@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Great impressions! You put a lot of thought into this post. I like how you articulated your feelings about it in relation to the rest of the franchise.
The lightning adds a lot to this atmosphere of this game. I mean, it's such a cheesy, old-fashioned way to creep out the player, but, on top of everything else, it just works well.
I didn't see Lisa Trevor as being the same sort of thing as the bosses that stalk you in subsequent games, personally. She's there, I think, to add dimension and character to the environment, and to deepen the sense of mystery and unease surrounding it. Definitely not as constant a presence as something like Mr. X or Nemesis, though.
RE voice acting, I didn't this it was bad at all, but that might just be due to how much better it was than the voice acting in the PS1 original. I'm sure it doesn't live up to modern standards, though. Thankfully, there's not a huge amount of dialogue in this game.
The game IS absolutely gorgeous on the GameCube. Unbelievably so. I think, more than any other game I've played from that generation, it holds up beautifully on an audio-visual level.
I can see why someone would be down on the giant animal bosses and enemies. They're VERY old-fashioned for video game enemies, hearkening back to a time when bats, rats, and spiders were the monsters you often faced off against in horror-themed video games.
I'm sorry to hear about your father, but I appreciate you sharing that very personal dimension of your experience with the game. When we experience media, especially with other people we care about, they often become another material that's woven into the fabric of our lives as social-spiritual animals.
Glad you enjoyed it overall! It won't be everyone's favorite, but I do think it stands as a unique and often tonally dissonant entry in the series.
PS: You may act like it's the worst thing in the world but you know you can't wait to replay this game in invisible enemies mode and run through a mansion full of invisible, flesh-hungry beasts.
I completed Bullet storm and what remains of Edith Finch today. Bullet storm took about three days to complete what remains of Edith Finch took less than 2 and a 1/2 hours. I finished it in a single siting. In the end I find killing stuff a lot more fun than being killed.
Level of Completion: Pretty much everything in the base game. Unlocked the platinum trophy and spent roughly 70 hours playing the game. Didn't touch the DLC, but I'll play that separately at a later time.
PRO
Let's start with the obvious: Horizon: Zero Dawn has one of the most fascinating and lovingly realized post-apocalyptic worlds I've ever encountered in Western media. The art direction for the machines and the environments is amazing. Additionally, there seems to be a ton of world-building here, and this was one of the few games where I actually bothered to stop and read a lot of the history and lore informing the tribal conflicts and mythologies at play.
Combat against the machines that inhabit this world is just... superb. All of them are so different, requiring different tactics to tackle different machines. It's a bit like a Monster Hunter game insofar as I initially struggled to beat the often intimidating new machines I encountered, only to become an expert and quickly taking them down as I learned their patterns and the best ways to neuter their offensive capabilities. Strategically removing components from the machines plays a huge role in this game, and the best way to get good at hunting the wildly diverse array of robotic wildlife is to isolate what components they're drawing strength from. Scrappers, for example, are fairly easy to deal with if you quickly remove their back-mounted guns; Thunderjaws need to be stripped of their rocket launchers sooner than later; Glinthawks are a pain until you realize that using fire arrows will ground them very quickly; Stalkers are terrifying until you learn to quickly strip them of the component they they use to become invisible; etc. There's such a huge amount of depth to these encounters, and when you learn to "git gud," every fight flows like beautiful poetry. Human combat doesn't fare nearly as well, but there is something fun to stalking around bandit camps with modded stealth gear and quietly murdering everyone like The Predator.
There is a fantastic level of diversity to the weapons you can use in this game. You get normal arrows, elemental arrows, arrows that specialize in removing components, arrows that explode and strip machines of their parts even more quickly, weapons that lob normal explosives, explosives that stick to stuff, explosives that trigger when something gets near it, wires that explode or trigger elemental effects and damage, landmines, a weapon that ties machines down with arrows, etc.! Learning how to combine these various tools to devastating effect against the monsters you regularly encounter is one of the funnest aspects of this game.
I really like how much stuff you can mod and upgrade in this game. Modding weapons and armor allows you a certain level of customization that will change your playstyle.
Additionally, there are skills you can unlock throughout the game that will often dramatically change how you engage in combat. They almost all feel invaluable, and it was difficult to pick out what skills I wanted to attain first. Which, of course, increases my desire to play more of the game and continue to upgrade Aloy.
