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Horizon Zero Dawn (2017, Playstation 4) Review



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Also for: Windows (2020, Complete Edition only)


Behold - a hard reboot of planet Earth. Horizon Zero Dawn takes place in an uncharacteristically beautiful post-apocalyptic setting. The opening credits roll to the dawn of a new day. The morning sun glistens in mountain streams rushing down its snowy slopes. A weather-worn man clad in furs walks down a mountain path with a baby on his back. As he approaches a field of majestic, animal-like machines he stops to tell her how she'll learn to hunt these one day.

On the surface level this futuristic concept may seem corny, but Horizon Zero Dawn treats itself with surprising earnestness. It touches upon some daring sci-fi themes about our own imminent future. What amazes me is how - even on my second playthrough - that sense of wonderment never subsides. This is not only food for thought, it is also convincingly depicted. And since my first playthrough, upon its initial release, a new option to activate HDR has emerged, allowing the sunsets to shine with an almost magical light.


Creator Guerrilla Games, previously known only for their Killzone franchise, gets almost everything right on their first foray into the open-world genre. They mix and match challenging, responsive action gameplay with a big, beautiful world and story content almost too clever for its own good. For long stretches of time very little happens on the action level, but the sci-fi themes are so captivating it feels like a conflict raging inside my mind. And once that's over, back into the open world I go, spending dozens of hours in exploration, combat, stealth and survival exploits. Time just flies, and none of it feels like a waste.

You assume the role of Aloy (brilliantly voiced by Ashly Burch), a flame-haired, agile and clever young heroine with great scientific acumen. Born an outcast under mysterious circumstances, she's raised by a fellow outcast named Rost (J.B. Blanc), who teaches her how to survive in the wilderness. When she's old enough she sets out on a quest for answers about her real identity. But what starts out as a deeply personal endeavour grows to become intertwined with the fate of the world. She crosses paths with an ancient threat that seems ready to bring about a second apocalypse.


Aloy's strongest characteristics are her curiosity, righteousness and affinity for making sense of the unknown. Her story unfolds to something almost Biblical in scope, and in the end the message becomes touchingly life-affirming. Whilst scouring old ruins and caverns, she unearths some of the recorded distress that plagued the last humans left alive before the apocalypse. This is some harrowing stuff. Although Aloy's importance is larger than life, her understated personality never overshadows the surrounding world and its secrets.

On your journey you cross different climate zones, stumble upon settlements and interact with different tribes and cultures, some of them with questlines of their own. They all fall under the central conflict of religious superstition versus scientific progress, and how the right tool of either kind can become a weapon in the wrong hands. Although the world is full of more or less meaningless activities, the exploration and story combines to pull me in deeper than I'd anticipated.


Combat is Horizon Zero Dawn's ace in the hole. Aloy's opposition is rich and varied, ranging from hostile humans, Raptor-resembling Watcher robots, and all the way to veritable Tyrannosaur robots armed with destructive lasers and rockets. Although not all are a genuine delight to fight (damn those burrowing, wormy Rockbreakers), their sheer number, size, behaviours, strengths and weaknesses make each fight like an impromptu puzzle - especially if they catch you unawares. They're patrolling certain routes and sites, dead set on guarding buried stashes and lore, which makes these secrets even more appealing to find.

When dealing with enemies, your spear or different kinds of bows and slings are the most straightforward options, even more so if you know what arrows to use, in what order, and where to aim. On a higher difficulty setting, sneaking around backstabbing them, or preparing the battleground with traps, is a better option. Although combat is excellent however you play, the call for more variation and strategic planning makes a hard playthrough a more engaging time.



Beware the hardest setting, though. Here, Aloy can only withstand a couple of hits before dying, and needs to make good use of her ability to corrupt and override machines to fight for her. If you engage enemies head-on, you'll discover they are bullet-sponges, unless you use mods to min-max every weapon in your arsenal to fit a specific enemy type. This becomes a tiresome, menu-juggling affair, hardly worth the extra time investment.

Apart from that, it's hard to fault Horizon Zero Dawn for anything but very minor flaws. Some of the skills obtained through levelling are disappointing, and the inventory fills up way too quick. The facial animations, with their occasional glitches and tics, make the characters look more robotic than human in some dialogue scenes, and the lip-syncing is not great.

Most other potential flaws are excusable. Whenever you fast-travel or enter a dungeon, the load times are long, but the complete lack of them whilst exploring makes up for that. Inspired by dozens of previous open-world games, no one could rightly call Horizon Zero Dawn inventive or even inspiring. But it makes up for that as well by simply stealing from the best. It's a case of boatloads of money funnelled into the right departments to make a perfectly polished game.



Four years after its initial release, it remains one of the finest open-world experiences on the market, and an essential addition to anyone's Playstation library. Sure, Marvel's Spider-Man might have better combat and controls. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has better storytelling. The same can be said about my favorite game, Red Dead Redemption II, which also boasts a more life-like world design. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's amazing exploration loop remains unbeaten. But I can think of no other open-world game this well-rounded and solid across the entire board. It has no weak parts. Every aspect works in support of another.

Rarely have I witnessed a game franchise start out this well, with such a solid foundation to build upon. Horizon Zero Dawn presents the player with the challenge of survival through combat training, research, hunting, crafting, analyzing and uncovering new ideas. This concept informs both story and gameplay. I approach it with an insatiable curiosity, and I'm still damning myself for not finding every codex entry.

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