re: Horizon Zero Dawn

quote:

---

It’s here where Horizon Zero Dawn settles you into a familiar grind, if you’ve played any modern RPG ever. You pluck herbs from the ground for health and supplies. You hunt (robotic) creatures using a variety of upgradeable bows (alongside other less-useful weapons) along with infinite boars and foxes (literally the only living animals that aren’t robots) so that you can craft more things. You talk to strangers on the road and in towns that you’ve never met before, and help them with their troubles despite any trust issues Aloy should bear inherently. Horizon Zero Dawn is a conglomerate of familiar RPG tasks, and fails to make any of them feel worthwhile; lacking the strong narrative to pull you through or differentiating hook to set the game apart from others in the genre.

The side missions in Horizon Zero Dawn are consequentially stale, in that they feel repetitive and pointless to a fault. In one, I help gather supplies for a woman's superpowered gun. I slaughter some people, get the supplies, slaughter more people with the new gun, and then we're pals. In most cases, you're fetching something for someone, you're helping someone fight (whether it's against robots or bandits), or you're finding a missing person. In another, a distressed father worries his daughter has fled to commit suicide, so I investigate to track her whearabouts. In the end she's not dead, just cornered by an alligator-like robot. I kill it, she thanks me, then she sends me to find another person (her lover), who winds up dead. She returns to her father, heartbroken, but alive. Aloy leaves, to likely track down another stranger.

---

quote:

---

After about fifteen hours with the game, the game’s main plot reaches an apparent climactic point. The story plateaus at this point, dragging out the additional revelations and twists, and slogs at a painfully slow pace for approximately 15 more hours. The main story within Horizon Zero Dawn has hardly any variety, like the side quests. Seemingly every main mission ends in an arena fight of sorts against a giant-to-medium-sized machine, with a plethora of corridor battles against living humans to get there. Horizon Zero Dawn waddles in an identity crisis. The game is action-packed and "open world" to the fullest extent of the definition, but then it shoves you into another battle of running in a big circle, flinging arrows aimlessly at your devilishly (and as the game drags on, redundant) massive target. It urges you to embark on bountiful side quests, but the bulk of them feel pointless and distracting to the central, pressing conflict. It attempts to tell a grand science fiction tale of humans and the mistakes we make with technology, but its central heart feels cold and unearned, and grows increasingly reliant on boring information dumps.

---