Like many open-world games, Horizon Zero Dawn feels a bit repetitive after a while. Rushing through the main story might last a dozen or so hours, but really clearing the map can easily take 60 hours or more. There are also scalable vantage points and mysterious machine ruins called Cauldrons to explore. There are many collectibles to find outside of side quests, such as metal flowers, ancient vessels, and tribal artifacts. The quests range from rescuing stranded people to finding lost items, and they provide incentive to explore the map. Successfully completing these missions rewards experience points and useful items. The game's main story keeps you occupied with one or two primary quests at a time, but you can pick up many secondary quests and errands from non-player characters. It’s nicely dense, filled with settlements, ruins, machine grazing areas, and bandit camps you can explore on your own or zig-zag between while performing quests.
Thanks to the inclusion of The Frozen Wilds DLC, Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition is larger than the original game, with a frosty region added to the map that becomes accessible partway through the game. The game is huge, with a sprawling map that covers miles of land across various environments, from forests to frozen steppes to deserts. There's a good mixture of direct fighting and stealth. Combat is varied, with multiple ways to effectively deal with threats. You need to stay aware of threats while you’re outside, but staying close to paths will keep you relatively safe and let you decide when and where to engage enemies. The action and exploration feels suitably challenging, without being overbearing or unforgiving. Focus also lets you follow tracks and see the intended paths of nearby machines, giving you a distinct upper hand when sneaking and stalking. Thankfully, Aloy has Focus, a relic from the old world that serves as a short-range scanner by highlighting nearby machines and humans. It's easy to be overwhelmed if you aren’t prepared for combat. You start with simple and limited weapons, such as a basic bow and arrow and a shocking tripwire gun, but eventually you'll juggle multiple slingshot-launched bombs, manually placed traps, sniping- and medium-range bows, and an arrow-shotgun that fires bolts at close range. She even uses tripwire guns and slings to fight and control the battlefield. She also employs bows for shooting enemies at different ranges with specialized arrows that cause elemental damage (or have other effects). Aloy's spear is her only melee weapon, but it's effective at knocking off enemy armor plates and causing significant damage to both machines and humans. When fighting breaks out, Aloy utilizes a large variety of weapons. You can set traps and snipe from hiding places, and if you spend the skill points, you can perform silent instant kills as machines and bandits walk by. Stealth plays an important role, with tall grass hiding your movements and letting you thin enemy groups before they're aware of your presence. Most machines are hostile in some way, requiring careful maneuvering to navigate around them or effectively attack them. Read Our XCOM: Chimera Squad (for PC) ReviewĪloy is a capable hunter and fighter, which is important because the wild holds many dangers. Civilization hovers between the stone and bronze ages, with tribes and kingdoms living alongside herds and robot packs they don't understand. In Horizon Zero Dawn, the world we knew was destroyed by an unknown event countless generations ago, and all that’s left are overgrown ruins and wildlife-like machines that rule the land. This is a post-post-apocalyptic game, where everything ended so long ago that there was time for new societies and customs to grow (similar to Adventure Time or Thundarr the Barbarian).
This PC game contains the base game, plus The Frozen Wilds DLC (an additional area featuring more story content and collectibles), and easily holds up as a huge, dense, worthwhile adventure. Now, more than three years later, you can enjoy its open-world action on PC, thanks to the $49.99 Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition. It stood as one of the best PlayStation 4 exclusives, right up there with Bloodborne, Spider-Man, and the God of War reimagining. Horizon Zero Dawn was one of 2017's hottest games.