Horizon Zero Dawn – Complete Edition (PS4)
Horizon Zero Dawn takes place after a technological apocalypse, but you wouldn’t really know that looking at it. Despite the game being quick to come out and say we’re looking at a future version of Earth after machines nearly wiped out humanity, the game finds us in a lush world where people have had enough time to form tribes, develop religions, and even carve great wonders. Despite the limited degree of understanding the have for the old technology though, the people of this world after ours have a unique relationship with their futuristic past. Wearing outfits fashioned from old scrap and fighting with weapons made of metals they don’t understand, they hunt large robots made in the image of old animals, machines just as much a part of the ecosystem to them as the plants and water. Learning how this curious situation came about ends up being one of the core mysteries of Horizon Zero Dawn, this world built on the ruins of ours and still living in its shadow.
Aloy, the heroine of this open-world action role-playing game, finds herself in a unique position to view both her world and the remnants of one before. Born an outcast to her tribe the Nora, she was raised in isolation from their religious dogma and learned to resent it, giving her the freedom to more willingly embrace exploring the nearby areas and not shunning the abandoned technology that her culture considers taboo. Being shunned until age 18 though has left her bitter, and while at first she also seems starved for connections, ultimately Aloy does seem to be more sarcastic and almost anti-establishment as she encounters other cultures and sees issues or concerns caused by their own beliefs and societal structure. You do have some control over Aloy’s personality, at a few points you’ll be asked to pick from a set of three dialogue choices, one being forceful, another being clever, and the last being more understanding, this often the way you can influence the outcome of smaller events or how specific characters treat you. This mostly impacts side quests though, the main story set in stone but still able to offer up some intriguing directions as it explores both the world it created and the world that was left behind.
Horizon Zero Dawn’s explorable area features a few cultures all interacting with each other, each of them feeling well-realized especially in terms of the small touches. The Carja tribe and their Sundom for example is a group of sun-worshipping people that take that simple common concept and truly commit to it, having plenty of small traditions and sayings arise naturally during conversation or in the way their people act. Many of the cultures are hostile towards each other and have their own preconceptions and rumors about each other, a believable state for societies at their level of development, and they all have their own means to coming to grips with the odd relics of The Ancients, those “ancients” being people who lived in times closer to ours. Horizon Zero Dawn – Complete Edition scatters ruins of our world around without it totally dominating the landscape, the player sometimes able to find more preserved structures like a city intersection, streetlights and all, but much of the time it will be old plant-covered wreckage that’s been picked apart by people for whatever they could use with their limited understanding of it. There’s a fascinating balance at play, the player sometimes walking through long stretches of forest, desert, or jungle and then finding a rusty tank that reminds them what this world was built on.
The story actually ends up being heavily linked to Aloy needing to learn more about The Ancients in order to help in the present. Aloy found a Focus when she was young, an advanced device that allows for interfacing with abandoned tech, but another group seems to have tapped into some of mankind’s older and more dangerous technologies as well. Learning more about the past becomes crucial to preventing this group from repeating past mistakes, and the game being so upfront about the nature of its apocalyptic history makes it more intriguing when you start coming across the deeper and darker secrets. It’s not hard to surmise how some things unfolded, but the mystery hangs in the air on why humans still survive and experience an odd coexistence with machines that seem more like animals than technology. The main plot is most interested in providing chances to keep uncovering what exactly happened, side quests often better for giving you the deeper look at the present through the different problems of people in the areas you explore. While the side quests do often give you a better picture of the societies you’re interacting with, Horizon Zero Dawn can struggle at times to create compelling side characters or unique tasks for the additional missions you can undertake, although it can even feel like in the main story it can’t cook up many effective boss fights since they often reuse things you’ll face quite a few times otherwise.
Horizon Zero Dawn – Complete Edition’s expansion Frozen Wilds feels better realized, the designers perhaps learning from their small shortcomings and designing a proper climactic fight to cap its story off while also crafting Waterlogged, a superb side-mission that nails most every part of its construction. It contains a unique window to the futuristic past as you find notes left from the two women working at a dam before machines are going to take their jobs and make them obsolete, the two trying to make the most out of the situation and compose music to avoid contending with the looming anguish of where they find themselves. The guy helping you navigate the dam is incredibly upbeat and full of fun thoughts to listen in on though, and the tasks you’re completing cover a good range including climbing, puzzle-solving, and a little combat. It’s not a main quest, but it feels like it pulls together ideas that work well in small bits elsewhere into something you wish you could see more of, and the main quest of Frozen Wilds even taps into more emotional elements as well. There are still side quests worth doing in the main quest, the game even designates some less notable ones as errands to try and emphasize the importance of others, but often you’ll find the best concepts, the best combat, and the best connections to the past are usually in separate places.
Horizon Zero Dawn’s action mostly consists of battles either with those impressive metal megafauna or other humans. The fights with robots have a much greater degree of depth, humans can only take so many arrows after all, so human confrontations will usually give them great numbers or some advanced weaponry to make them more potent. Taking down optional bandit camps or facing main story foes will usually be a matter of stealth then, and your hunter’s tools aren’t really designed around Aloy running into battle. She carries a spear, one that she swings in a deliberately risky way to try and discourage relying on it, but it can be very useful since it can be made to sometimes stun targets and it is free to use. Otherwise, you do get a range of projectile weapons, all of them needing their ammo crafted by utilizing plants you find while out in the wilds or resources taken from defeated creatures. Crafting is quick, possible in an instant during a fight, but your more advanced battle options will be limited by what you’ve carried in with you. Your bow, for example, has standard arrows that you should never be wanting for materials for, but later weapons will let you utilize shock arrows, freeze arrows, and arrows with specialized purposes like ones that will release a pulse to shear off metal plating. You’ll get weapons that can place tripwires with a similar range of options, slings to launch explosives with different elemental payloads, and a few other tools that can fit more careful or aggressive strategies that all hinge on making sure you’re balancing strength, resources, and enemy awareness, because the machines are especially dangerous once they’ve begun fighting back.
