It's hard to definitively rate this game. Boring narrative compensated by fun gameplay that more than makes-up for it, but in a sense let down by a bland open world. A lot of people put stock into the world of Horzion Zero Dawn but for some reason, I can't personally get into it. A lot of times it just felt too overly stylized for it's own good. It's pretty to look at but it feels way too flashy and it's hard to get past that even at the point of beating the game, it's something that doesn't really shake off for me.
Aloy is likable enough, but none of the other characters are all that interesting and the dialogue at times is extremely bland. The plot itself feels like a 10 quest-line side mission of a much larger game, stretched out for about 20+ hours. It's underwhelming, not much happens and pretty much what you are set out to do is what you end up doing at the end. It's strange because usually, huge open world RPG-like games such as this throw a lot more at you that thwarts your path in the way of achieving the ending, but everything here just plays out too perfectly. The only moment I really gave credit to the plot at all was within it's final four main quests, especially the ending. Something that I wish was maintained throughout because I feel like this game has a lot of wasted potential in it's otherwise interesting ideas that could have shined a lot more if the narrative was competently written and actually entertaining.
Again, though, the gameplay is quite fun but after a certain point it does get old and I sorta stopped actively looking for trouble in service of just getting the story over with so that I could move onto something else. It's classic open world fatigue and everything gets kinda old within 5 hours of play time. The game throws certain mechanic concepts at you. Upgrading things, crafting, modifying your equipment, but I can't help but feel like in the end, none of this matters. I played through more than half of the story without realising I could expand my inventory capacity and about half of it without modifying anything and I bet if it stayed that way, it wouldn't have made too much of a difference which brings me to the "boss fights."
I heavily expected this game to be much more grander, but it was less so than what it hyped itself up to be. I thought the boss fights would be similar to the likes of Shadow of the Colossus with the premise of Tallnecks and larger mechanical creatures that are shown later on, only to be arrow sponges and "hit here" bosses with not much of a pattern to look out for other than spamming jump or whatever to slow down time. It was a huge let down in that regard and I'm hoping the sequel utilizes interesting boss fights more, though I'm doubtful.
Overall, this is one of the more overrated games I've played. Insanely hyped up by it's player base when it's just less than average. PlayStation usually delivers banger exclusives on it's platforms, but this is one of the few times it's missed hard. But, hey, at least it's not Days Gone.
Aloy is likable enough, but none of the other characters are all that interesting and the dialogue at times is extremely bland. The plot itself feels like a 10 quest-line side mission of a much larger game, stretched out for about 20+ hours. It's underwhelming, not much happens and pretty much what you are set out to do is what you end up doing at the end. It's strange because usually, huge open world RPG-like games such as this throw a lot more at you that thwarts your path in the way of achieving the ending, but everything here just plays out too perfectly. The only moment I really gave credit to the plot at all was within it's final four main quests, especially the ending. Something that I wish was maintained throughout because I feel like this game has a lot of wasted potential in it's otherwise interesting ideas that could have shined a lot more if the narrative was competently written and actually entertaining.
Again, though, the gameplay is quite fun but after a certain point it does get old and I sorta stopped actively looking for trouble in service of just getting the story over with so that I could move onto something else. It's classic open world fatigue and everything gets kinda old within 5 hours of play time. The game throws certain mechanic concepts at you. Upgrading things, crafting, modifying your equipment, but I can't help but feel like in the end, none of this matters. I played through more than half of the story without realising I could expand my inventory capacity and about half of it without modifying anything and I bet if it stayed that way, it wouldn't have made too much of a difference which brings me to the "boss fights."
I heavily expected this game to be much more grander, but it was less so than what it hyped itself up to be. I thought the boss fights would be similar to the likes of Shadow of the Colossus with the premise of Tallnecks and larger mechanical creatures that are shown later on, only to be arrow sponges and "hit here" bosses with not much of a pattern to look out for other than spamming jump or whatever to slow down time. It was a huge let down in that regard and I'm hoping the sequel utilizes interesting boss fights more, though I'm doubtful.
Overall, this is one of the more overrated games I've played. Insanely hyped up by it's player base when it's just less than average. PlayStation usually delivers banger exclusives on it's platforms, but this is one of the few times it's missed hard. But, hey, at least it's not Days Gone.