izigame.me

Horizon Zero Dawn is, for the most part, a solid, middle-of-the-road, generic open-world action-adventure game. It is perfectly competent in basically all areas, but doesn't really do much to innovate or stand out from the extremely crowded, extremely saturated field of generic open-world action-adventure games. Thankfully, it is saved by its one actual innovation: fighting giant robot animals using bows.
HZD does an excellent job of making the robots feel threatening and dangerous at every stage of the game, no matter how high your level or how powerful your equipment, while still making them feel like surmountable challenges that can be overcome with tactics and cunning. Obviously, blindly firing arrows at robots will do next to nothing, even with the best bows in the game, and you will find yourself getting smacked around like a giant cat toy. First, you will need to scan a new robot type while staying hidden to learn where all their weak points are, whether it be optic cameras, batteries or fuel canisters. Often, these parts will be protected by armour plating, which you will have to first remove by shooting them with armour-stripping arrows. Then, you will need to shoot at the exposed area to deal critical damage to the robot. If you use the correct ammo type, such as flaming arrows for fuel canisters or electrified arrows for batteries, you can cause elemental explosions which will damage all nearby robots, which will be useful if you are hunting multiple robots at once. If you are able to ambush a robot, you might be able to set up tripwires ahead of time to damage or stun robots. If a robot is too mobile to deal with, you can use harpoon ropes to anchor them to the spot. In all scenarios, there is always an element of strategy and finesse when hunting robots, and you never feel like you're trivialising the game with sheer firepower. Every encounter with a robot, even when doing mundane things like farming components for weapon upgrades, feels fun and exciting.
If there's one thing to criticise about the bow combat system, it's the lack of evolution in weapons as the game progresses. Very early on in the game, you gain the ability to craft the starter form of every ranged weapon in the game: three different types of bow, crossbow, slingshot etc. At that point, you basically have every combat option you will get in the game. You can get upgraded bows which deal more damage and can use more elemental arrows, but 90% of using elemental arrows is just "shoot arrow type A at weakpoint type A," so your experience in using these weapons basically remains unchanged for the entire game. This is alleviated somewhat in the DLC story, which allows you to unlock 4 new weapon types that function completely differently than your other weapons, but the DLC is targeted at a pretty high level, so you will still go through most of the game with the same few weapons.
As for why there are highly advanced robot animals in a post-apocalyptic world of primitive humans in the first place, HZD does a surprisingly excellent job with its plot and worldbuilding. The story of HZD is well-written and well-paced, first starting small with the protagonist Aloy wondering about her mysterious origins and trying to save her tribe, then gradually expanding to learning about the origins of the current state of the world they live in and trying to save the entire world. The game could have very easily shrugged its shoulders and said "we're giving you freaking ROBOT DINOSAURS with freaking LASER BEAMS on their heads, are you really going to question where they came from" and most people would have been perfectly understanding, but instead they chose to craft a rich, believable setting in which to populate all manner of mechanical beasts.
However, while the plot of the game is consistently good throughout, the same cannot be said for the character writing. Thankfully, the important characters are all done well: father figure is fatherly, mysterious ally is mysterious, antagonist is a constant insufferable dick, and Aloy herself is a sympathetic protagonist. However, almost every other NPC in the game is a flat cardboard sign meant to point you towards your next objective and disappear forever. This is the kind of game story that you will find more fun diving into in a fan wiki than actually playing reading about in game.
Unfortunately, that is where the accolades for this game end. Everything else in HZD is painfully generic open-world filler content. You got your three fighting styles of ranged, melee and stealth, where melee and stealth are painfully underbaked compared to the game's bow combat. You got your bandit camps scattered around the map to liberate, populated entirely by human enemies, which are so much more boring to fight compared to robot sabertooth tigers. You got your Uncharted-style traversal system, where you can only climb on special yellow-coloured rocks and ledges and it's really just a glorified linear path, which feels so dated and restricted now that we've experienced BotW's freeform stamina-based climbing system. You even have grinding random forest critters to farm drops to craft new weapons, which feels so extremely lame and out-of-place when compared to hunting down a giant robot crocodile to extract a machine core. It feels like a lot of these were added to the game because they couldn't think of anything better to pad the game out with and they decided to go with what everyone else is doing, instead of truly making design decisions to support a truly wonderful core gameplay hook of hunting bus-sized killer machines with caveman tools.
Overall, Horizon Zero Dawn is a good game. I don't want my criticisms of it to detract from that fact. However, it is certainly not the second coming of Jesus that the hype surrounding the game would have you believe. Everything that makes this game unique is a truly shining experience, but unfortunately everything else is painfully generic and fails to help the good stuff reach its full potential.