being organized into Weraks that emphasize adoption over bloodlines makes their openness to Aloy more organic, and Aloy exhibits a lot more spunk this time around, making her less of a follower when objectives need to be completed. Personalities, most notably that of Aratak and Ourea, are fleshed out, and it gives the undercurrents to everything real meat when conflicts arise. The momentum and mystery never drop, pacing is solid, and the resolution feels earned. By the end, I felt I understood the Banuk culture more-so than any of the game’s other tribes, its pros and cons included.
Sidequests continue the main game’s trend of being better than simple fetch tasks. They tend to dig deeper into Banuk lore, and the terrific performances ingrain that interlocution with memorability.
Tl;dr - Frozen Wilds is a great DLC.