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Oh yeah, forgot to mention about it here, but I finished Horizon: Zero Dawn the other day.
Snatched the complete edition off a sale in June and thought I'd finally give the game a shot. And in the end, it was a positively surprising treat, a really solid experience.
Snatched the complete edition off a sale in June and thought I'd finally give the game a shot. And in the end, it was a positively surprising treat, a really solid experience.
I had played it briefly before by borrowing my gf's copy, but I didn't play it that far, didn't really click with me back then.
But now with me still social distancing, what else is there to do but to dedicate more time on games, so I thought I'd push myself a little further.
But now with me still social distancing, what else is there to do but to dedicate more time on games, so I thought I'd push myself a little further.
Eventually the game did grab my interest, Aloy started to seem like a fun character, the mysteries involving the world got more interesting and I wanted to see all the mechanical monstrosities the game had in store for me. Gotta catch 'em all, y'know?
Story-wise it was one of the more engaging stories I've played through in an open-world game. While I maybe liked PS4 Spidey more gameplay-wise, the spandex man's personal conflicts didn't do it for me. Aloy was a fun character to follow and her struggles were plenty relatable.
Gameplay-wise it's gotten a lot of comparisons to Monster Hunter. While that's technically true, it's less about Monster Hunter's precise evading, animation reading and opportunism and more about being a 3rd person shooter where you shoot the glowy parts with the right ammo.
Don't get me wrong, I still really enjoyed Horizon's combat, but it's not the direct combat where that game shines, it's the moments leading up to that. The versatile ways you can stealth around and debilitate your targets before engaging was really the height of each encounter.
Felt like the direct combat tends to turn into a somewhat repetitive cycle of shooting and rolling, especially in some of the story-related boss fights. Or it could be that I'm just missing some aspect of the combat, I'm not sure. Either way, I still had a good time.
Aesthetics-wise I loooved the game. The whole reason I was interested in the game in the first place was the unique blend of beautiful untouched nature (my kinda jam) and pristine-white ultra-modern robots. The environments looked absolutely stunning most of the time, holy shit.
In addition to Aloy, there weren't that many other characters that I found fun to watch or terribly interesting. Erend was a hell of a guy, but aside from him, nobody else really comes to mind. Aloy was snarky in all the right places without becoming a total asshat.
I also played the Frozen Wilds story content. It was a fun expansion, explained a lot more about the world, but at least at the Fireclaw boss fight, all of my gripes about the direct combat became all the more apparent. I did not have an ounce of fun fighting that thing lmao
After completing the story, I kinda felt like there wasn't much to do in the world. Most of the sidequests didn't seem that interesting and the hunting grounds stuff involve mostly direct combat afaik, and I'm not here for that. I did find all the cauldrons and tallnecks at least
Speaking of tallnecks, I felt that those were a really fun new spin on the usual formulaic "climb the vantage point to reveal map" Ubisoft trick. Figuring out the landscape where to jump on their backs and climbing a moving giant got me all giddy each time. I want more of that.
