Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition

Completed the game on steam. The world looks fantastic, but it is sadly not terribly interesting once you start exploring. The story is the average "save the world" stuff. I did like uncovering what made the world what it is though. The characters are extremely bland, main character included. I did not manage to find a single interesting sidequest or optional encounter. Quest and collectible rewards are almost always just a loot box with random crafting materials inside, which isn't a motivating reward for me. The crafting is mostly just busywork, pulling the brakes on an exciting fight by forcing you to create more arrows. The weapons feel good, and it's fun to build a loadout that suits you. You can get substantial upgrades of weapons and armor during the game and you can immediately feel when you have upgraded/changed an item. I would recommend the game if you need to kill some time. It took me almost 40 hours to complete the game (with DLC and all collectibles)

Some may love this game but unfortunately I couldn't get into it. It's a very console-first open world game: cutsey characters and dialoge (such as trying to find ways around not speaking to outsiders), somewhat repeative missions (such as repeatively following "invisible" tracks), enemies respawn on reload so no point clearing out areas (and difficult to avoid), having to visit campsites to save progress, awkward K+M control, limited interface (such as map only showing 1-2 quests at a time), inconsistent climbing, etc. Combat is reasonable if you can make it flow. Others report similar concerns but score it higher, so if you think you can overlook some of these things then you may enjoy it. I didn't find enough of it to be interesting or engaging to outweigh them though.

Let's start off with what this game does well: presentation. H:ZD looks phenomenal. The motion capture on human faces was expertly done. The voice acting lacked the signature cheesy, game-breaking fakeness common in video games. The characters and environments are very detailed, and look incredible. On top of all that, the game runs very well. I was able to keep a stable 50+ FPS with decent settings on my RX 590 with a freesync monitor. An additional positive is the worldbuilding. The origins of the world in H:ZD are unfolded throughout the story, and, in my opinion, were refreshingly original. Despite these triumphs, H:ZD simply fails to entertain. Enemies are arrow-sponges, and the only worthwhile weapons are bows. The combat is decent for the first few hours, until its monotony begins to wear down on the player's sanity. The characters and quests are flat-out boring. The side quests specifically are almost always "fetch this" or "go here" or "here's some enemies, fight." Additionally, the rewards for side quests are literally just loot-boxes, except there's no chance for a cool item. It's all just resources or minor item upgrades. Looking back, I spent a large chunk of playtime gathering resources, which I would label work rather than gameplay. Honestly, I was expecting such a highly reviewed game to be better. Unless you enjoy monotonous grinding and boring quests, I would suggest giving this one a skip.

Good: + Switching between melee and ranged is seamless, it just depends on whether you're holding down the trigger or not. Really clever! + The setting is unique, tribal meets sci-fi. + The progression system is slow, but in a good way (may depend on the difficulty) + Heavily emphasised crafting adds somewhat of a challenge. If you are out of ammo, you need to craft it! If you run out of inventory space, you need to craft more space! + Strong opening sequence Bad: - Monster Hunter style parts breaking system is fine, except they are very difficult to hit and there is no way to lock on and follow a single target. Even slowing down time does not help in most situations (though I could just be really bad at aiming). - It has every single trope from typical Ubisoft open world busy work games... watchtowers that reveal the map, bandit camps, hunting/crafting parts, marking enemies to be seen through walls, optional stealth gameplay, scaling walls/buildings, hidden audio logs... the list goes on. Copy and paste, rinse and repeat for a few hundred hours. - The voice acting is excellent, but the AI automated lip syncing when these characters are talking is not good (outside of hand-animated cutscenes), and you will be seeing it a lot since there is a lot of talking! - I do not care in the slightest about what most characters outside of the main story have to say. I get that they're going for a Witcher 3 kind of thing, but the stories that are being told by these characters are not compelling at all since I know exactly what is going to happen next. In Witcher 3, if you had to fight a monster as part of a side quest, it was usually either a unique variant or something you had genuinely never seen before, and I cared about the context of the fight and what the quest-givers had to say. In this, no matter what, it is almost always a pack of small robots and one or two big robots, whatever happens or whatever anybody says.

When I bought H:ZD, I didn't have many preconceptions. I knew that there is cool robot monster combat and a beautifully crafted world, and those were definitely the relevant selling factors for me. The game delivered on both of these things, for sure, it's beautiful and fighting robot animals is pretty exciting. What I hadn't considered was that I was actually playing Assassin's Creed or Far Cry in another wrapping, how could I? The prologue was free from radio towers and exterminating bandit camps with optionally stealthy approaches, at least during the narratively strong prologue. Incrementally expanding inventory size and finding random small damage boost modifications made me suspicious of some AAA-gaming formula being injected here, but I wasn't worried quite yet, even as my inventory continued filling up with more and more random, seemingly important junk. But then the prologue ended somewhat unceremoniously. Promising story complications resolved via a disappointingly simplistic "go forth and explore the world now." Previously interesting characters responded to technological mysteries that affected the very core of their faith with bored ignorance, All of the relevant plot was paused so that the player could run around and deliver plants to basically nameless NPCs. Two steps out of the prologue and the side quests started piling up. Not exactly the most exciting side quests, either: Follow a linear trail for half an hour (press forward) as Aloy interprets all findings to you immediately. Complete Assassin's Creed-style timed challenges. Wipe out a bandit camp (optionally stealthy). Climb radio towers (they are walking this time around). I have gameplay issues as well, mostly that melee feels bad and aiming on a gamepad is annoying while playing the game on keyboard+mouse is strenuous, but neither of these issues are as problematic to my continued playthrough as seeing the bland AAA-formula behind every facet of this beautiful world.