Horizon Zero Dawn: First Impressions

I was wary of picking up Horizon Zero Dawn when I’d heard so many bad things about this PC version. But I figured I’d give it a shot and if it really was as bad as people said, I could always get a refund. I’ve now played Horizon for about 16 hours and I’m happy to say I’ve not experienced any crashes, stuttering or performance issues. I don’t know if it’s just luck and maybe at some point that luck will run out, but at the time of writing, Horizon runs perfectly fine for me.

Horizon is the story of Aloy, a young outcast of the Nora tribe living amongst the ruins of a technologically advanced civilisation. The setting is something I’m particularly fond of and I’m pleased that my exploration of the map is nearly always rewarded with the discovery of ancient artefacts to sell, or audio / text logs that serve to flesh out the world and reveal more of the past.

This is a world inhabited by dangerous machines, many of which have grown more hostile to any humans they come into contact with – one of the many mysteries that you’ll explore as you progress through Horizon’s story.

Visually, Horizon looks great, although how good it looks does somewhat depend upon the environment and lighting – some areas look much better than others, but none of it looks bad. The only real negative I have with the visuals is the facial animation which seems almost non-existent. It’s like everyone has been pumped full of botox. Their lips barely move and their blank expression barely changes regardless of the situation. It does a pretty great disservice to what is, overall, some pretty good VA work, even for minor side characters.

Horizon is a very collecting / crafting heavy kind of open world game, but the game streamlines these systems in such a way that it hasn’t yet grown annoying. Combat is pretty fun and I like the tactical aspect as you have to plan your attack when dealing with a group of machines, setting traps, luring them into ambush and switching weapon types depending upon a specific weakness or when targeting specific pieces of your enemy. 

Stealth, however, is kind of broken, at least from what I’ve played so far. It’s far too easy to simply whistle one enemy into a bush at a time and insta-kill them silently. I cleared one bandit camp almost entirely by sitting in a single bush and luring the bandits to it one at a time until there was a dozen bodies surrounding it. At no point did any of my foes consider this suspicious.

Another criticism I have right now is quest progression – the game is very side quest heavy, even relatively early on, and this does see you lose focus a little on the core story. The side quests, for the most part, are all pretty decent, but there are quite a few of the ‘gather 4 boar skins’ type of fetch quests that don’t really feel necessary. I also don’t like how the weapon tutorial quests don’t track if you don’t actively select them.

I don’t want to get too stuck into Horizon in this post because it’s still pretty early in the game and I’ve got a lot left to explore. But I am really enjoying it at the time of writing and, thankfully, I’m not experiencing any of the reported technical problems. Hopefully I’ll be able to get through the entire game without issue because what I’ve played so far is shaping up to be one of my favourite games of the year.