'Horizon Zero Dawn' Review (PS4): Rage Against The Machine

New IPs are a rarity in our current age of sequels, and new exclusive IPs are almost unicorns at this point, as it’s become unusual for a brand to attempt to create new iconic franchises when everything is cross-platform. But that’s what Guerrilla Games has tried to do for Sony with Horizon Zero Dawn, and after playing the game for 30 hours, I’m going to say they’ve succeeded.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a radical departure for Guerrilla, best known for the Killzone series, which has always been a PlayStation staple, but not exactly a stand-out entry in the overly-crowded shooter genre dominated by Call of Duty, Battlefield and the like. Switching to an open world title isn’t exactly blazing some bold new path either at this point, as the genre is well-established and some would even say oversaturated at this point.

In many ways, Horizon Zero Dawn can feel like a lot of what’s come before. Its third person, bow-and-climbing focused gameplay certainly has echoes of the new Tomb Raider games. Its overall world and structure feels a lot like Far Cry Primal, only here most of the wildlife is robotic and terrifying.

Therein lies the central “hook” of Horizon (which is what the game should have been called, or “Zero Dawn,” but not both). The game has topped many “most anticipated” lists in 2017 thanks to its gorgeous visuals and frankly bizarre concept, tribal warriors hunting and fighting robot dinosaurs and animals in some far-flung future after our current world has been destroyed.

You play as Aloy, the red-maned hunting goddess featured in all the trailers who seems destined to become an instant PlayStation icon alongside Nathan Drake and Kratos, which is surely what Sony was hoping for. Aloy and her adoptive guardian are outcasts, shunned by their people for unclear reasons, but the game opens with her trying to win a spot in the tribe during a process for the young called “The Proving.” Aloy wants to not just complete the event, but win, which will allow her to ask the tribal elders for anything, and she wants to know who her mother was. If this sounds like the beginning to some kind of young adult novel, I can promise it doesn’t stay that way for long.

Aloy’s journey to self-discovery turns out to be much more complicated than she envisions, and to find answers, she sets out across the entire countryside, far outside the borders of her tribal lands. There she discovers that the more she learns about herself and her own origins, the more she’s able to uncover the mystery of what killed the world, and why there are uh, giant robot animals roaming around everywhere. She also has to deal with squabbles and wars between different human factions, and some of the more sinister ones are using “corrupted” machines to do their bidding.

I like Aloy. She’s well-voiced by Ashly Burch, as she’s tough, often compassionate and occasionally funny. There is no Lara Croft “the girl must become a woman” arc here. After a brief childhood training sequence, she’s more or less a total badass for the duration of the game, and the more she does to combat the robot menace, the more everyone treats her as such.

The beginning and the end of the game is where Aloy shines the most, first in her rather dispiriting role as a shunned outcast trying to prove herself, and her touching relationship with her surrogate father. Similarly, she’s inspiring near the end when she’s on track to be a world-saving warrior queen. The middle drags a bit however. While I appreciate what Horizon does with sidequests, giving each a little story, making sure none are clone-stamped or substance-free the way you seen in Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed, I’m not sure any of them are terribly memorable. Aloy lacks many meaningful relationships throughout the game, as supporting characters are only given a handful of lines or a sparse few missions with her. This solidifies by the end when she rallies all the allies she’s helped against the machine menace, but during the game it can make the story, and Aloy herself, feel rather empty at times.

I will say, however, that far and away, my favorite aspect of Horizon’s story was the overall arc that explains what happened to the world and why Aloy is a key part of the equation. You may be able to connect some dots about the apocalypse based on the fact that every city lies in ruins and the world is full of giant robot monsters, but it goes much, much deeper than that. Without giving anything away, there is some really interesting science-fiction lore here, and it creates a story that you’re genuinely curious to see explained. It’s a “chosen one” narrative that actually makes a lot of sense when all is revealed, and while there may not be any mind-blowing plot twists, the story of the end of Old Earth and the beginning of this weird new era is surprisingly well thought-out, and it manages to be one of my favorite storylines I’ve seen in this genre.

Pushing past story, this is a game after all, and if Horizon failed mechanically, it wouldn’t work at all. Fortunately, gameplay isn’t an issue, and in many sequences, can be the kind of chaotic, epic experience that you’ve likely seen in all the trailers.

There are two main types of enemies that Aloy fights: humans, evil cultists and such, and the machines. Unfortunately, even though human opponents make up close to half of the number of combat sequences in the game, this is where things feel a bit dull. There’s very, very little complexity to Aloy vs. human combat. You can one-hit stealth kill any enemy with only minor upgrades, and if you get into open combat, a heavy-critical hit combo is enough to take out almost any foe in two strikes. Or if that’s still too complicated for you, you can just whip out your fire arrows, hit any enemy two or three times, and watch them melt instantly. There’s just not that much to it.

Fighting machines is the polar opposite. While you can sneak around and one shot some of the early machines, or whack them a few times with your spear for a kill, soon enough you will be running into bigger and badder creatures that will absolutely wipe the floor with you, if you’re not careful. These sequences are where the game really comes to life, and where it differentiates itself from its competition.

