Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition

Zero Horizon Dawn has a really nice world and story. My only gripe is that it tries too hard to 'educate' its players. Apart from that, it could have been really great. (1) Story is very linear. It would have been nice to have several endings or to simply ignore the proving. After all, the villagers don't want you, so why should you try to kiss up to them? (2) Survival of early antagonists. It would have been interesting to see Bast or the girl in the beginning survive. And maybe eventually come to respect Aloy. (3) Depiction of men and women. Ok, I get that Sobeck/Gaia/Aloy are all good and wise and nice. And all female. And that Ted Faro/Hades/Helis are all evil or incompetent. And all male. And we have at least Rost and Jenna counteracting this extremely black and white world view. But after some time, it gets really tiresome. (4) Stone age utopia. This is a fantasy story, so you can of course depict utopian societies. But the suggestion that a tribal culture would work as a 'modern', 'multicultural' society is a bit wishful thinking. Just have a harsh winter, a bit of starvation or quarrel among the Nora or Banuk and these tribes would immediately splinter and break apart.

crashes, would not start

I've never played a game that felt like a perfect well crafted story AND incredible addicting and fun gameplay. HZD truly nailed it. This is probably the most complete and well polished experience I've had in a game since the original Portal game.

I was waiting for this game to come to GOG for ages and now that I've had a chance to sink some time into it I can safely say that It's a mediocre game. The characters are pretty cool, the gameplay is okay, the combat get's a bit repetitive and the storyline is really weird. I can certainly understand why people like this game, but it's not for me.

First of all, this game is not for you if your penis falls off when you have to play as a female character. Yes, you have to play as a girl - boohoo - get over it. Now for the awesome game: -It's still good looking by 2021 standards. Could be better, could be alot worse. -It responds surprisingly well to PC-controls for a console port. This translates to: Most of the time Aloy does what you want her to do. Sometimes though, she just clings to some rock or tree and refuses to budge until you move her a few millimetres left or right. I've seen far worse ports. -The ingame tutorials do what they are supposed to do. They tell you what you should do but don't hold your hand. The perfect equilibrium between babysitting and Souls. -It is fun to play just running around and hunting machines while trying different tactics. And it feels really rewarding when a new approach suddenly works out and a seemingly invincible opponent becomes just a tough challenge. -The NPCs have well written dialogues overall. -The story is good, at least up to the point I was able to get to. The last point is the reason why I give the game only 3 out of 5 stars: I would have given the otherwise well deserved five stars if it were not for the horrible stability issues. The game sometimes froze for no apparent reason when I was still learning the ropes, i.e. before being made a seeker. After becoming a seeker the game moved on to freezing/crashing regularly after a few minutes playing. When this happens, you have the option to send a crash report, though I seriously doubt anybody cares about that anymore. Why do I doubt this? If you would like to contact support, following the instructions in the crash report just takes down a rabbit hole that ultimately brings you to Sony's support for the PS4 version. Which is exactly as helpful as you'd think owning the PC version. Maybe there is still an official support for PC gamers out there for this game. But if so, they have hidden like ninjas.