Just finished the game 100%. It took 94 hours to complete everything, since I wasn't hurrying
Amazing experience! I'm so tempted to start over again, but maybe I should complete few other games first before doing that.
Here are my opinions and thoughts (
trying to keep it short):
Map size seemed to be nice. It was still comfortable to explore even without always using fast travel options, but there were enough amazing places and different kinds of regions. Random surprising small events happened while traveling around, but sadly those didn't have any effect to your game, no matter if you succeeded or not. Or ignored it completely. Some randomly found small quests would have been nice. Even if the world didn't have that much "extra" content, I still enjoyed it very much. Landscapes were beautiful and I needed to collect some curatives or other ingredients anyways, so it gave me enough things to do while traveling. I also liked the way how climbing, jumping from pole to pole etc was made. Even if it was sort of big part of this game, it never felt annoying. You could get yourself killed if you fell down, but you didn't have to be super careful. Hardest part was to find the climbing spot.
I think that there was a nice amount of enemies for me. Mostly you could also choose what to do with them. Fight? Sneak past them? Run/ride through. Make them fight against each other and just sit back and relax? Lure them to your traps? Kill them with their own weapons? Everything sort of works, so just pick whatever suits you best. I learned pretty fast that I'm not going to get far with just aggressively waving my spear and screaming. I needed to think first and use the environment for either killing enemies and/or to protect myself. Without thinking first, you (or at least I) ended up dead pretty quickly. And I played this with easy difficulty. PS: I hate all enemies that can fly.
Character development felt rewarding and I liked it. I also liked the combat much after I got the hang of it, but those heavy spear attacks were always s bit clumsy to use. Too often I was attacking to wrong direction when trying to hit quicker enemies. Bow was definitely my all time favorite and you could handle that pretty nicely in different kinds of situations. I'm pretty sure that I wasn't able to fully use Aloy's movement options, so more experiments with that next in next game. Also, see the quote below.
I enjoyed the story and side quests. There was nice amount of both and the content was good and interesting enough for me. But like
EliHarel said in here, it would have been nice to have...
...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.
Only one
really annoying part in this game was that one hunting trial mentioned in my above post. Luckily it's not needed to complete a game, but since I wanted to get all trophies, I had to do it. Once again, I really hate everything that flies!
Hmm... There's still probably much more things to discuss, but I think this is enough for one post.
