Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition

Amazing world, visuals, machines and combat. Day night cycle as well as weather changes are one of the best that I saw so far. Almost at any point in game you can make a wallpaper quality screenshot. Breath taking views everywhere. Story is OK-ish, but dialogs and characters are on hollywood teenager movie level. They are boring, bland and full of inconsistency. Read: your typical scenario of choosen one main protagonist and bad guy(s) with few cliche freinds along the way. Fortunatelly world building make up for this. And I liked main character, very nicelly done. Many side quests are equally boring. Peasant: go to barn and kill 10 rats, than I will reward you with rusty pan. Or may be I am just spoiled by Witcher 3 / Cyberpank 2077 story and quests? Luckily you can just ignore them. Game have few technical issues. Namelly it is agressivly uses low quality textures. If you move 5 meters from object high quality textures are replaced with low quality ones. For consoles thats problably fine, but we are on PC? On top of that after some hours of playing, game stops using high quality textures for many objects alltogether. Up to the point that during diallog NPC body is just a brown cylinder instead of armor / skin texture. Game also leaks memmory and crashes after prolonged running sessions (even if you stay AFK). I end up reloading game every few hours. Overall game runs 60-70 FPS with ultra / high settings on following PC: 1440p display, Vega 64 UV&OC (1500 MHz core, 1100 MHz mem), R5 2600x. Inventory managment is also so so. I can live with sub par story and quests because visuals, machines, weapons and combat are amazing. And you spent most of the time exploring the world and fighting then engaging with NPC's. Also you can skip dialogs.

This is perhaps the synthesis of big budget AAA gaming, and it is a marvelous example of everything done right. I played this game for over 90 hours and by its end I looked back on it fondly. The world is a joy and Aloy is a charming character to play as. What this game nails is exploration and the feeling of adventure that is infused into every far flung outpost, every new, tantalizing vista. There isn't much to the NPCs in this game, and the world is fairly empty besides its scattered collectibles, but it is crafted so well, and with so much thought put into things, that it remains a joy to explore. The expansion, The Frozen Wilds, is an amazing step up for this game. I was merely enamored with it prior to the expansion, but I was in love post this DLC. The stories in this smaller map are so good, well realised and executed, that it puts the main game to shame. The biggest criticism I have of Horizon Zero Dawn is its subdued story and uninspired, rote, side quests. The expansion corrects this wonderfully. Every side quest is a big story, and I enjoyed them a lot. The one that stuck out to me, and what I believe is a perfect representation of the good found in this game, is a side quest set in an abandoned dam. Here, as Aloy explores the dam and gets it operational, we find out about the previous workers. They are a group of ladies who find out they will be soon be retrenched. Their youthful energy contrasted with the world weary hardship of leaving and drifting apart is felt acutely and conveyed sincerely. They start a band and we hear their final performance before they all go their separate ways. It is very touching. This youthfulness and simple melancholy embodies Horizon Zero Dawn and pushes it forward. This was a fantastic, pristine experience.

I originally bought this on PS4. It was a near perfect game, except for having to run it on PS4 equipment. I was so excited to finally see a PC release!!! Even better, it was available DRM-free on GOG! If Sony keeps this up, I'll be one happy customer (Bloodborne, please). It's post-post-apocalyptic tribal robo-dinosaur hunting at its finest. Nothing beats finding and taking down a new robo-dinosaur for the first time. Beautiful graphics, original concept, fantastic plot, challenging-but-fair skill based combat, great voice acting... I love it! I've heard folks have had trouble with crashes, etc. I've never had a crash, and rarely dip below 60FPS on ultra (though I've got a beefy PC). The loading times are pretty long, unless you run the "Optimize Shader Cache" at the beginning.

Forbidden West is great also, but Zero Dawn is where my love of the series started. The story, the combat, and pretty much ebverything is great. My only real complaint is that in cutscenes the mouth movement often doesn't match the words people say.

The Short: A bit like Tomb Raider, with easier jumping parts, better and more diverse fighting system and a really open world where you can decide the progression. Remarkably well done. The gameplay: Very well balanced, many nice side-quests with majority much better than the usual "fetch X" style and even include nice plot twists. The story is well done too, even though I am not the story type. New players are guided the right amount into gameplay, many other games overdo that part. The world is huge. The leveling is done well too, it does not feel like an endless grind. The fighting style fits my playing style: "Archers Heaven". Since I am bad at typical Boss-fights, I like that they are challenging, but manageable. To compare: I fail at many boss fights in The Surge 1 and 2 and have to resort to "helpers". The look: Just great, I have nothing to complain, which is rare. If you play in 4K on a large screen the faces look realistic and not plastic. Though: Why does Aloy always have that concerned and worrisome look on her face? Yep, that is my only complain. And I do complain without hesitation when things are bad, I am German. The coding: Very well done, the performance is great, not a single crash, not a bug anywhere, never got stuck somewhere and could not leave. It is remarkable that the game keeps a good steady FPS with near perfect stutter-free gameplay, much better than most other games. Other things: You are not forced to listen all dialogs, you can skip them quickly. I can read the subtitle faster than they speak their parts. Even though the voice acting is well done. The savegame-spots are limited to fireplaces and some quest-autosave spots, but there are enough fireplaces around to avoid getting annoyed.