Aloy has access to a host of non-traditional weaponry that comes in handy during these difficult machine fights. She can set up traps with a gun that shoots tripwires, she can rope machines down to the ground and immobilize them, she can lob elemental grenades at them, and she has access to not one, but three different kinds of specialty bows that each have different ammo for different situations. Your regular bow can fire normal and fire arrows for instance, while your sniper bow can pierce armor and knock off plating with sonic arrows. Your “war bow” is purely elemental, able to shock or freeze enemies, or with an upgraded version, able to “corrupt” them and make machines turn on one another. Aloy also has the ability to manually hack machines to rally to her side, some she can ride like a horse, others she can override to simply unleash havoc on other machines or human enemies.

In these battles, you really have to pay attention to tactics, elemental vulnerabilities, enemy weak spots, and so on. If you just dodge roll and spear whack and shoot random arrows at these machines, you’re going to get absolutely destroyed. But once you start paying attention to what works, that’s where things get really interesting. Set up shock tripwires to trap and stun stampeding Behemoths. Freeze Thunderjaws solid and snipe at their heart plating to expose their vulnerable core. Shoot fire arrows at Glinthawks until they catch ablaze and come crashing down to earth so you can melee them. The combination of all these tactics, weapons and enemies create some really compelling combat encounters, much more so than you’d usually expect from a game like this.

Elsewhere, there are some issues that may remind you that this is Guerrilla’s first open-world game. For some reason, they decided to make fast traveling based on a consumable item, which is really irritating in the early stages of the game. It was only through dumb luck that I discovered that eventually, NPC vendors will sell a permanent item that allows for infinite fast travel, because the game never told me that became available. Still, it would have been better to just have that from the start.

By far, the worst mechanic in Horizon is its health system. There is no natural health regeneration, which could be fine, but the way you regain it is beyond irritating. You can craft and use a small collection of health potions, but your main way to manually recover life without using a consumable is to collect various “medicinal” leaves from the wild that fill up a little bar of reserve medicine that you can use when you’re low. The problem is that even with an upgrade that lets you scavenge better, you need four to six plants to fill up your medicine bar even once, and if you’re seeking out combat in any form, you will often spend the next five minutes wandering around a random field collecting plants to try and refill that bar for your next encounter. Worse still, there are about five other types of plants in the wild, all with the same icon, so you can walk up to what you think is a health plant and it’s some sort of anti-elemental plant used to craft a different potion. This entire system was a huge oversight, and it’s a big time waster. Better to have two or three of these plants fill up your bar at most, or allow players the ability to regain health at campfires, or slowly over time. Any of those ideas would be better than the current set-up.

One sort of weird quirk about the open world map that isn’t necessarily a problem, but an odd decision, is that you can miss some very important places on the map if you’re not paying attention. Aloy will get early quests to wipe out bandit camps, or enter dungeon-like Cauldrons which will allow her to hack different classes of machines. But after the initial ones, the rest appear only as faded icons on the map. You will never be tasked to go there unless you get within spitting distance of them, so if you’re just going around doing easily visible quests, it’s easy to miss them even though they’re some of the best, most important pieces of content in the game. The same goes for random villages that you’re never told to go to, but if you don’t, you might miss a number of extensive sidequests. It’s not on the level of Fallout where you have talk to every single NPC to make sure you don’t miss a quest, but I can imagine many people getting close to the end of the game and realizing they’ve missed four or five dungeons or big quests they were supposed to do 20 levels ago.

Overall, I do like the structure of Horizon Zero Dawn. It’s a meaty game. I sunk 30 hours into it, and that’s without XP farming, collectible hunting or getting gold medals in hunting challenges. That was just doing all the quests and clearing all the camps and dungeons. The main story seems like it’s going to end at a few different points, but just when you think it might all be over, there’s usually another bigger, tougher quest on the horizon, culminating in a very satisfying finale, both from a gameplay and story perspective.

I was impressed with Horizon from the outset, my interest lagged a bit in the middle, but by the end I was a convert. This is a very cool universe with a genuinely likable new lead. Gameplay is excellent in most sections, and it avoids some irritating open world tropes like overloading players with substance-free side missions. There are some problems that reflect Guerrilla being new to this genre, but ultimately the good far outweighs the bad. It is a slightly disappointing that in many ways, Horizon does feel like a lot of other open-world games rather than being some crazy breakout new experience, but there is enough here between its story and robo-monster hunting gameplay that makes it unique. If you’re overloaded on open-world games, I don’t blame you, but Horizon is one of the better entries in the crowded genre, and it’s kind of cool to witness the birth of what’s probably going to be a pretty key franchise for PlayStation in the coming years. No, Horizon probably isn’t as monumental of an experience as playing Uncharted or God of War for the first time, but it’s well-made, engaging and probably worth your time.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Platform: PlayStation 4

Developer: Guerrilla Games

Publisher: Sony Interactive

Released: February 28th, 2017

Price: $59.99

Score: 9/10

A review copy was provided for the purposes of this review.

Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook.