Horizon Zero Dawn for Windows

Horizon Zero Dawn is a symbiosis of the latest Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed gameplay. It’s like a pure action-packed exploration of the “tombs” of ancient civilizations, but in an open world and with RPG elements. This is a game that surprises with an unrealistically beautiful open world, but at the same time does not know how to properly fill it and make it alive.

Horizon Zero Dawn Review

The plot of the game is excellent in all its manifestations, except for rare situations, which we will talk about later. He will talk about the post-apocalyptic world, its inhabitants with a tribal state system and a girl raised by a representative of the exiled caste. And this girl, our main character, most of all wants to know who her mother is. For this, Ela does absolutely everything, including saving the world, but the main goal and motivation of the heroine will remain the truth about her mother. It’s a pretty simple yet powerful story that will surprise you with its plot twists and turns.

However, the developers failed to avoid all the plot holes of Horizon Zero Dawn, which are so fond of collecting games about the study of ancient civilizations. Going on a journey in ruins, you will constantly meet enemies from the present. Representatives of a hostile tribe may be waiting for you in a room, which seems to be impossible to get into without solving several puzzles and launching the mechanisms of an ancient civilization that have not been touched since the end of the world. How they got there through the door closed on both sides is a question the game desperately bypasses.

The world of Horizon Zero Dawn is an unrealistically beautiful post-apocalyptic world with robots that you want to stretch out into screenshots and take them almost every five minutes. There are mountains, meadows, forests and desert here. There is no need to talk about the incredible sky that spreads over all these views. Wildlife, remnants of Old Civilization cities, new tribal savages who hunt for survival. The main difference from our ancestors lies only in the fact that instead of mammoths there are super-technological robots. The only thing that is a little depressing is that while in the PC version there are problems with rendering, when weather effects and time of day can switch in one or two frames.

The world of the game Horizon Zero Dawn is quite spacious, but it is rarely possible to meet activity on its way. It was made contextually correct, so the desert is practically empty and there are large places where there are no people and animals, because there is a huge robot worm in the ground like the monsters from the movie “Tremors”. The forests are dominated by animals and fewer robots, because they graze in the meadows.

The unevenness of filling the game world with content manifests itself almost immediately: the first 10-15 hours Ela spends among small mountain villages. And then he comes to Meridian – a huge city, a real metropolis according to ideas. And already here side quests and a bunch of unique merchants await her.

Thus, the size of the city and the world itself amazes and enhances the effect of the plot behavior of members of the Nora clan, who are afraid to go beyond their mountain lands and caves. Distribution by levels is another big problem of the game, because there are a lot of cases when robots several times higher than the level stand in the way. So, you can carefully walk by or, if you have the time and inspiration, kill everyone one by one. But this only stretches the passage and spoils the nerves. During the first act in the territories of our native tribe, we quickly dealt with the monsters, and they were not insurmountably dangerous for us, and then the game forcibly forces us to stealth.

Horizon Zero Dawn side quests are usually tied to this: analyze the place, follow the trail, find that, kill the monster. The stories they tell are interesting: here you have Romeo and Juliet, Robin Hood, and a bunch of other familiar stories in a local interpretation. But the gameplay part remains monotonous, and this is worth accepting. On the other hand, there are not so many sidequests, so you are unlikely to have time to get bored.

Horizon Zero Dawn’s mechanics have a lot of potential, but are poorly implemented. The world of the game is divided into sectors according to the preferences and occupations of tribes and factions. Nora are simple hunters, Karzhs are brave warriors, Auxerre are focused on technology. Dark Karzhs, those who generally cannot live without war, and Banuk, trying to coexist with robots, and not exterminate them. There are robots that have replaced the familiar ecosystem of large animals (horses, deer, bulls) and their evil counterparts, captured by a virus that wants to destroy all living things.

The inhabitants of this world do not always normally interact with each other or even notice each other’s existence. Robots are aggressive towards all people, which is understandable. But some human patrols pass by the field with robots, not paying attention to them. Such bugs in the behavior of artificial intelligence happen quite often and make an unpleasant impression, especially during the passage of key story missions.

The combat system Horizon Zero Dawn works on the principle of easy to learn, hard to master, adjusted for role-playing elements. If you want, throw everyone with ordinary arrows, if you want, buy new types of weapons and expanded versions of what you already have; use more highly specialized cartridges and kill more efficiently. And when at least three or four robots are running at you at the same time, it’s no longer up to aimed shooting at painful points, here at least have time to roll from their blows so as not to die.

Therefore, no matter how hard the developers try, fully-fledged game mechanics work only in battles against bosses. Everyone else is usually more effective just to spam with fire arrows. Another no less interesting option is to hack robots so that they fight by your side. But for this you will have to work hard: clean up factories for the manufacture of robots and download information about the vulnerabilities of their software. Synchronization towers, which reveal the map, here are originally played in the style of the whole world – these are huge walking robots, on which you still need to figure out how to climb.

Horizon Zero Dawn on PC is definitely worth the attention of the release, but you need to be prepared for certain technical problems that the developers are in no hurry to fix. The game itself is a great first attempt at an RPG from an experienced studio that used to make shooters, and a good demonstration of the heights that Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to this game, will reach. Well-written history, incredibly beautiful world and daring gameplay decisions make up the big picture of Horizon Zero Dawn. And for the price that is sold on Steam and EGS, it would be really a crime not to purchase this game.