On the face of it, a lavish and original fantasy epic set in a wonderfully realised world sounds like a welcome escape from the very real horrors being played out across the nightly news bulletins.
Then again, given that Horizon: Zero Dawn deals with the consequences of hubristic ambition and sentient robots combining to bring about the near-annihilation of the human race, perhaps you’d be better off with an Enid Blyton book instead. At times Horizon: Zero Dawn, the latest title from Dutch studio Guerrilla Games, those behind the Killzone series, feels uncannily like prophecy rather than escapism. Or perhaps even a survival manual. This is a world where technology has all but defeated the human race, where the most powerful inhabitants are robot monsters, and where the lead character is looking to discover exactly what happened to the grand civilisation of the past. It could be a particularly bleak New Scientist article about 2025.
One thing is certain in this game – you’ll spend an awful lot of time foraging to survive, harvesting ridge wood to craft arrows, gathering medicinal embers to brew healing salves, and searching for the various leaves and roots required to concoct offensive weapons, not to mention collecting the various protective potions aligned to the game’s elemental status ailments: fire, ice, electricity and corruption. Likeable protagonist Aloy might share some of the moves and survival skills of the rebooted Lara Croft, but she also has the green fingers of Charlie Dimmock.
Crafting is one of a handful of familiar tropes that mark Horizon: Zero Dawn out as a modern action RPG – others include optional side quests and errands being doled out by non-player characters with exclamation marks above their heads, or Aloy’s ability to use an augmented reality device to follow tracks in a manner ‘borrowed’ from The Witcher 3. But in truth, there’s no real freedom here to play any role other than that proscribed by the game’s writers.
Sure, our heroine can chew the fat with the supporting cast of (we have to admit, largely forgettable) characters she meets in settlements dotted around the map, but as with the limited customisation options afforded outfits and weapons, it feels like lip service to genre expectations. A handful of clearly signposted, story critical encounters aside, these conversations are entirely cosmetic – to the point where even the developers’ review guide distributed alongside advance copies of the game points out players can skip them entirely should they “just want to get to the action”.
It’s difficult to discern whether this is a guilty admission on Guerrilla Games’ part that the RPG elements of Horizon: Zero Dawn are undercooked and ultimately unnecessary, or a sneaking acknowledgement that its action is so good players will want to jump straight into it – but both sentiments have a ring of truth. And that’s because the two dozen different machines that populate Aloy’s post-apocalyptic playground are much more interesting than its human inhabitants.
Most of the automata are modelled on different animal species and share some of their characteristics (albeit with added armour and weaponised appendages). The deer-like Grazers and equine Striders are largely docile unless spooked, while the more savage Sawtooths and Ravagers attack with a feral feline ferocity. The alligator-esque Snapmaws, meanwhile, have long, whiplike tails that can literally trip up unwary hunters, and horned Tramplers have a tendency to charge like bad-tempered buffalo.
Overcoming each type of robotic adversary demands a different tactical approach, so thankfully the player has a suitably varied and versatile arsenal to call upon. The spear and bow are your go-to short- and long-range damage dealers, augmented by the shotgun-like Rattler and bomb-disposing sling. More interesting – and essential against larger or multiple machines – are the Tripcaster and Ropecaster. The former allows Aloy to string out incapacitating tripwire traps on the fly, while the latter fires out lengths of rope that can be used to pin down more agile aggressors.
But weapons alone do not great combat make, and Guerrilla has incorporated a number of smart design decisions to even the odds and ensure encounters ebb and flow. A simple and generous stealth system means prey can be stalked and combat initiated on favourable terms, while a rechargeable ‘concentration’ mechanic slows time, allowing players to target individual weapons or sections of armour. The Thunderjaw, one of the largest machines, boasts an astonishing 93 such targetable components – including an explosive disc launcher that can be picked up and turned back upon it following successful removal.
There’s a brilliant, beautifully balletic balance to it all that combines to give the impression of controlling the perfect hunter. Aloy’s ability to craft stacks of ammunition mid-fight is a potentially fiction-breaking conceit that is not only a necessity during long battles but also feels right in practice. Even the initially puzzling lack of a conventional ‘lock on’ mechanic reveals itself to be a perfectly judged call to keep you moving around the battlefield to maintain a visual on your quarry.
The overall effect is akin to a more accessible and arcade-oriented take on Dark Souls’ strategic stand-offs – even down to Aloy’s defensive dodge roll – and it’s hard to overstate just how endurably exhilarating and enjoyable the combat between woman and machine is. Plucking a Glinthawk out of the sky with your Ropecaster, removing its armoured breastplate with a Tearblaster arrow and then piercing the exposed chillwater container to cover the bird in lethal, damage multiplying ice never gets old, and even after the credits have rolled some 30 or so hours in you’ll find yourself returning to the plains to rage against the machines just for sport.
Perhaps as a perverse yet inevitable consequence of that combat being too good (or maybe it’s down to Guerrilla’s heritage as first person shooter developers first and foremost) other facets of the game struggle to match the machine combat’s intense innovation. Its central storyline, for example, is a compelling-enough sci-fi potboiler but it’s dolloped out in missions weighed down by extraneous exposition and exploration and drowning in downloadable audio and text files.
Likewise, while Horizon: Zero Dawn’s seamless open-world setting is as impressive as any created – all breathtaking vistas, incredibly detailed flora and dazzling dynamic weather systems – it largely conforms to Ubisoft’s much-maligned school of design. Local detail is revealed by scaling four storey-high machines called Tallnecks, and the uninspired list of optional activities include liberating bandit camps, raiding tomb-like bunkers containing secrets of the technologically advanced, pre-fall society, and completing sets of hidden collectibles.
It makes for an unexpectedly contradictory proposition. On the one hand Horizon: Zero Dawn is an ambitious technological showpiece for Sony’s new PlayStation Pro platform and a visual benchmark for this console generation. And yet its underlying hunter/gathering gameplay mechanics and zonal map architecture have barely evolved from their obvious origins in the long-established franchises Far Cry and Tomb Raider.
On that basis alone Horizon: Zero Dawn falls short of the seminal status to which it so clearly aspires but it’s still an immensely playable – and likeable – romp with a core combat mechanic worth the price of purchase alone. And given a Marvel-style post-credits sequence suggests a sequel is very much in the works, Guerrilla will be given another shot at genuine greatness. Provided, of course, a real-world apocalypse doesn’t Trump their imagined one in the meantime.
Sony; PS4; £50; Pegi rating 16+
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