Originally Posted by
Tetsuwan Convoy
Finished Horizon Zero Dawn last week and while it wasn't bad, it didn't really have me all that enthralled.
I'm not sure, but I think seeing the slew of reviews giving it 10/10 scores perhaps pushed my expectations up too much. I didn't read any reviews, but saw many of the scores and had Kurdt the goat talking it up a bit.
Although I think if I bought it without knowing the reviews, I think I'd still feel the same.
Graphics are amazing, there's no doubt about that, and Dino action was pretty cool too.
Oddly the game had some red flags to me.
I didn't like most of the characters. At the end of the game, the only ones I did like were Sylens and Nil. Even Sylens is on the lower end of being "liked." Aloy was a weird character and things like the conversation arcs seemed pointless. Why give me a compassionate option about the preciousness of life, when later on she's just going to blow off or brag about killing 40 human bandits?
The map looks huge, but is rather small. This struck me early on when I went to avoid a stormbird at the start of the game, I took the lft path, but in game, I could clearly see the tight path, but on the map it looked like a long way.
Stupid NPC fetch quests. Get this, kill this, kill this then get this. They totally padded the game out with somewhat ridiculously. Not only that they always sent you far away for the thing you needed.
Crafting arrows/potions/traps etc was cool. But at the end, I just had too much stuff, but wasn't too sure on what I needed to keep. Fire arrows were my bread and butter, but I fould myself outta bits when I had dumped some stuff that looked like I didn't need it for something else. Too much screen hopping to find out what ingredients I needed for the arrows.
Money was frikking useless. I ended up with the shadow weapons rather soon (to my surprise) there were no better ones, not that weapon types added much attack anyway... I ended up ignoring most shops by the end, only to sell stuff to lighten the load of animal bits I picked up.
As I said before, the graphics were amazing. But then there'd be some bit where it showed that while they had spent all their time on graphics, they'd taken some serious shortcuts.
It started snowing heavily in one area. Cool. I entered a cave or something and the snow and wind was blowing through the cave walls. Same with walking by mountain sides. Rain would come through the side of the mountains...
Storms making it for me to see, but not enemies apparently. I got stuck doing a human boss fight in torrential rain. I couldn't see them, but they sure as hell could see me.
The one thing that bugged me the most. The funky arse head movements as you spoke to people. Oh gawd. Considering how nice most of the character models looked, they just messed it up with bizzare animations. Does everyone on this game have some kind of tic? Mass case of mild turrets syndrome?
Riding mounts. Why when riding some sheep thing with big arse horns does the sheep thing attack by kicking like a horse?
It wasn't a bad game by any means and the Aloy vs Robits combat was ace and well done. The options you had allowed various gameplay styles. Stealth, full on gung ho, traps. Or a combination of all three. Personally I really enjoyed the traps and used them a lot. But the human fights were just a bit tedious in my opion.
Oh and the last story mission, well... It seemed so hyped up and possibly epic, I was really looking forward to it... It was quite anticlimactic.
In the end, I think the game deserves a 7/10. It's not prefect by any means, but its damn good, but a few whacky things just let it down a little bit
Reply With Quote
