Hey guys. Been ages since I posted here. I wrote my own amateur review for the game and felt like posting it here too for old time's sake. Let's be frank, brevity isn't my strong suit, and this is after consciously trying to trim it down. Anyway, hope you enjoy.
After 57 hours I finished the game, and here's my amateur review. I tried being succinct, but I failed miserably. Sorry. Also, I won't add "IMO" to every line because it's both obvious and annoying to read. It's also a review that considers you already know the basic premise of this being a post-post-apocalyptic action-RPG with machine dinosaurs and a fixed protagonist. And if you didn't, there you go.
What surprised me most about Horizon was the main story. It actually fascinated me - more the revelations about the old world and what led to the apocalypse rather than what came long after. There are big info dumps in the main missions that slow it down a bit, but it didn't bother me at all since I wanted to drink it all in. Many of the emotions were negative ones, in a good way - I was chilled, I felt sad, and one of the twists left me with goosebumps. I would've liked for the epilogue to be a bit longer - to see what happens to the cities, tribes and people after the finale. Voice acting also positively surprised me. There are some odd moments, but it's still a big RPG - they're never absolutely consistent across all NPCs. I really enjoyed Aloy's cheekiness and spunky attitude. The supporting cast was one I very much liked (and sometimes liked to hate), whether they were people in Aloy's life, or people from Earth before shit hit the fan. I really want more of the latter, honestly. The world of 2065 is stuck in my mind. It's cool and tragic and terrifying. Even the title of the game and the dumb-awesome robo-dinos make sense. Who would've thought. The side missions were mostly lackluster however and I eventually just stopped doing them altogether because very few of the ones I did complete interested me. A specific example for improvement that comes to mind is adding bits of lore to every machine you need to hunt in the quests of the Hunter's Lodge, not just the final big baddie. A bit like Witcher Contracts. Without that, it just suffers too much from a "I did this already" sensation.
Exploration was also a bit of a letdown. It's partly because I didn't feel there was too much to discover, partly because what there was to discover was usually marked for you on the map. I understand that it's there for the sake of those who want an easy time finding all the shit, but to me it just removes a lot of motivation for exploration. I even might have enjoyed finding collectibles in this game, for a change, since they had bits of lore attached to them, but when they're all on the map to "begin" with (you buy an in-game map for them, but once you do, they're there forever), there's not much fun in just randomly traveling. I don't recall many situations in the game when I went off the beaten path, not towards a town I noticed on the map but just to the wilds, and found something unexpected. Not story-wise, and not in items - since you just buy them from merchants all the time. Speaking of which, the merchants themselves could have been enhanced, to have their own stories and distinctly different inventories. Finding a new merchant in an RPG should be borderline exhilarating. In Horizon it's usually just a chance to dump your trash. So, when many of the activities are already revealed on your map, going to an empty spot on it for the off-chance that there just might be an NPC outside of a settlement with a story waiting for me wasn't too alluring. There just weren't enough. And this next point might be really contentious - I commonly felt that the map had too many enemies, which prevented me from casually trotting in open fields atop my trusted steed without aggroing whoever. It's a difficult balance, I know. Make it too empty and it's, well, empty. But this was on the other end of the spectrum for me. Too crowded. Not with quests or characters, with enemies. It's alright and even enjoyable for open-worlds to have down-time in traveling. Calculating how much, though, is tough.
I actually would've liked it if there were many more people to speak with. RPG is a very flexible term. I don't want to get into that silly and sometimes kinda prideful argument of "what's a true RPG!", and I accept that it's a very broad range. But still, since it was marketed as an action RPG, I expected to have more NPCs to chat with just for the sake of it, and more meaningful choices to make. One thing I love in the genre is finding myself in that "fuuuuck, dunno what to decide!" moment, and I don't think I had that... at all? in Horizon. I did like the skill tree though, for the most part. It could've used more stuff (how about dual stealth takedowns, for example?), but still, every time you got a new talent, it felt meaningful. It didn't strike me as having a lot of fluff. To me, fun progress in games is when I can do something I previously couldn't, not just do it better a la TW3's minor percentage increases. Horizon has the latter too, but it also has mechanical character development that is quite noticeable in combat, whether it's rolling farther away for the big monsters, nocking two or even three arrows (that's really fun), slowing down time, takedowns and more. Even when a talent is just a higher number of something you already have, it's usually a high enough number to be satisfying.