How Aloy controls. Unlike a lot of Western AAA titles I've played over the years, where the character you control feels 'heavy' or otherwise doesn't respond immediately to controller inputs, Aloy in HZD controls beautifully. She'll twitch around instantaneously to any touch the control sticks. It feels good to run, jump, dodge, etc., which makes the game's brilliant machine fights all the more fun.
The world in Horizon: Zero Dawn is often photo-realistic and is one of the most visually resplendent environments I've encountered in a video game. This is both due to the level of detail in the environments as well as the gorgeous weather and lighting effects. Guerilla Games did a great job of getting the somewhat weak PS4 to render this absolutely stunning world at a consistent frame-rate.
Performance is excellent. If this game was dropping frames, I never noticed it.
While it took me a LONG time to bother really engaging with the main plot, I ended up being quite into it as I progressed further in the game. But I'm a sucker for good science-fiction, and I liked how the game attempted to fully explain why the world is the way it is.
This game really nailed the side quests. Everything has so much narrative grounding and the presentation is frequently so superb that even mere fetch quests felt substantive, like I was making a positive change in the world. And there are a LOT of side-quests in this game.
HZD is good about frequently rewarding the player for completing side content and exploring, making it where I rarely felt like I was wasting my time or playing the game just to play it.
The game almost always opts for "gamey" design over pure realism when it'll impact the player's enjoyment of the experience, which I really appreciated. A perfect example of this is the treatment of mounts. After you learn how to override and mount machines, you can use them to quickly traverse dangerous environments. Now, in many other games, mounts are often more trouble than they're worth because you can't stray too far from them and they'll freak out at the slightest hint of environmental unevenness. The beautiful machines in this game will intelligently maneuver over streams, up small rocks and down slight dips, so that you can still take shortcuts, explore, and stray away from the beaten path. Additionally, you can summon your mount from pretty much anywhere, no matter how far from it you seem to be. The best skill in this game is actually one that allows you to automatically spawn a mount to ride whenever you need it, which is SO helpful and convenient. Unrealistic? Absolutely. But it made the game better, and I appreciate that the designers prioritized fun gameplay over an obsessive fixation on realism at all times.
The photo mode in this game is super robust and a ton of fun to play around with. I never really bother with photo modes in games, but I spent a lot of time lining up great screenshots to share with people. This is mainly down to the camera being VERY flexible and adjustable, I think. Aloy has a lot of different poses as well.
Aside from one particular trophy, the platinum was a pleasure to achieve, and most of the trophies come along with fully engaging with the game.
Mixed
While the world is full of stuff to do, the way it's designed is pure Ubisoft. In particular, there's a number of striking similarities to recent Far Cry games, particularly in terms of how a huge emphasis is placed on hunting animals for resources to upgrade your gear, and icons of those animals adorning your map. It works... but it also means that HZD never feels fully realized on a game design level (absolutely brilliant combat and art design aside).
The music is serviceable, and I have no complaints about it, but, aside from the title theme (which IS quite lovely), I didn't really take much away from it. It's difficult to even remember the music in this game a few days after completing it.
The characters are all over the place. I really, really like Sylens, and several of the side characters have a surprising level of depth to them (Nil, Erend, etc.). Others, like the primary human antagonist and numerous other people you meet, are fairly stereotypical, although you can't expect great development from hundreds of characters. What moved the characters to the "mixed" category for me is Aloy herself. She, to put it in no uncertain terms, a generic heroic character who rarely struggles to do the right thing and almost always seems to reach with grace to a situation. Burch's voice work for her is excellent, but there's only so much personality you can impart to a character who is fundamentally unrelatable. This is particularly grotesque when other people in her tribe literally begin to worship the ground she stands on (which she, of course, dissuades them from doing). You can have morally upright and strong characters who are also interesting and relatable, but I don't think they really achieved that here. If anything, I thought the scientist that Aloy is a clone of had a much more interesting story arc and characterization.
The voice work in this game. There are a ton of voiced side characters in this game, and I've noticed that the quality of the acting varies pretty wildly over the course of the game. Thankfully, the core cast of voice actors do a pretty good job overall. With that said, every time I stumbled across another shrill, whiny male NPC in the overworld, I would feel a momentary urge to mute the sound.
I like all the loot you can find in this game, but it doesn't feel like there's a whole lot to do with most of it other than sell it. The bulk of craftable items tend to draw from a small pool of similar items. Which means, despite the huge amount of stuff to find in your environment, you're better off selling most of it and having blaze canisters, ridge-wood, and a few other useful items take up 3/4 of your available inventory space.
