Horizon Zero Dawn

2017-03-01

First Impressions

I’ve been playing the game for a few hours now and so far I’m mostly impressed. The graphics overall is rather striking, as promised. Particularly I liked the environment and surrounding viewing vista, giving some rather good photo opportunities.

My only gripes so far, and sadly I know these are gonna annoy me as the game goes on, is the plastic looking skin when wet from rain and the like, and the rather poor facial animations when it came to talking. They just didn’t cut it, for me at least. To be fair, I guess, no game that I’ve seen so far in my life has nailed the wet skin look, so I’m gathering is rather hard to code. Same with the facial animations.

You start of with a spear and bow, and quickly learn to use them as you’re apposed by mech dinos right outside your door. The combat flows pretty naturally, with sniping for opening attacks, and a good mix of dodging incoming swipes while you lash back with your spear, or keep firing while you kite them. Almost right of the bat you’re able to upgrade your skills, among other improvements to hunting, such as a slow-time focus ability, which helps a lot when facing several dinos at once.

I would like to pan the camera a bit further back to get a better overview, to compensate the lack of side-vision, as we’re inside a computer and all that.. But sadly no such option exists, so from time to time, you kinda loose track of the environment which I feel wouldn’t be an issue had I personally been in Aloy’s place.

I’m not all to impressed with the story yet. Aloy, and her guardian, Rost –I know, I loved the names in regards to the whole mech-theme of the game– are both outcast from the main community around them. She from birth, because reasons, and he did something terrible I assume.. Some of the characters you meet break the rules by talking to them, as outcasts are to be shunned at all cost apparently. Aloy, from a young age is told, by Rost, that she has to take a rite of passage to get back onto the good side of the camp to get the story of why she is motherless and a cast-out.

You quickly get introduced to Odd Grata, another outcast that you bring food and other stuff to from time to time. Aloy whines about Grata not talking to her, being a good outcast and all. But from the “dialog” between them, where Grata talks about what she wants while addressing All Mother (mother nature) or something, you kinda get the feeling that Grata means Aloy when she says All Mother, which can be foreshadowing to later in the game when I’m guessing we’re gonna find out that Aloy is a freaking messiah or a prophesied balancer of the force, or some other damn thing.

The whole story is a bit too much cloaked in mystery for my liking. More to come on that I guess.

The voice acting isn’t all that either, coupled with the facial animations not matching up all that well, and you’re left with a rather dull interaction between people. You do get to select between aggressive, passive, and compassionate responses in some dialog, so I’m hoping that can reveal some interesting tidbits about the folk you run into at least, not to mention, hopefully, how they interact in the long run with you.

After the Main Storyline

I’ve now played through about 90% of the game and completed the main storyline, and my view of the game has changed a bit. A large bit to be honest.

I bought the PS4 Pro, for no particular reason to be honest, but HZD can render in 4K, which was nice. I was, however, sceptical that it could maintain 4K smoothly during intense combat or big scenes. Luckily it turned out to be unfounded concerns. I know it’s only 30 FPS, something I don’t mind, but a lot of people do.

Guerrilla Games, the creaters of HZD has really outdone themselves when it came to the graphics in HZD. The landscapes alone are stunningly beautiful, and all the way down to the different details on armors found all around the place. Their attention to detail made the game so immersive that I’d often just stop at random locations to take in the scenes around me.

The issue I had with skin looking plastic when wet is still there, but after a while I stopped caring since the rest of the game kept me preoccupied. I’m guessing about half of my time in-game was spent running around purly exploring the world. Finding metal flowers and Banuk figures, mapping out the various dino sites, and taking down the Cauldrons to make my override powers more feared ;)

To be honest, this is basically what I often ended up doing in both Witcher 3 and Skyrim too, but in my humble opinion, Guerrilla Games created such a beautiful game world that I’m guessing it’s gonna take some years for someone to beat.

The Music

Graphics aside, the game is perfectly scored. From Aloy’s haunting theme, the mysterious Cauldrons, to the intense combat music. It all fits, and flows, so perfectly in-game that you don’t even notice how much it builds upon the experience until you turn it off and is left with a void of sorts. I often en up turning off music in games, mostly because a lot is bad, or badly fitting, but HZD managed to hit this one out of the park.

You can find the music on Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/album/5ZAaYcFudS0BtKhWJqeMCH

I would particaularly recommend Aloy’s Theme, https://open.spotify.com/track/14Raww1VcizsEpQQpbEqbd

The Combat

I’m not a big fan of close quarter combat, and if I can, I’m gonna stay in the distance and snipe your ass from across two buildings, three windows, and a grocery store. In HZD you start of with a bow and a spear. You upgrade/replace the bow as you progress, as well as get other types of bows. There are also a type of sling-shot that I didn’t like all that much, so didn’t end up using it, or needing it.

I sneaked around, sniping the Watchers from afar, and where I couldn’t one-shot the beasts, I tried my best to still remain hidden while popping up here and there to take pot-shots at them till they fell.

Now and then you are forced into CQC, which I’m not a fan of, but didn’t en up hating it in HZD. The bow still worked fine at 2 meters away, and you had the spear to both poke, tickle, and fucking smash them with. The advantages of sneaking up on enemies, after taking over a Cauldron, was you could override the beasts and make them fight on your side. Seeing multiple Stalkers go at it against each other was a pretty awesome sight.

I actually ended up doing quite a bit of CQC during the play-through, even though most of my openers was still done by sniping.