Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition

Played on Ryzen 5 3600, 16gb RAM, AMD rx5700, SSD. This game is a lot of fun to play. gorgeous environments and combat with bows and explosives, setting traps, and a wide variety of enemy types keeps combat engaging. Approach by stealth, and subtly stalk your prey, set your traps, and watch mayhem ensue. Or you can just start shooting with your trusty bow, then finish them up close with your spear. Either way is fun. The story is told from what I think, is a very imaginative angle. Rather than a exposition dump at the beginning, and subsequently forgetting why, we learn about the history of the world as we play. What happened, the how, and why. With an interesting twist I did not see coming. But it's not perfect. Inventory management is the most glaring. I acknowledge that this was a console game, however the method of selecting items while playing (potions, traps, etc) is frustrating mid-combat. You must cycle through them, find the item you want, use it, then cycle back to what you had before. It would have been better if we had a numbered taskbar we could slot frequently used items, or at least equip or use items directly from the inventory screen. Climbing is featured very heavily in this game, which makes it a pity that the handholds you use can sometimes be so difficult to spot. Using the focus should have made it so the handholds were highlighted when scanning a cliff or structure. While annoying, these are not gamebreaking in anyway. Just little things that I feel could have used a little more attention with, in regards to being a PC version of the game. So in conclusion, if you like open world games, give this one a try. You're probably going to like it.

I got my hands on this game day one on PS4 and enjoyed it. What differentiates this game from a herd of post Witcher 3 action RPGs is that it has a great concept, a unique and distinct idea that form a world and lore which makes a great game possible.

This one deserves the Complete Edition Title. A well done, polished version of the base game. I dont't get the drama with data-collection / telemetry, Guerilla didn't choose to put it in there, thank Sony for that. Just use a firewall when using Windows.

So if you expect different classes and lots of choices to affect the storyline, you will be dissapointed. However if you enjoy action open world games with some minor RPG features and good storytelling, then you will enojy this game. I liked the main characters, the side characters are interesting and what I absolutely loved is the world itself - I mean postapo world with animal robots and tribe cultures - that's just so awesome. The combat is also engaging and the visuals are pretty good too. The only thing I didn't like were the climbing mechanics, these are really annoying. However they promised to improve them in the sequel - fingers crossed it's ported to PC eventually.

I am not entirey sure why this game gripped me by the guts and had me playing late nights. That's a rare occurrence these days, with me supposely being a grown-up and all, but I really liked the new, fundamentally optimist take on the apocalypse which is the foundation of so many games these days, and I enjoyed the way the backstory was told: revealed gradually as the main character dug into her background. You have a relative freedom to explore, where a linear overarcing story can be freely mixed with mostly fun and reasonably varied quests. Whether I took short or long sessions with the game, I always found things to do and places to visit. The visuals were beautiful, and my budget GTX1660 GPU had no problems with the highest quality settings. The animations for the main character and for the machine opponents are very nice, with a sometimes stunning attention to detail and lots of variation. Human opponents look and feel less alive and less intelligent, bizarrely enough, but the game is mostly about fights against machines, and they are really well done. Perhaps most notable, though, is the outstanding voice acting for the main character. Aloy is voiced with such passion (by Ashly Burch) that some moments in the dialog had me literally moved to tears or laughing out loud, and even her little comments on the environment and the actions you take are spot on for the character, all the way through. As a Swede being used to cold winters, I love the way the character interacts with deep snow in the DLC, both how she walks and runs in it, and how it deforms to her footsteps and dodge rolls (and, I must admit, the occasional downhill butt-slide I made just for fun). I hope the PS4/PS5 sequel, right now Sony-exclusive, will be ported to Windows as well. This was my most enjoyable gaming experience in years, perhaps in a decade. (FYI, I'm old enough -barely- to have played the original Pong when it was released.)