Onto graphics. Horizon is a very beautiful game. You don't need a reviewer to tell you that, all the footage shows it. But to be honest, I think making the environment just mildly more responsive to your movement would've improved it immensely for me. The vegetation and water are mostly static. I would've sacrificed graphical fidelity to change that. Maybe I'm just generally not really wowed by graphics anymore. I get used to it really fast, and then I become focused on the game itself and the interactivity. Sure, sometimes I stop and take in the view when it's one I find remarkably pretty, but it doesn't happen regularly. Not on merit of graphical prowess alone. The only times I recall actually pausing were when I stared at a Metal Devil, and when I saw Meridian (the main city) from afar alongside the spire. Not because I could see every little metallic part on the machine's limbs. The scenes themselves were awe-inspiring due to what they were - a monstrously huge and freakishly designed dead machine, and a city on a mountain with a giant, mysterious relic of the old world towering over it. These sites would've had the same effect on me even with less graphical power. I'll put it this way: I was more bothered by a thin tree I smacked with my spear not breaking, than I was impressed by the detail on Aloy's clothes. The latter is awesome, sure, but my priorities lie more in the former (and don't cling to that one specific example - understand the idea behind it).
Minor stuff:
Menus are thankfully fast, as is saving. Fast-travel limitation before you purchase the unlimited kit is a pointless, annoying hindrance. Map should have customization options for the icons littering it (did I miss that?). Having the quest waypoint in the middle of the screen instead of just on the compass bothered me - a compass which I could hide, due to the wonderfully dynamic HUD that makes for a much nicer experience. Underwater segments could have been cool. Speed of camera in Focus mode (= Detective mode, Survival instincts, Witcher senses, Eagle vision, etc) was irritating, as was hunting for animal parts to improve your gear. Horizon has an option of "creating a quest" for an ingredient you're missing. I thought this meant it would direct you to where that specific animal is, and do away with the RNG of its corpse having the "skin", or "bone" that you required. It doesn't, making it a wasted opportunity. It just marks it as an errand. Using tools in during battle was clumsy because I often had to both sprint away from danger while quickly searching for the trap or potion I wanted. Having a second quick menu for the accessories that also slows down time would've made it much more enjoyable for me to use them in a fight. Sometimes traps weren't set down too fast either. Combat overall was cool.
Alright, that's not a minor point.
Combat is probably the best aspect of the game for many, with good reason. Horizon has a big pool of enemies, and even if it's not a massive quantity of them (though it's still a respectable one), the quality is what's astounding. The machines you encounter at the beginning are fairly simple, but later on, the big ones have so many different attacks of their own, so many captivating animations and so many various parts for you to target for different effect that it truly is an exceptional experience. Especially in this genre, which is usually known to have not-so-intricate combat mechanics. Think of V.A.T.S. in the Fallout series, only it's real time (mostly - you can go into slow-mo while drawing your bow, with a cooldown, but that's kinda necessary with how fast some of the machines are, and it's not slow enough to make you virtually invulnerable), with the targetable objects being more interesting than humanoid limbs and a head, each one with a different advantage. Do you want to remove this machine's ability to use its rockets? Its laser? Its machine gun? Do you just want the resources on its back? Do you want to expose its shielded Achilles heel? I read that it took them 18 months to create the Thunderjaw. It shows. I can't think of another game with enemy design this impressive, and it can't be praised enough. Sans the bandits. They are as simple as you can imagine, and easily the weak spot of the game's combat.
