Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition
Won in a giveaway by Doc0075 at the start of this year, thank you very much for your generosity, Doc!
On the one hand I absolutely loved it as an open world monster hunting game. It strongly reminded me of Far Cry: Primal, which I loved as well, combined with some modern, guided Tomb Raider platforming and good old, free-form terrain hopping à la Elder Scrolls. If you liked wreaking havoc with predators in FC Primal or if you liked playing the sneaky archer in Skyrim or Enderal, cheesing fights from spots where opponents have trouble to reach you, you will have a blast with Horizon Zero Dawn, too.
The setting (tribal hunters with machine animals) is silly but fun. The world is wonderfully crafted with lots of impressive vistas to behold and four different biomes. Your adventures are accompanied by a beautiful soundtrack and immersive sound design (IMO they exaggerated a bit with some of the animal noises when e.g. foxes screech like monkeys, but all in all the soundscape is very cool). You get a large arsenal of different weapons that encourage creativity and give you a lot of freedom in how to approach fights. You can even turn machines against each other or shoot off their powerful weapons and use them yourself (in the fight, not permanently as they are too heavy to carry around with you all the time, but you still have the option of acquiring them in one fight and using them for another, close by). And last but not least, the game has very fair and convenient fast travel and savegame systems in the form of campfires which are spread everywhere and allow you to save manually, on top of all the autosaving the game does. I hardly ever lost significant progress, not even on crashes. All of the above made this my number one go-to game for a longer period of time, which made me forget about all others, and I spent almost 115 hours with it, a lot more than necessary, just because I was enjoying it so much, using it as my playground.
Some of the open world aspects seemed a bit lacklustre. There wasn't that much variety in the structure of quests; it was usually "go there, find tracks, follow trail, fight some monsters and return", with very few surprises. And merchants tasked you to find random collectibles all over the world in exchange for small rewards and sold maps that showed their locations. At first I thought, why would I ever want to pointlessly collect these random things? But in the end, I did it regardless, because even though all these tasks seemed tedious on paper, I found they served a function of giving me a small incentive to visit parts of the maps I would not have gone to otherwise and experience my own open world adventures. So while the tasks in themselves were not memorable, what I saw and experienced on the way to complete them was, for me at least.
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So, that was all of the good stuff. Free-form open world gaming at its finest. Now, on the other hand, if you go into this also expecting a well written and exciting story, I'd probably advise you to better look elsewhere. It starts off well enough with some dramatic scenes, but after the beginning, the main story quests are spread thin and on top of that follow two different plot lines, one pertaining to present political machinations (which was halfway interesting) and one pertaining to uncovering the past and a future threat (and this one I thought very dry and predictable).
Several quests connected to the latter were essentially walking simulators that had you traverse more or less linear paths through same-y looking frozen bunkers, just collecting all the lore about the old world that was dumped there, either in the form of optional text and audio log collectibles or in the form of obligatory hologram speeches. In between and at the end, you might get a fight, but most of the time you are just stepping from one long-winded pseudo tech babble speech to the next, and I found none of it truly exciting or surprising.
Conveying info via text and audio logs is one of the most tired videogames tropes at this point. It was kind of clumsy already when RPGs did it at the turn of the millenium, more than 20 years ago (e.g. miners writing down their thoughts in a journal and then text suddenly stopping due to the author being surprised by an attack). But HZD doesn't even know how to use these tropes in an engaging way (like e.g. Bioshock). It just dumps several audio logs close to each other, so your options are either (1) stop what you are doing, just stand still and listen to all audio logs in a row (which is not what audio logs were invented for, they should allow you to continue playing the game and listening on the side, but if you do that in HZD, you run a high risk of triggering more voiced lines which will then play all at the same time and you will miss half of what is said), or (2) you ignore the logs completely (because if you won't listen to them now, you won't later - even if you collect them, you will have a hard time finding individual items in your data collection again later, and on top of that, if you postpone listening to them, you will be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of them and their length). And frankly, if you go with (2), you won't really miss out on much. I wish I had done that, instead of letting OCDs & FOMO allow my time to be wasted with this tedious writing.
So yeah, there's not much of a story in HZD, IMO, but the less of interest it has to tell, the more words it uses for it. And if you think, okay, but those are just optional collectibles - no. You will also have to endure a significant portion of it in order to get through the main storyline. There were some optional side quests that were way more exciting and memorable than many of the main quests. I kind of wish, the game would have revolved more around the present, and the past would have remained more of a mystery, because anything that was mildly interesting about the past was drowned in all the trivial lore dumping and tech babble.
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There also were a few minor things that I didn't like as much:
Your weapon selection wheel can only ever hold four different weapons, even though there are a lot more in the game. But this doesn't seem to be an intentional limitation to make you choose your weapons carefully before going into battle. Because at all times you can just go into your inventory menu and switch out weapons on the selection wheel. Meaning you basically have access to all weapons whenever you want to, but constantly going through the inventory menus to switch between them is very inconvenient and clunky. Why not just have a bigger weapon wheel and allow access to all of them, or at least more than 4 with the press of a single button?
Also, inventory space for resources is limited, so you have an incentive to upgrade and expand it, something to work for. Fine by me. But even when I had it fully maxed out, I constantly had to interrupt the game for inventory management, throwing away resources that I might end up missing later on because the inventory was clogging up again, and that was not the idea of expanding the space so I wouldn't have to worry about this anymore. At the same time, you can carry unlimited amounts of lootboxes with resources though. But you can only remove items from them, not put anything back inside. And the lootboxes (or reward boxes) felt kind of pointless anyway. They didn't really add anything to the game, IMO, and I never spent in-game money on them. The whole inventory system just felt unnecessarily cumbersome and time-consuming to me.
The hunting trials offered an opportunity to learn and practice new strategies of approaching fights, which I liked, but this good idea was kind of ruined for me by the addition of time limits and a three-star achievement/reward system that mostly reminded me of mobile games (try again for the gold star!). Some of the time limits also seemed pretty harsh, it sucked the fun out of what could have been enjoyable activities otherwise. Thankfully this part was entirely optional, and in the end I decided not to waste my time by trying to master it.
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And on the technical side, I had a few crashes, but I believe that was mainly due to the game putting a strain on my rather old system. I'd definitely recommend 16GB over 8GB, my RAM usage was often dangerously close to 100% when running HZD. And in areas with a lot of NPCs, I got some heavy stuttering, not sure if due to insufficient memory or weak CPU. But I'm very happy that apart from these occasional inconveniences, I was still able to run the game just fine for the most time, and well enough to finish it.
What I could not explain though is that even after quitting HZD, the game's process was kept alive in the task manager for a long time, and often I had to manually kill it because it was hogging all my resources and slowing the PC down. This doesn't seem to have been connected to my system because a lot of others reported the same, so I assume it's an actual technical oddity of the program and kind of a serious issue. If you experience your system getting slower after running the game, check the task manager and kill the HZD process if it's still there!
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TL:DR
+++ I strongly recommend it as an open world playground if you enjoy games like Far Cry Primal and Skyrim. That's why I loved it.
-- I don't really recommend it if you're mostly looking for a great storytelling game and don't care much about the open world part. It does have its moments and some decent characters, but not enough to justify spending so much time with it, and definitely not enough to justify all the tedium of tech speeches and lore dumps. And that's why I probably won't ever list it among my all-time favorite games, even though I had a lot of fun with it.
Post edited December 15, 2023 by Leroux