CON
The climbing in this game sucks. The geometry is set up in such a way that it's difficult to even try to climb up some boulders without Aloy stumbling around like an idiot. At least in Skyrim you could kind of clip your character up a hill, but, here, unless you get extremely lucky, you're mostly relegated to using these horrible yellow handholds plastered onto everything in this world to climb places. Even worse is when the game expects you to know that some grooves on the faces of mountains and rocks are climbable, meaning you often have to go way out of your way and hunt for some creases in a wall so that you can climb up a short way to a building or tower on a different environmental plane. When you do climb, it's this loose, Uncharted-esque flow of movement that takes minimal effort on the part of the player.
More broadly, while the environments, as previously acknowledged, are GORGEOUS, the way you interact with them is incredibly shallow. You don't get cold, wet, hot. Environments don't really burn or ice over. Weather doesn't matter. The environments are beautiful window dressing meant to change the scenery and little else.
It's understandable given the almost complete lack of loading screens as you're actually playing the game, but the load times when you first start the game, or when you fast travel across the map, can exceed a minute in length and feel PAINFULLY long.
During cutscenes, the game has this weird tendency to engage in jump cuts when a character is in the midst of a drawn out dialogue. It's always startling, and impacts the immersiveness of the game during story segments.
The way lighting changes in the environments in this game is frequently very odd. It's like, when the sun is setting or rising, instead of a gradual shift in the environmental color gradient, there'll be sudden, jarring shifts between different colors, or, even more jarringly, between darkness and illumination. One second you're surrounded by darkness, the next, the sun is suddenly illuminating your surroundings.
What's up with the camera hugging the backs of the protagonists in so many PS4 exclusives? The camera is always sort of close to Aloy, but in caves and towns it zooms in so close to the character that I almost felt claustrophobic at points.
I hate that Aloy, and the game with her, kind of forgets about Rost after the start of the game. I was hoping for some sort of callback or tribute or SOMETHING at the end of the game, but it never happens.
The facial animations in this game are... not good. These are some seriously creepy looking people: their lip movements never really sync with the dialogue, they're often somewhat strange looking, and I feel a chill going up my spine when I see their plastic-y mouths move and contort. The Nora apparently live in the heart of the Uncanny Valley. These are some of the creepiest looking video game characters I've seen this side of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and its parade of deformed-looking hill people. I've heard the animations are improved in the DLC campaign, though, so I'm eager to play that at some point and see how they stack up to the base game.
I found the final mission to be somewhat rushed and disappointing. Not a big deal, but it doesn't match up a lot of the narrative highs in this game.
Obtaining all the collectibles is boring. Finding them involves pixel hunting in certain parts of the map. No puzzles, no quests, you just follow a map and hunt around an area until you find them. The power cells are a bit different than this, insofar as they're hidden out of the way, but you still don't really do anything interesting to collect them.
Conclusion: Despite the large number of complaints I've made about the game, it should be pointed out that the impact of almost all of these were fairly minimal on my enjoyment of the game as a whole. Horizon: Zero Dawn is an epic, original, inventive, addictive, responsive, beautiful, and straight up fun game, and, more than 95% of games I play, feels high quality in almost every respect. HZD is the complete package, and it's very, very satisfying to play a game that feels so... complete as an experience. I wasn't expecting to like this even half as much as I do.
I don't know that it's the BEST game on the PS4, but it's absolutely my favorite exclusive on the system now (sorry, Tetris Effect, but you've been dethroned), and I'm excited to see how this franchise evolves going into the future.
@Ralizah I'm gonna keep this review in my head so I can compare and contrast whenever I finish the game. Which I'm probably a long ways away. I only got to Meridian not that long ago and done a few sidequests related to it.
"We don't get to choose how we start in this life. Real 'greatness' is what you do with the hand you're dealt." -Victor Sullivan "Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing." -Solid Snake
@DerMeister Oh yeah, there's a ton more of the game ahead of you. The game never felt overly long to me, but I guess that's just how you feel when you're enjoying yourself. I can definitely say it's the best $10 I ever spent!
@Kidfried Yeah, games are for playing, and the interactive elements of the experience should always be the focus. I could definitely see myself... admiring... the obsessive level of detail that's apparently stuffed into EVERYTHING in RDR2, but if that makes the game less fun to play, then it's a net negative, imo. Complaints about user-friendliness in this regard and the way the game controls is probably the biggest reason I haven't bothered to touch the game yet.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy I enjoyed talking about it! It's nice to have a passionate community that I can interact with and bounce my thoughts off of.