It's not only what the machines can do that is impressive, but also the meaningful arsenal at your disposal. Each weapon with its own use and its multiple ammunition types, each suit, each potion and each trap serve a different purpose. Guerrilla Games opted for quality over quantity. You don't have dozens and dozens of bows, but those you do find buy (sad) usually feel important and different enough to be an exciting new acquisition. Some do bear similarities but they're never near-identical, and I'm certain that players will use different loadouts (your quick-menu doesn't cover your full weaponry, just 4 max - the rest are stored in your inventory). Between that, the ability to turn enemies on one another, basic stealth and just the robots in general, (non-human) combat in Horizon can be a ton of crazy fun. I did have a problem with it however. Not with what happened during a fight itself, but the things surrounding it. Eventually the logistics wore me down: the need to constantly keep stocked on resources to craft ammo and items, swapping weapons in and out of my quick menu, changing mods and switching outfits for different enemies. The bigger enemies also have so many variable parts to them that I constantly had to reopen my codex and search for the entry about this specific monster, reading again about what it was vulnerable to and what its strength was. This is cool, mind you. I like it. But I would've enjoyed a way to quickly jump into that specific entry instead of manually searching for it every time anew. It might seem like a small thing, but repeating it over time adds up to my weariness of it. Yeah, you can identify the weak spots live while using your Focus, but the machines always move, and they're usually far away if you're just scanning them out and planning, making it difficult to see all the parts. It's not as thorough a study as opening the menu again. Around halfway through my playthrough I got a bit tired of it all. It felt more like busy-work that slowed the game down in a way I disliked. I enjoy preparing for a fight, but at the higher difficulty levels in Horizon, preparing the right way can require quite a bit of customization, which involves too much menu-navigation for my liking 30 hours in. Fighting a Stormbird of a Thunderjaw (some of the tougher, bigger robots) for the 7th time made me lose patience for it. A few dozen hours in, after experiencing all the huge machines a few times, I lowered the difficulty to Easy. I didn't lose complete interest because they were still incredibly crafted and the story was great, but I wanted a smoother experience that was less interrupted by menu-fiddling by the end. Anyway, people searching for something challenging and even punishing can certainly find it here.
Aloy also controls and maneuvers really well (though I vote for an option to adjust camera sensitivity). She hops and climbs over machines and rocks fluidly, her animations blend together nicely, turning around sharply is instant but still smooth, sliding is just always enjoyable, horses feel good. There are some things to improve though. Jumping with the mounts, maybe? Swimming feels very subpar to ground traversal - not because it's different by nature, just because it didn't receive as much attention I suspect. And sometimes Aloy's jumps, when you're performing them over a cliff towards a ledge, feel a bit weird - like her body doesn't animate properly considering the distance she's making in the air, and she feels a bit stuck in her motion because she's locked onto that edge you're gonna grab. I will quickly address the platforming on this note. It's not the main focus of the game, which is probably why I had fun with it. Open-worlds, especially the western RPGs I'm familiar with, always kinda suck in this aspect, mountain climbing in particular. TW3 did make some nice strides, allowing you simple stuff that was standard in action games, but never in RPGs, such as hopping over a fence, grabbing a ledge and lifting yourself up - things like that. They were a nice touch, even if they weren't always animated smoothly. There wasn't anything noteworthy when it came to climbing mountains however. Horizon having some basic platforming abilities adds a layer to open-world exploration I wasn't used to. Suddenly getting up a cliff is not such an awkward process of default-jumping over and over, and over. To try and get up that one rock. And then the next, and then the next. That was never a fun sort of challenge, just something very weird and unnatural, so I appreciate this addition. What I would have liked for them to improve was expanding what constituted as a climbable spot, both to allow better interactivity with more of the mountain side, and just generally when traveling in the fields (there were a few times when I felt I should have been able to rise over a spot that was the right height, but I couldn't because that bit of elevation didn't have that designated white or yellow climbing sign on it). I also feel that momentum never had an effect on whether or not I reached the ledge I was jumping for - that's one small thing that can already make platforming a bit less automatic and just mildly involve the player more.
This went on for far too long.
It's a great game, and I'd like for NG+ to replay it - more for the story and understanding things I may not have comprehended at the beginning, rather than the combat. But I predict that my battle-satiation will disappear by the time I return to it in half a year or so, and then I'll have a literal and figurative blast all over again.
I won't buy the maps for all the collectibles on my second round though.
