Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of those AAA titles I had heard about a lot, but never got around to really jumping into. The concept of an open-world robot dino hunting game sounds cool, but is it enough pull to commit to a 30+ hour game for? After finishing it, I'm still unsure.

Horizon's story is one of its primary draws. The setup of a post-post-apocolypse and putting the pieces together to figure out what happened is very interesting. Unfortunately, the game uses its protagonist Aloy as its medium to tell the story and ends up focusing on her own motivations rather than a narrative that feels heroic or even carried by player curiosity. The writing overall is lengthy and excessively padded, resulting in a majority of conversations from main quests to merchants being downright skipped. The characters are all ironically robotic in nature, and the premise never really permits you to care about anyone living in this world. The story really starts finding engaging threads by its third act, but the critical path resolves quickly, leaving much of its broader, more interesting content to text logs, voice memos, and collectibles.

Speaking of collectibles, there are several. Many boil down to finding a relic of the past somewhere marked with a radius on the map. I like hunting for objects in the world, specifically the climbing-focused Banuk figures, but there were too many to collect to make anything feel special. One of the recurring symbols on the map function like linear dungeons, and those are an easy highlight of my time with the game, due to their fresh setting and fun encounters.

Most of Horizon is spent in its open world, collecting materials and fighting metal creatures. The actual combat is pretty solid, with some intense battles with powerful beasts. There is a decent variety of enemies, each with their own quirks and patterns that can destroy you quickly if you start to get swarmed. The arsenal of weapons you use to deal with them also has a nice progression, and you'll likely find a loadout you enjoy using most. Unfortunately, I never felt like I got stronger or better through the entire run of the game. Reaching almost level 50 by the end and unlocking most of the skills on the trees, I still could get easily tanked by a few lowly enemies. While I appreciate the game's challenge, it never felt necessary to level up or try to go out of my way to loot and get better gear. This is only worsened by the health pickups, which don't ever get a boost or increase, leading to relying on health potions more often than not.

Horizon revels in its inefficiency. The menus are clunky, tutorials don't help very much, and the map is comedically cluttered with icons and waypoints to find. A lot of this can be mediated once you know what you are looking at, but the opening hours of this game are downright messy. The game also has some technical hiccups, with blatant glitches in cutscenes and some pop-in when exploring.

I have a lot of negative things to say about Horizon. It had the unfortunate release close to Breath of the Wild, a game that unknowingly improves on hundreds of the minor issues I have with this game. That said, it's a decently fun time if you don't care about the overall story and just want to go out and take down larger and larger robots.