I must sperg and there's nowhere else.
Got the game for free so I gave it a shot. Never cared to play it when it came out so I went in pretty much entirely blind. Only thing I know about this series is Aloy is a dyke in the sequel, but an hour into the first one should have all you needed to figure that out. She gives off powerful muff diver energy.
The melee combat is fucking atrocious and kills the fun of the bow and beaing a sneaky hunter. Especially with how the robots just do not stop attacking. It makes fights with 90% of the large monsters, which make up the vast majority of late game and most of the DLC encounters, just a cycle of using the rope tie gun so you can actually shoot the fucking things. It's either that or they throw 20 machines at you which is rough. The game just doesn't have the depth of mechanics to make group fights or melee enjoyable. It really doesn't help that even with an upgraded spear you do so much more damage with your bow that it's pointless to use it outside of sneak attacks or critical attacks.
I really cannot stress how unfun I find the melee. Maybe if all these various tools actually mattered it wouldn't be so bad. As is, there's almost no point in using these stingers, the rattler gun or the trip wires. You very quickly hit a point where, if you actually wanted to use your kit fully, every engagement would end up taking 30+ minutes. I've done it. And that's clearly not how a lot of these encounters were designed. That may have been how the game was intended, at least in the early stages, but that's not where it ended up. And I guess that's my issue. It feels like they wanted this game to be much, much slower but it took a turn into a more action heavy direction at some point.
The story is probably the thing that bugs me the most. I actually think it's pretty neat, but there's so many weird little hiccups that it pulls me out of it entirely. And that's without mentioned the obvious Message
and how forced it is.
The overall story is neat enough that I was interested in learning it, but to find out everything went to shit specifically because one guy was being a egomaniacal asshole who was only held in check by the settings Martyr'd Lady (Sobek), somehow, was a let down. It wasn't the AI getting a bug up it's ass and interpreting it's prime directive in an aberrant way like I'd thought, no. It was some guy getting a god complex. A guy who got everyone into the mess to begin with. Just so stupid. Really killed a lot of genuine intrigue I had with the "how". I still think the setting and overall story beats are cool enough.
The Message
however tanks it all. So much of the game is about this weird ass "who's my mother" angle in place of a more universal "belonging/where I come from/exile being accepted", with a heavy handed "girl power" bend that the game doesn't earn. Nothing in the game implies women are held down or looked down on, especially not in the games first area with the Nora people. A totally matriarchal society. And even when you leave for the Outlands, you see women everywhere doing just fine. Theres so much forced "but you probably can't because your a girl/ew a woman" type shit that it feels tacked on. Like it was retroactively added late in development.
Also the voice acting in this game is fucking atrocious. It's actually so bad I laughed out loud at multiple moments that were meant to be very serious. Rough. Very pretty game though, imo.
All in all, I'd give it 6/10. If the story didn't have such a cartoon villain in Ted Faro being the cause of the downfall of humanity, and the story didn't have such a shitty "girl power" Message stapled onto its forehead, I'd give it a more solid 7.5/10. The melee combat is really, really bad and I cannot over state this.
If I can get the sequel for free, or for very cheap, I'd actually be willing to give it a shot too. The game scratches a particular open world itch just enough that, for all its faults, I can say "I had fun".
Ps: Aloy is a moonfaced goober. She's mid as hell and always has been. After looking at her from the original version, the remaster(what I'm playing) and the sequel, she looks pretty much exactly the same. Average.