I didn't know that about Sylens' voice actor. Pretty cool bit of trivia, though. The concierge is a hilarious character.
I forget where old Rost is buried. When I get back to this in a few months (maybe more; we'll see), I need to look up the location and see what happens.
DDS is next on the chopping block! (once I'm able to drag myself away from Three Houses, anyway)
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Neat! Did you actually finish this game, or do you just want to mop up side content.
RE DDS: Probably. It's a very old JRPG, after all. I'm excited to play through the last third or so of the game, though. I have a new area to explore, and a bunch of colored doors to unlock.
I've heard the super boss is... something. I'll at least try it, although I doubt I'll grind too much to beat it.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
Haha, I love my Atlus games, but that sort of hardcore dedication to any game is beyond me. I'll enjoy my vanilla playthrough.
Not sure how long it'll take me to get to DDS2, but I can't imagine why I wouldn't hold onto my game clear data. I have dozens of memory cards with save game data from 15+ years ago, even!
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
Batman: Return to Arkham Asylum (PS4) - A remaster of the PS360 title for modern platforms.
Pros:
The core beat 'em up combat is pretty fun, and it feels good to get a lengthy combo going. Although I never got too good at it, the stealth mechanics were well concieved too.
There was a pretty good variety of gameplay on offer, with most combat scenerios often going back & forth between straight beat 'em up action (areas where enemies didn't have guns) or stealth (all enemies would have guns and you'd have to take them out without drawing attention to yourself), and then it would further break up the action with some God of War (2018) style platforming or light puzzle solving (which sometimes would be mixed with the platforming).
It had classic "Metroidvania" style world design & progression, with absolutely brilliant atmosphere (the creepy Medical Facility in particular creeped me the heck out).
I liked how it handled the collectables. Instead of items that would directly increase your health or attack as you would find in Metroid, they all gave you EXP instead, which largely allowed you to upgrade at your own discretion. The collectables themselves would often have other purposes beyond just granting you EXP as well, like Interview Tapes & Arkham Chronicles providing in game world building/lore, Solving Riddles would often grant you character bios of various Batman characters (most not even in the game), and others would grant you character trophies.
While it's roots as a last gen game came through in places, I generally found it to be a nice looking game even by modern standards.
The banter of the Joker & Riddler throughout the game was a highlight.
Cons:
Not a big fan of the boss fights in the game, which is a shame considering they could have done some cool things with a slate of supervillains. One early game boss had his whole combat shtick aped by special late game enemies (I hate it when a boss, usually an early game one, essentially becomes a regular enemy in late game), a couple were pretty cool, but don't actually involve fighting them, a couple (including the final boss) devolve into little more than fighting waves of regular enemies in a hazardous environment, and then you have exactly one that is a traditional, unique fight.
Overall I thought it was a pretty good time though, and though I'll be taking a break from the Bat, I'm looking forward to continuing the series (I also got the remaster of Arkham City in the same bundle).
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
Well i finally got around to finishing FFXV and im glad that i did, but im also glad i waited until all the dlc was released. Got the plat for it, and i have played a little of the episodes for it and they are ok. Not the best FF game ever, but a really fun game.
@RR529@RogerRoger yeah, I think the boss fight issue was a pretty universal feeling.
Arkham City was good but I think it lost something with such an open area. The claustrophobic feeling in the Asylum made it feel much more intimidating.
@RogerRoger, @Thrillho, glad it's not just me on the boss issues (though I vaguely remember complaints about the final boss from back during it's original release).
Looking forward to getting around to City eventually, as I liked Spider-Man & InFamous: Second Son and am interested in seeing what the open world format brings to the table.
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
I'm finally done with Borderlands 2 and all the DLC. Good fun but I'm pretty Borderlands-ed out after almost two months playing just this.
I picked up Dead Cells for a blast after finishing that having heard they'd updated the game a bit more. I never managed to beat the final boss but managed to do so on only my fourth run this time around! It did feel as though the difficulty has been tinkered with but I'm still happy with that.
