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Horizon Zero Dawn: Open World Gaming 101

Video Review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj7TOqwA7Uo My PS4 doesn’t get much attention these days, or rather, it doesn’t get the attention it probably thinks it should. I use it every day for Netflix, Amazon Prime and Youtube and such, but on the gaming side of things…well, lets just say that I had to take out The Last Guardian disc before putting Horizon Zero Dawn in, and I haven’t played that since I completed it on it’s launch weekend. See, I used to split my games pretty evenly between PC and Playstation. But this generation has pushed my away from console gaming, to the point where the only playstation games I’ll play are exclusives. Luckily, as it happens, I reckon playstation has a pretty good track record of exclusive games, and I’m happy to report that this game carries on that good reputation. I’ve noticed that Playstation’s 1st Party developers have a bit of a habit of establishing themselves with one franchise before starting a brand new IP in a completely different genre and defying all expectations to create yet another game series for people to get excited about. Naughty Dog started with Crash Bandicoot before blowing tiny minds with Uncharted, with some Jak and Daxter in between, Sucker Punch established themselves with Sly Cooper before making possibly the best original superhero game with Infamous, but lets just ignore Second Son for this example, and Insomniac gave Ratchet and Clank to the world, before scorching said world with an invasion of Chimera for the Resistance series. And now we come to Guerrilla games, who are best known around the globe for 2 things. One is the Killzone FPS series, and the other is for showing off pre-rendered footage and claiming it was captured during gameplay. What is now known as Gearboxing after that colonial marines…incident. So it was a bit of a surprise to see them announce a game where you play as a young tribal woman who is a bit of a dab hand at killing robot dinosaurs with spears and slingshots. Set around 1000 into earths future, some sort of apocalyptic event has occurred, everyone has got over their whole chaotic and rather disorganised “fallout” phase, and human civilisation has basically started from scratch. So it’s not so much as a post apocalyptic world as it is a post-post apocalyptic world. The apocalypse has happened, but everyones gotten over it and started settling down and getting on with things. The tribal lass you play as is called Aloy, which is one of the least subtle character names I’ve heard in a while, who is deemed an outcast from her tribe by the matriarchs because she doesn’t have a mother. As Aloy grows up, she decides to set out to discover who her mother is and what happened to her. This quest ends up taking her to every corner of this impressively large, but never empty or boring, open world. From snow covered mountains, to sandblasted deserts, from lush woodlands to thick jungles, there’s more than enough environmental diversity here to stop any one biome overstaying it’s welcome. Dotted around this wide expansive playground are the haunting and slightly epic looking ruins from the Metal World, remnants of the long lost civilisation from before the event that reverted humanity back to the stone age. You’ll also find resources to collect, wood for arrows, plants for healing items or elemental damage ammunition, or even just materials to increase your inventory storage space. And there are also some animals to hunt, like boars, rabbits and turkeys, all of which works in to a crafting system very much in line with Far Cry Primal. Oh, and there are great big giant robot crocodiles, dragons and dinosaurs kicking around the place too. And yes, a bow and arrow is actually surprisingly effective at taking them down. During her childhood, Aloy found herself in an ancient ruin, where she found a bluetooth headset thing, or what she calls a Focus. This allows her to scan the environment, letting you see through walls and terrain, tag enemies, and highlight weak points on the angry robot types. This plays in to what I feel is the central mechanic to this game, hiding in the long grass, scanning enemy weakpoints, throwing a plan together and charging out with murderous intent. You see, certain parts of a robot have different weaknesses that you have to exploit. For instance, their body may be extremely susceptible to ice damage, but that’s protected by armour that is weak to your hollow point arrows. Other robots have antennae that will let it call for help if you don’t disable them first, and other, more angry robots have mounted guns that you can blast off, before picking up for yourself and enacting sweet, ironic revenge. And you’ve got more than just elemental arrows at your disposal to take them down, you also have trip wire traps, proximity mines, bombs you fire from slingshots, some sort of fully automatic arrow rifle thing, and my tactical fallback option, a rope dart that will pin enemies to the ground, leaving them open for a critical hit, or to keep them out of a mass brawl for a minute or so. You also have a long bit of wood with a blade attached to the end, which you can eventually use to hack, or override, enemy robots with. Initially you can only override smaller machines, but you can eventually unlock the ability to take control of the bigger ones, some of which you can even ride around on as mounts. And let’s face it, being able to ride into battle atop a robot bull, firing explosive arrows at a robot crocodile is everyones idea of pretty cool. You also have to deal with other smaller, fleshier creatures that use similar weapons to yourself. These are called Humans, and fighting them will almost always boil down to tagging everyone and staying hidden, trying to take them all out quietly with stealth kills and long range headshots, before you’re spotted and it turns into a great big royal rumble. Fighting against humans isn’t nearly as fun as fighting robots, the melee attacks don’t pack any real punch, and your attacks don’t knock enemies about or interrupt their actions. In fact anything other than a headshot with an arrow wont even make them flinch. But they do offer a bit of a change of pace, and most of these encounters can be skipped entirely, with only a small handful of them being part of the main story missions. I wont go into the story too much so as to avoid any spoilers, but I will say that the story didn’t take the route I was expecting it to, and that it could have very easily taken if Guerrilla were feeling lazy. Because Aloy was an outcast for her whole life up to this