Captivating gameplay loop, interesting (but ultimately disappointing) story, audacious main character. Zero Dawn was fun enough to keep me entertained, but was uninspiring in some areas.

Wikipedia summary:

Horizon Zero Dawn is a 2017 action role-playing game developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The plot follows Aloy, a young hunter in a world overrun by machines, who sets out to uncover her past.

Review

Setup

  • Version: PlayStation 5
  • Difficulty: Normal
  • Total playing time: 46h (no Frozen Wilds)

Comments

Game started out slow, and I was not feeling that attached, but it picked up after “The Proving”. The amount of weapons and items skyrocketed after that, which I found a bit overwhelming.

Overall, the game caught my attention and kept me entertained. The gameplay loop had multiple different errands, quests, side quests, and areas to discover or items to collect, that I could keep switching between them as I got bored from one or another, and then always had something that I found fun to do:

  • collectibles to find
  • side quests to do
  • bandit camps to clear (I loved to play these as stealth missions)
  • cauldrons to explore and unlock some skills
  • hunting grounds, which were basically some timed challenges against machines
  • corrupted zones (areas with more challenging versions of monsters)

The first cauldron I found was quite scary. I was really not sure what to expect, which is my favourite feeling while playing games. It was quite long, and after I died once, I was brought to the beginning, which made me think any death inside would roll back your whole progress. I played every cauldron very carefully after that, and only died once more in late game, at the final room. Thankfully, at least if you reach the final room you get rolled back only to its entrance, not to the redo the whole cauldron.

One specific thing that got me very confused, was when finishing a (seemingly) random side quest to save Itamen and his mother from Sunfall. After we finish, we get all these cutscenes that just felt out of place and completely random, as no other quest so far had anything like that. I almost got scared the game was ending, even thought it would not have made sense.

I also had the Frozen Wilds DLC. I thought of playing through it before finishing the main quest, but decided against it. By the time I finished the main quest, I was kind of burned out and decided to skip it altogether.

Combat

For a long time at the beginning, I felt like I was partially playing Metal Gear Solid, sneaking around most enemies. While I did have some fun with it and enjoyed the bonus experience from killing them this way, I felt like it was very time-consuming to keep playing like this.

Switching to close combat was not very rewarding, or easy, for me. I felt very weak and more open to getting hit. Mostly, I focused on stealth and long range attacks. However, even then I thought that I was rather weak for some of the bigger enemies. I never understood how my spear was supposed to be upgraded. I read online that I had to do some quest to allow it to get mods, but I had never done it, and so I played the whole game with an un-modded spear. Additionally, I did not find any significant upgrades to the spear itself after saving a guy near the beginning of the game which upgraded it for me, so I always thought I had missed a specific place I had to go to upgrade it.

Until at least the 20h range, the progression of enemies felt nice. Started with very newbie ones, moving to groups of noobs, then a random harder one, then big packs of regulars, then some bigger “bossy” ones, etc. Eventually, we find even an invisible one, which was quite a surprise and change of pace for me. It was challenging in a rewarding manner, and it became one of my favorite enemies to face.

Until this mid-game, I mostly felt like having no idea how to fight the machines. I felt like I was spending all of my arrows uselessly. It took me a while to figure out that, just because an enemy is weak to fire, it does not mean you should just blindly shoot fire arrows at it. The big damages came from the explosions that resulted from shooting specific weaker parts. I know it seems obvious that specific weak spots given to you should be focused, but sometimes I was just running around not wanting to try hard each battle, and just wanted to shoot monsters down without too much aiming. This does not work that well as you progress through the game, as these weaknesses are not supposed to be beaten through direct arrow hits alone.

Story

The gist of the story is: the world is in a post-apocalyptic state. Mankind seems to be back at the “bow and arrow” age. However, it is also filled with advanced machines, our main enemies in most of the game.

We play as Aloy, a girl who was outcast from her tribe after birth, and raised by a man named Rost. While exploring the world as a kid, Aloy finds a piece of technology that allows her to see the world differently. It was basically some sort of scanner, as well as a database of knowledge. It is able to “augment reality” for Aloy, showing her things most people can not see: tracks in a jungle, weak spots in enemies, as well as keeping a database of information from the current and the “old age”.