The wild machines of Horizon Zero Dawn – Complete Edition come in many shapes, many inspired by real creatures like vultures, gators, raptors, and even Tyrannosauruses, but they aren’t often full on recreations. The raptor inspired Watchers have no arms and their heads are one large spotlight for example, and the Tallneck that seems like a giraffe has a large disc for a head that you can even climb up and stand on to pilfer its mapping data. A Sawtooth is closer to essentially a robotic smilodon, but other machines definitely embrace their robotic side more, some wielding flamethrowers and energy weapons or employing tech like optical camouflage. As you might imagine, machines, even ones that look like animals, aren’t going to be as vulnerable as flesh and blood creatures, their metal plating meaning poorly aimed shots will barely harm them. However, Aloy’s Focus can mark weak points, and while such markings fade after a bit, many of the machines have parts that stand out in their design so you can reasonably intuit where to strike. The machine hunting does start off on a rough foot when your battle options are low, the game perhaps rolling out the additional weapon and ammo types a bit too slowly, but once you’ve got a good kit on hand, taking down machines can be a layered experience. Removing pieces can remove functions from machines or even cause blowback like a part detonating to harm other nearby machines. Aloy is given a surprisingly effective roll for avoiding danger which can help since many machines are incredibly dangerous at close range, but generally Horizon Zero Dawn does make machines seem appropriately dangerous prey and keeping command of the fight is important since letting them gang up on you can be a death sentence.
The machine fights are the highlights of your adventure as Aloy and the types of machines you encounter do feel like they scale up well as you enter new territories despite the story sometimes feeling like it leans on throwing somewhat stronger variants of the same few at you for its big battles. Exploration is often a pretty important element as well, climbing about places not often difficult but identifying where you can go makes it a bit more involved than just walking to destinations. You can unlock the means to override machines at points, able to employ more docile ones as mounts to travel about while others can join your side briefly in a skirmish, and tracking is a frequent feature where your Focus has you follow a trail even though it’s practically just a guiding line rather than a deep investigation you’re participating in. There are extra tasks off the beaten path beyond the side missions, some like Cauldrons shining as they’re often intricate spaces where you enter a massive technologically advanced space that is presented in different ways and with different threats each time, this truly the place where climbing gets put through more interesting paces. Others like finding Metal Flowers or Vantage Points feel more like scattered collectibles without too much going on to make them exciting. Completion of extra tasks ends up not that worthwhile but they are usually a decent little diversion if you’re in the area, and since this game is a role-playing game, sometimes doing extra work will benefit you as you can grow in strength and start unlocking new abilities. Some abilities like increased focus to slow down time briefly when shooting or being able to nock multiple arrows can pay off immensely, although at other times it does feel like large spaces in Horizon Zero Dawn could be used to more effect as you barely have reason to linger there as is.
THE VERDICT: Horizon Zero Dawn – Complete Edition is a feast of incredible world-building, its main story and side content able to spotlight fascinating parts of its futuristic past and the fleshed out cultures of its present. Some distribution and cohesion stumbles do mean some elements aren’t able to shine as brightly though, not many characters standing out and the game sometimes can’t muster up interesting activities alongside its story content. However, the depth of the machine hunting can make up for things like the simplicity of facing humans, and once your weapons are robust enough, taking on some of the tougher robotic creatures can be exhilarating. The Frozen Wilds expansion included here even starts to better meld its best elements together, showing what the adventure can be like when things are truly working in concert.
And so, I give Horizon Zero Dawn – Complete Edition for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating. Unraveling the true nature of what happened to humanity in the past and how it connects to Aloy and the present is a strong throughline to Horizon Zero Dawn’s main adventure, one that makes each development exciting even when they often take the shape of reading notes or listening to logs without much action. A bit too much weight was put on climbing around when it’s not a task with too much depth, and skirmishes with humans are less exciting save for the points where the game wisely adds them as a garnish alongside some of the game’s mechanical beasts. The machine hunting is Horizon Zero Dawn at its gameplay peak, figuring out how to strip down some fierce metal creature to take away its attacks and leave it vulnerable a very strong concept for a battle format and one that makes those bosses that are cut from the same cloth a bit underwhelming as a result. You will get some battles that truly feel like incredible victories when you have some run-ins with the tougher foes though, but Frozen Wilds shows how the main game could have better populated its world. It is compelling to learn more about the cultures of this setting and getting peeks at the old world as well as seeing the creative ways those two halves intermingle when past meets present, the Waterlogged quest able to provide unique perspectives, get you invested in multiple characters, and even mix up the gameplay better than many side missions in the main journey. Frozen Wilds shows the creative team was figuring out how to make the game’s best elements intersect more often, an embrace of the totality of what the game could offer rather than cordoning off ideas or providing what sometimes feels like busywork with areas like the collectibles and errands.
Horizon Zero Dawn – Complete Edition not only provides what works well with the main story, but shows where things could go in Frozen Wilds where things feel more cohesive. Some of its open world elements and ideas for extra activities like tracking and climbing still feel like they need work, but when the game is detailing its complex world, embracing the depth in its machine hunting, and cooking up new things rather than trotting out the familiar, it can pull you in and keep you exploring for the next standout moment. Even with many major mysteries cleared up by the conclusion, the creativity put into realizing this setting feels like it could sustain many adventures to come, this first entry perhaps not the incredible tent pole for a PlayStation dynasty but something filled with promise that could be refined and evolved in future titles.