@Thrillho You mean the Dead Cells difficultly has been lowered? Was it too difficult before? I always heard that it was hard but you could grind and make progress with each run and never felt like you were wasting time. I’ve considered playing it, but I’m not a huge Metroidvania style fan, but Dead Cells is supposedly light on the Metroidvania stuff supposedly.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution Some of the patch notes said that they've tinkered with enemies auto-scaling which was based on how much you had levelled up with scrolls through your run. Some people were originally saying it was actually easier to avoid these and so avoid enemy levelling up. Now, it sounds like each level has a "set" difficulty and that the first run through the game (see below) is a little easier than it used to be.
The game isn't hard for the sake of being hard though. But with all the hours I'd put into it before, I was making it to the final boss quite routinely but could utterly destroyed by him each time. Now, having not played it for months, I beat him on the first attempt making it to him (but with a few failed runs getting to him). Once you've finished the game once, you can up the difficulty and I think this can be done five times.
The Metroidvania thing isn't too involved but there are abilities you can unlock as you go along which allow you to access new areas. However, you can finish the game only unlocking the first one as that is the only one that is essential to progress (and is obtained very early on).
It gets "easier" with each run as the area between maps allows you to spend "cells" to unlock blueprints for new weapons/items you found but also allows you to unlock permanent abilities, such as giving you more health flasks or retaining gold between runs which makes your life a little easier each time (but only if you make it to that area; you lose all cells you're holding when you die).
Runs can be pretty quick; my successful run only took 33 minutes for example, but it is a game you can spend hours and hours playing. The Switch I could see being the best way to play it as you can pick up and play for a quick run.
I think it's a fantastic, albeit frustrating, game.
I played through the entirety of Detroit Become Human at the weekend and had a blast. Such a graphically stunning game and really cool decision making design that actually affects the outcome of the story.
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy There's a setting to play the old PS1 music? In that case I'm tempted to do every track again. Though to be fair, I was probably going to do that anyway since I want to try to unlock N Tropy. Anyway great write up, I agree with pretty much all of your points.
Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled was my first Crash racing game, so everything in it was new to me. The unique drifting mechanics took me a while to get any good at it, but I like the amount of depth to it. Even now, I'm still improving with each race.
My favourite thing about this game is that there's lots to do. As well as racing through the many tracks (either in a single race or in a four race cup), there's also CTR challenges, time trials and relic races for each track. And there's also an adventure mode to top it all off, complete with a story and boss fights.
The track design is also mostly rather good. There's a lot of detail and things going on in the visuals keeping it all rather interesting. Except for a few annoying places such as in Dragon Mines, the track layouts generally make it quite fun for whizzing around the tracks.
My main dislike is to do with the in-game shop and microtransactions, which taint an otherwise great game. Without going into too much detail, my main issues with the shop is that getting coins is a huge grind in single player, only a small section of available items is available for purchase at any one time, and it requires an internet connection to get coins. And adding in microtransactions after release feels downright dodgy.
As for grand prixes, I'm conflicted on them. On one hand, getting new tracks is wonderful, along with new characters. On the other hand, it adds a lot of tedious busywork in terms of earning nitro points to unlock the rewards and getting coins to buy new characters and cosmetics. I also don't like having things only available for a limited time, after which they're gone until if and when they decide to bring them back. All this mixed together along with the daily challenges, and it feels like there's too much of a push to keep grinding, and too much of a push to play every day instead of whenever you feel like playing.
Being able to play adventure mode in the classic way of 1 character only or "Nitro Fueled" and being able to change characters on the fly is nice too.
Is there any value to restricting yourself to one character, or is it just a toggle included for the sake of people who want to play it in as 'classic' a manner as possible?
I think the mechanics hold up. 30fps doesn't hinder the game either from my point of view. It's still fast paced and the boosting mechanics work well! Practically flying around the tracks when you learn how to use the boosts properly is sublime.
Weird. Based on what I've heard in the gaming community, racing games are nigh unplayable if they're not running at 60fps.
Do I really need to explain why? Our good ol' ShogunRok said it best in yesterday's article in that adding these to such a bright and vibrant kart racer (that's aimed at children more so then us old fogies) really does taint the whole experience of the game.
I dunno, I feel like a remake of a beloved PS1 title is very specifically targeting old fogies, doncha' think? Children are dabbing on the haters in Fortnite and group chatting with other five year olds in Minecraft. I feel like this is probably selling best to the same cohort that keeps Nintendo in business.
Crash Team Racing was really the best and only Kart Racer Playstation had on the PS1. Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled is really in the same position on PS4.
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