With this tech, Aloy becomes an exceptional hunter. When she is older, one of her goals is to find out more about her mother, and why she was outcast from the tribe, making it the main plot of the game. Rost reveals to her that there is an event, “The Proving”, where outcasts who win it can be accepted back into the tribe, as well as request a single thing from the tribe’s matriarchs. Aloy plans to win The Proving, request to know about her mother, and then come back to live with Rost.

After winning The Proving, however, the place is attacked, and Rost is killed. One of the matriarchs reveals to Aloy that she had no mother, she was found as a baby near an ancient door that lies in a sacred place within the tribe’s territory. While some matriarch thought this was a sign of a blessing, others thought it was a sign of a curse, and that the child would only bring destruction, deciding to outcast her.

While visiting this door, she sees the hologram projection of a woman who is remarkably similar to her. Near the door, a scan is activated, and Aloy is “biologically accepted”, but the door malfunctions due to corrupted data. Aloy sets out in the world to find out who attacked the tribe (and why), and who was this woman she saw.

I will just cut it short, because this was one of the weakest points of the game for me: Aloy is a clone from Elisabet Sobeck, a scientist who worked on a project called “Zero Dawn”. At some point in the game we see a projection of how the owner of the tech corporation Faro Automated Solutions (FAS), reveals to Elisabet that his machines have gone rogue. A “glitch” allowed them to bypass hierarchy of command, and the AI is now acting on their own. They could multiply very fast, exponentially increasing their numbers, and were fueled by consuming biomass. The encrypted code to disable all machines would take decades to be decoded, and at their rate of replication, the world had only a few months until their critical mass would cause extinction of any living thing on the surface of the planet.

To counter this, Elisabet comes up with a “brilliant” plan: build a different AI, also capable of reproducing, also capable of fighting, also capable of everything the previous threat is capable of, and more! Terraforming? We got it. Decoding the encryption mechanism of previous threat? We have it. Learn by itself and capable to adapt to situations? Obviously. Genetic engineering able to create new humans and grow them and teach them everything that happened? Sounds perfect. The plan was to just let everyone die, wait for this new AI to decode the original threat’s deactivation code, deactivate them, terraform the planet back to life, and then create new humans.

At some point in the game, it is explained what and in which order everything went downhill, but I was too annoyed with the overall idea to pay too much attention. I mean, what kind of plan, huh? Everything goes according to schedule, everyone dies, machines are deactivated, world starts to be terraformed, humans start to be genetically created and raised, but due to some shenanigans we lost all of human’s knowledge, so everyone is now back to tribal level knowledge. Part of the new AI is corrupted (who could have foreseen?), and wakes up some machines to try and kill everyone again. Then Aloy is created as a clone of Elisabet, to fix everything and bring peace and harmony back.

It sounds like a very interesting story, but I just could not enjoy it. Not only it is a bit ridiculous, but then plan is flawed that I just could not accept it, even if it’s just a game. I continued to play for the gameplay loop, and enjoyed the tidbits of lore, but overall the plan within the story threw me completely off of it.

Difficulty

I could swear I had chosen the Hard difficulty when starting the game. However, only after I finished it and started with Horizon Forbidden West, did I start having second thoughts. On the sequel, the Hard difficulty was so much harder, with initial monsters killing me with single hits multiple times, that I decided to tune it down to Normal difficulty, as well as made me realize I probably had the Zero Dawn gameplay set to Normal as well.

All in all, the game was not specifically difficult. To me the difficulty came from the fact I that I felt like I was spending more than I should while killing harder machines. I never got used to what was worth how much, and there were so many “useless” items (machine parts, plants, etc.), that I could never figure out if the amount I invested into killing a big monster was worth the drop. Over time, I just learned to ignore this point completely, since I never ran out of resources or money, so this was a non-issue.

Some of the missions were easier than random encounters, probably because they were built in a way to be accessible. Some random encounters could be harder because monsters could come and help each other, and this made it more annoying to fight them.

All in all, whichever difficulty I configured (Normal or Hard), I think it was the best choice, because the gameplay loop that locked me in was not having super hard fights, but in general just ticking quests and accomplishing all these little things as I found more about the universe of the game.

Pros

  • Gameplay loop is fun, there are many activities to do, besides following the main quest
  • Many different machines to destroy, as well as some humans to fight and wildlife to hunt
  • Controls fit the gameplay nicely, and the skill tree allows for some customization
  • Aloy is cool, audacious, sometimes sassy, and overall a strong main character

Cons

  • The story hurts itself in its confusion
  • The itemization can be little overwhelming