Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition

HZD is a tactical open world 3rd person shooter with some basic stealth elements. Rather than just rushing in with guns blazing, the player must choose proper tactics (stealth, hack machines to fight each other, etc.), weapons, and ammo to overcome encounters against powerful machines. The open world is huge, beautiful, and has a lot of fun side activities to do. The game is very fun. Unfortunately, there are some incredibly aggravating issues that constantly drag the game down and make it difficult to just enjoy the game. - Severely limited inventory forces the player to manage inventory on a regular basis. Every 2~3 quests, I have to visit a merchant and fiddle with inventory. It gets incredibly aggravating and really kills the flow of the game. - No AOE or auto loot. Looting a dozen things one at a time gets old. - Poor visibility can make for another aggravating experience. In dark areas, it can be impossible to see the terrain and ledges to jump to. Landing headshots on human enemies can be difficult since you can't see them. It can also be hard to see the direction human enemies are facing, making stealth kills difficult. Not only that, when it's bright, it's hard to see focus highlights. - Clunky weapon/ammo/potion switching. Quick changing mid combat often leads to player rushing and accidentally selecting the wrong weapon/ammo since the game doesn't pause. Switching between potions is even worse as the game doesn't even slow down, nor can the player move while switching potions. - While crafting ammo, the player has to be mindful and stop the game from wasting resources to craft 1 ammo. - Aiming and dodging don't work together well. With the camera zoomed in while aiming, you will not know if you'll fall off a cliff or walk into a wall and not have room to dodge. There's also no way to know of attacks coming from the sides. - Dialogue, story, and characters (including Aloy) are boring and uninteresting.

Everything about the base game is great! Story, music, progression, characters, exploration, robots. It's a wonder to explore in this fun new world! The expansion is similarly fun except for one thing: the MASSIVE power creep in both enemies and weapons/armour you can get. While the base game slowly introduces new creatures that are one step up from the previous ones, the expansion goes about 5 steps up with the monsters and a couple steps up with the equipment. Btw a game calling home is not the same as DRM; those ignorant reviewers who claimed it is need to learn to read wikipedia. You want a game that is close to it? Assasins Creed calls home every time you walk through a door. At least these devs state it up front that you are providing them analytical data; most just do it without your knowledge.

Besides the data collection on a so-called "singleplayer game" that has been mentionned enough by other comments, I would like to mention how this game is utterly incapable of running at all on a perfectly capable machine. Hitting the 4K 60FPS mark is breeze, yet the game keeps crashing not even five minutes past the save load, and this happens constantly on even the cleanest possible state of the game AND of the system itself. And this happens regardless whether I tune down the graphics settings, the resolution, framerate or a combination of the three. Must I also add that I have installed the game first on a newly installed W11 setup before starting again from 0 with a new W10 installation, expecting my crashes to be a compatibility issue and thus be fixed, only to find out that it DID NOT change A THING. The only traces of similar issues found online date back a year ago AT LEAST, no hint at a possible solution seems to have ever been provided and no candidate solution suggested by other player ever proved effective. Releasing a game in such a disastrous state of achievement is an absolute DISGRACE and making people pay money for it is nothing but a scam. Thank you kindly for wasting my money, time, diskspace and internet bandwith and congratulations for having me pay for it.

This game defintiely has some flaws, especially the weird difficulty curve, and its share of bugs like things occasionally falling through terrain. However it's still really fun and the story is quite compelling. There's also a lot of world building that went into this and it shows. All in all I'd say it's about the same or a bit more fun than Witcher 3. About the DRM, I'm pretty sure I was able to opt out completely or agree only to some anonymous game-only stats so something seems to have changed since the other reviews were posted.

Indisputably, Horizon's visual artwork is stunning. You walk from one grandiose vista to the next. The world designers did an excellent job here. The ambient music transports perfectly the feeling this lost world. Unfortunately, the game itself is mediocre at best, often disappointing. The biggest disappointment hit me immediately when I fist played the game myself: Wait, this *is* Rise of the Tomb Raider! And I mean literally: the climbing, the sneaking, the fighting, the perks, the quests, the weapons and armor. They only dumbed down the climbing (which requires no timing anymore) and removed the physical puzzles, ignoring that these were a few of the assets of the Tomb Raider game. Horizon is just a different world and different plot for the Tomb Raider game-engine! I venture to say, that the fact that protagonist is a female is also due to a restriction imposed by the Tomb Raider engine. When I buy a game, part of the fun is learning to play the game. And learning its weaknesses. For the Tomb Raider games this is for instance the weak AI when it comes to patrolling and back-stabbing. Also, close combat is infuriatingly ineffective and chaotic. The main quest is meh, with only very few revelations or surprises. The main character, Aloy, is rather annoying. I do not know if there is a single dialog without sarcasm, a snooty remark, sulkiness or being offended on her part. The dialogs are often boring. Exploration of the world is a mayor part of the game. But there is no intrinsic motivation to do that because the visually dazzling world of Horizon is just a beautiful scenery with nothing to do and no secrets to uncover. So the game developers littered it with collectibles, hoping to connect to the compulsive tendencies of their players. I got them all. And I did not enjoy getting them! What a letdown, to climb on a pinnacle in the sunset only to find a loot box on top. It is a monument to the laziness of the game developers.