point, are exploring and discovering the world and its people along with her. You know as much about the world as she does. The tribe you first interact with are stereotypical Nordic types in appearance, but later you meet different civilisations, each with their own histories, societies and religions, and each looking drastically different from the others, in terms of how they dress and the architecture of their settlements. Talking to various people through dialogue wheels lets you dig in to the lore of the world as deeply or as little as you please, and audio tapes and text documents from the old world serve to help you piece together what happened to humanity between then and now. You also get a whole heap of side quests and activities, from hunting challenges to clearing out corrupted zones, to batman esque detective missions where you scan areas for clues and follow trials. There are even hidden power cells to find that unlock powerful endgame armour, much like in Assassins Creed 2. There’s also dungeons that, upon completion, allow you to override new robots, and the Tallnecks that reveal more of the world map, again, kind of like Assassins Creed, or any other Ubisoft open world, for that matter. There are bonfire’s dotted around the world that act as both save points and fast travel locations. Initially, fast travel is dependant on a consumable item called fast travel packs, which you can get as quest rewards or from several merchants. I’m not such a big fan of this, as it limits exploration, and when you need to hunt specific robots for specific parts to buy a new weapon from an overly picky merchant, not being able to warp around the place is a pain in the arse. Oddly though, around 8 or 9 hours into the game, I found a merchant who sold an item that allows unlimited fast travel, and is cheap enough that I didn’t have to put off buying anything else I was saving up for, which begs the question, why put a limit on it in the first place if you’re going to unlock it completely anyway? Then again, some of the load times can be so long I wonder whether it would actually be quicker to walk some distances. Some of the dialogue scenes are reminiscent of Mass Effect, with the characters awkwardly stood in place, fixed on each others eyes, and often you’ll notice a jump in camera position, facial expression and tone of voice between lines, probably because due to you having multiple choices, and the game is slotting together conversations in an order that they weren’t recorded or animated in. This hardly RUINS the game, or even the scene it occurs in, it just seems like a bit of a glaring smudge that only really stands out because the rest of the product is so highly polished. The voice acting is pretty damn good for the most part, too, with only the odd one or two deliveries feeling like they were rushing because it was lunch time. As well as the floaty melee combat I mentioned earlier, the terrain clambering mechanics can also feel a bit, well, floaty. You’ll soon start to spot tell tail signs that the terrain is climbable, either by white rock edges or yellow metal beams and handholds. These work well enough, but some places that require climbing don’t have these, so I ended up just jumping up bits of rock like I was trying to scale a particularly steep mountain in Skyrim. I mean I eventually made it to where the game leading me, but if that was the way the developers intended for me to go, they could have done a better job of signposting it. As it is, I feel like I just exploited the collision detection of the terrain and essentially exploited my way over an obstacle. But, the number of times that that sort of thing occurred is negligible compared to the 25 or so hours I’ve spent with this amazing game so far, and I haven’t really finished it yet, I’ve just done the main quest line with a couple of the optional exploration bits here and there, so there’s plenty left to do here yet. This game is sort of like a compilation album of open world gameplay mechanics, showing off the best mechanics of the genre by presenting you with some of the best examples of their execution. You can see the inspiration taken from games like Skyrim, Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Batman and Mass Effect, squeezes it all into this huge, unique world, and ends up with a game that can be held high and used as an example of open world gaming done right. I played this game on a standard PS4, so I don’t know how much better this would look or play on a PS4 Pro, but even as it is, this game is absolutely gorgeous. As seems to be the trend with PS4 exclusives these days, there is a photo mode included, which allows you to mess about with camera positioning, different filters, and even change the time of day to get just the right shot. I know the PC elitists will say this game looks crap, or that it would look much better at 120fps on at 4K, and yeah, it would, of course it would. Everything would. But even as it is, I was regularly finding myself stopping and just taking in the environment I was surrounded by. When you find just the right spot, with just the right light and weather effects, this game can be ACHINGLY beautiful, so I imagine that playing it on the PS4 Pro may result in you needing to change your underwear occasionally. I also discovered an option to set the HUD to Dynamic, which means the screen is a lot less cluttered while you’re exploring, but it will all pop up again once you get in a scrap. I highly recommend this option, as the game is too beautiful to be hidden behind a quick select bar and health meters, and I’m annoyed at myself for having played the game for about 6 hours until I found that option. What I’m getting at here is that if you have a PS4, you should go and get this game immediately. This is the game you need in your life right now. I was planning on splitting my time this past week between this and Dark Souls 3, which I still haven’t managed to complete, but Horizon Zero Dawn ended up stealing every minute of my free time. I really can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy this game, but then again there are people out there who thought Red Dead Redemption was crap, so what do I know, there are weirdos out there. And for those of you without a PS4, well, don’t buy one for this. No game is worth buying a whole new console for (and that includes breath of the wild). It really is a shame that more people can’t play this game. We can only hope that one day the console manufacturers evolve some sort of empathy and scrap the whole business practice of console exclusive games. But until that day, I dunno, maybe ask to borrow your friends console for a while?