Horizon: Zero Dawn - Sorry PC mustard race, look away

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Played to the growing up part and stopped. I might pick it up again someday, but there was nothing in it from what I saw or played that RDR didn't do better nearly a decade earlier.

I might have also let myself down by seeing earlier concepts of the game when it was still in development. I expected more of a dual role where a choose-your-own-gender character would be part of the story similar to Mass Effect, and the main focus of the story would be on giant, robotic dinosaurs. Instead, it's a story about girl power and indians with giant, robotic dinosaurs running around in the backdrop.
 
That Chris Guy said:
Played to the growing up part and stopped. I might pick it up again someday, but there was nothing in it from what I saw or played that RDR didn't do better nearly a decade earlier.

I might have also let myself down by seeing earlier concepts of the game when it was still in development. I expected more of a dual role where a choose-your-own-gender character would be part of the story similar to Mass Effect, and the main focus of the story would be on giant, robotic dinosaurs. Instead, it's a story about girl power and indians with giant, robotic dinosaurs running around in the backdrop.
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The robot dinosaur parts are all in the bandit camps and dungeons that you come across. Because the main goal is to get to the ends of the dungeons (which are all large scale manufacturing plants run autonomously) to get the upgrades that allow you to hijack more powerful robots.

Aloy's story is minimal and it mostly gets frontloaded to you at the end of the main quest. All the side activities are devoid of personal stuff.

Stuff will get rather intense if you're 100%ing it because the last robot giraffe is located at an airfield boneyard and it's full of the most powerful enemies and they'll swarm you as they emerge out of these destroyed planes.

there's also those huge ass bird robots that fuck you up.
 
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Marissa Moira said:
The robot dinosaur parts are all in the bandit camps and dungeons that you come across. Because the main goal is to get to the ends of the dungeons (which are all large scale manufacturing plants run autonomously) to get the upgrades that allow you to hijack more powerful robots.

Aloy's story is minimal and it mostly gets frontloaded to you at the end of the main quest. All the side activities are devoid of personal stuff.

Stuff will get rather intense if you're 100%ing it because the last robot giraffe is located at an airfield boneyard and it's full of the most powerful enemies and they'll swarm you as they emerge out of these destroyed planes.

there's also those huge ass bird robots that fuck you up.
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Those bird robots were the most frustrating part of the game, frankly.
 
Horizon was a really bare bones game when you get down to it. I found myself really invested in the Faro Plague backstory, since it was far and away the most interesting thing. But it got so depressing that it cast a dark shadow over the whole game after the big reveal about Zero Day. Maybe I'm just a huge pussy, but the idea of a robot apocalypse where they literally eat living things rubbed me the wrong way. It didn't help that the writers did everything they could to make the situation as hopeless as possible (No one even once brought up EMP weaponry for example)

Overall though, I was somewhat impressed. I've been thinking of getting Forbidden West, I've heard it's equally divisive.
 
HZD did the thing where the events leading up to the game are far more interesting than the happenings of the game itself. It's the same problem that Destiny has. I was able to look beyond the fact that they made virtually every character from the past a cartoonish caricature because the premise was intriguing enough but as soon as some zoomer science girl started talking or I had to hear about a female character's wife, I stopped paying attention. The main quest and world building was God-awful though.
Gondolindrim said:
Overall though, I was somewhat impressed.
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The gameplay itself was serviceable. I would have liked it if the game took a leaf from Monster Hunter and made some of the larger robots an actual undertaking to bring down. They sort of tried that with the final boss of the Lodge questline being the beefed up Thunderjaw but it didn't fight differently than any of the others. I liked how hectic some of the fights could get but I wasn't that thrilled at how formulaic it eventually became.
 
Asian tech support said:
HZD did the thing where the events leading up to the game are far more interesting than the happenings of the game itself. It's the same problem that Destiny has. I was able to look beyond the fact that they made virtually every character from the past a cartoonish caricature because the premise was intriguing enough but as soon as some zoomer science girl started talking or I had to hear about a female character's wife, I stopped paying attention. The main quest and world building was God-awful though.
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The more I read the notes and listened to the audio logs, the more I thought humanity deserved what it got.
 
I bought it on Steam a while back during a sale for $25. I never really played it. It's just collecting digital dust in my Steam game list. I always thought the complaints about how the female player character was unattractive were a bit ridiculous. If I wanted to see attractive women, I would just go look at some porn or something. From what I saw you spend most of the time looking at the back of her head. But I played it a few hours and yeah, it's a bit weird. She almost looks like a female version of Jimmy Hopkins from Bully. lol

They can make a female character less sexually appealing without making them fugly. lol
 
Night Crawler said:
I bought it on Steam a while back during a sale for $25. I never really played it. It's just collecting digital dust in my Steam game list. I always thought the complaints about how the female player character was unattractive were a bit ridiculous. If I wanted to see attractive women, I would just go look at some porn or something. From what I saw you spend most of the time looking at the back of her head. But I played it a few hours and yeah, it's a bit weird. She almost looks like a female version of Jimmy Hopkins from Bully. lol

They can make a female character less sexually appealing without making them fugly. lol
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Funny thing is Horizon came out five days after Nier Auromata so the contrast between 2B and brick faced, peach fuzzed, anti male gaze Aloy was even more noticeable.
 
ShitLurker said:
The glowing legacy of Horizon after 8 years of astroturfing ladies and gentlemen!
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The big issue with Horizon is that I don't give a shit about past humanity. They all died 10000 years ago, why are we wasting our time on them? It's not like the explanations for the robots make sense, it's all fucking black muslim female magic. The mention of Nier Automata is apt because that game was smart enough to focus on the setting and embrace the ridiculousness. Rather than spend hours building up on how a white male destroyed the world that was teetering on apocalypse anyways.
 
i will note at the end of the dlc, you fight the horus aka this thing
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pretty solid boss fight actually and the best part of this entire thing
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
Rather than spend hours building up on how a white male destroyed the world that was teetering on apocalypse anyways.
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It wasn't. The game makes explicit mention of the Claw-Back Decade at a few points where mankind had managed to not just halt but reverse a lot of the ecological damage through geoengineering projects.
 
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.
 
Aloy's visual problems are her jowls which she shouldn't have as an athletic hunter+ being female and that's not how fat or muscle distributes on women, and her hairstyle which you can't change.

It's weird her clone in the sequel doesn't have the jowls, baffling, and Sony thinks she's an Icon.
 
Rick The Stick said:
The melee combat is really, really bad
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If I ended up doing melee it means I fucked up. The second game has "Melee Pits" for training and combinations. Never even tried the training pits, and didn't once do a combination unless it was accidental.
 
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