Horizon Zero Dawnlooks like it could be described as Far Cry Primal with robot dinosaurs

IN a world where civilisation has collapsed, humanity lives in tribes and robot dinosaurs roam the earth, one woman must save the entire planet.

IN a world where civilisation has collapsed, humanity lives in tribes and robot dinosaurs roam the earth, one woman must rise up to overcome the new threat which is threatening both her tribe and the entire planet.

In a nutshell, that’s the premise behind Guerrilla Games’ new title Horizon Zero Dawn, published by Sony exclusively for the PlayStation 4.

You play Aloy, a young woman and hunter cast out from her tribe as a baby and raised by a father figure who also appears to have been voluntarily exiled to care for her. Aloy sets out to reclaim her place in her tribe, and then find out exactly what happened to humans that caused their downfall and the ascendancy of the machines so many years ago.

Horizon Zero Dawn looks like it could be described as Far Cry Primal with robot dinosaurs in it, and there are some similarities between the two titles — particularly the open-world layout, tribal theme, crafting, and breathtaking scenery. The game also struck me as having influences from the Fallout and Tomb Raider series, among other similar titles.

The worldbuilding and setting is great — rusting, overgrown ruins, tribal villages, medieval-type structures and the array of machines (based on familiar animals such as horses and deer), inhabiting the world.

It’s the sort of place that invites you into itself and asks you to take it all in — helped by the protagonist, Aloy, being a practical and capable character — aided by her Focus, a piece of pre-collapse tech that highlights items of interest, enemies, and enables interaction with other ancient technology.

Horizon Zero Dawn featuring Aloy is a strong protagonist that grounds Sony Play Station's new game Horizon Zero Dawn's fanciful world

The visuals really are impressive (still not quite as impressive as most PC gamers would expect, though) the gameplay itself handles well — particularly the bow combat. The controls are intuitive too, which helps. There’s ostensibly a strong stealth element in Horizon Zero Dawn but it doesn’t really work, in my experience. In theory, you can sneak up on enemies and take them out quietly, but in reality as soon as one of them spots you — be it a machine or a human — every opponent in the area will rapidly descend on you.

The game also doesn’t seem to know if it’s an action-adventure or a role-playing game (RPG). You’ve got the involved combat and set-up for a classic action-adventure, but you’ve also got the lore-and-antiquities hunting of an old-school RPG.

Games straddling this line aren’t anything new — the Witcher and Mass Effect games do it particularly well — but Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t quite seamlessly blend the two genres. The focus is definitely on combat, which is great if that’s what you came for, but disappointing if you were hoping for a serious RPG.

Despite ostensibly being open-world the quests are all pretty linear and I found a lot of them to outstay their interest — and there isn’t an option to say “No, not interested” to someone asking for you to undertake a quest on their behalf. Sure, you can say “I’ll see” and then just never get around to it, but it’s not ideal from a storytelling or character development perspective.

I loved the world of Horizon Zero Dawn and wanted to explore it in more detail — I really wanted to really get into it and create my own stories and experiences the way I did in Fallout: New Vegas or Skyrim — but the option wasn’t there; the cities and towns were superficial and felt like waypoints en route to somewhere else rather than hubs for exploration and discovery.

The lost civilisation aspects in particular were too sparingly doled out — after some tantalising aspects at the start it’s forgotten about for several hours while Aloy gets involved in tribal skirmishes and fighting a mysterious robot-worshipping cult.

Screenshot: Horizon Zero Dawn on PlayStation 4 Pro

Ultimately my interest in the main story started to wane because of this and I really wasn’t sure why I was fighting the robot worshippers either. So what if they want to reanimate old robots and take over the world? I’m not sure how they could make things any worse, considering everyone’s living like it’s 1400AD anyway.

There’s a few other issues in the storytelling, too. In one case, your character acquires the ability to override some of the tamer machines and ride them like a horse — yet no-one comments on it. At all. No-one bats an eyelid at Aloy riding a robot horse into the middle of their tribal encampment despite it being quite possibly the most awesome or terrifying thing any of them have likely seen in years.

The difficulty also spikes exponentially in the second half of the map, where the robots suddenly go from mild annoyances to minibosses. Worse, there’s often more than one serious-threat robot in an area and taking them out becomes an exercise in gaming the AI, luck, and hoping you bought enough health potions.

As it stands, it’s not a terrible game — far from it. There’s a lot to like here but at the same time, the flaws were noticeable for me and ultimately I couldn’t shake the feeling I wasn’t getting as much out of the game as I wanted to.

Horizon Zero Dawn does what it does competently but not outstandingly; it’s a game that’s definitely worth checking out but not necessarily immediately, especially if you’ve got a backlog of games to get through.

Having said that, there’s a huge amount of potential here and I hope we see more stories from the Horizon Zero Dawn world in due course.

Originally published as Horizon Zero Dawnlooks like it could be described as Far Cry Primal with robot dinosaurs