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REVIEW: HORIZON ZERO DAWN (PS4)

13/3/2017

16 Comments

 
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There's a funny little game I used to play with friends, whereby we'd try to distill a blockbuster movie into a tongue-in-cheek pitch. You know: "It's like Movie X meets Movie Y".

For instance, Star Wars might be "Flash Gordon meets The Hidden Fortress", Jurassic Park might be "Westworld meets Jaws", and Dunston Checks In might be "The Shining meets Planet of the Apes".

You can do much the same thing with most video games. Unfortunately, there's no quick and pithy response when it comes to Horizon Zero Dawn. It's not Game X meets Game Y... it's more "Far Cry meets Tomb Raider meets The Last of Us meets Uncharted meets The Witcher III meets Watch Dogs meets Arkham Asylum meets Shadow of the Colossus".

You see, there's scarcely an original idea in Horizon Zero Dawn. Okay, okay - robot wildlife and that... but comic creators Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill did the exact same thing in 2000AD years ago.

Admittedly, video games have rarely been original - even Pong, the game which started it all, was a rip-off of somebody else's idea. Plagiarism is de riguer in gaming, and Horizon Zero Dawn celebrates it in considerable style.

And there is nothing funny nor little about it.

BOW DOWN
In Horizon Zero Dawn you play Aloy, a nice lady with a bow and arrow, who lives in the far future, following the fall of civilisation.

Some sort of war has lead to humanity devolving, while machines evolved into dinosaurs and other wildlife. People live in tribes which are massively distinct from one another - both in terms of their inexplicable hipster fashion sense and accents - despite just being a short walk away. 

There are villages and cities, and there are the decaying remnants of the old world - above and below ground. And there are lots and lots of forests, and woods, and mountains, which - sorry - I'm sick to my hairy nipples of seeing in games, however pretty they might look.

In short: it's one of those games set in an enormous open world, where you have to forage for resources, take down enemy bases singlehandedly without setting off the alarm, and unlock new parts of your map by climbing towers (which, in this instance, just happen to be the necks of robot brachiosaurs).

With this in mind, describing the gameplay in Horizon Zero Dawn would bore us both, given that we've all played a game like this. It has arrived right at the cusp of my tolerance for open world games, when I'm starting to demand more from them.

Basically, just imagine your favourite open world game, and picture robot dinosaurs wandering around.  At points, it's shockingly derivative; apparently, nobody on the development team ever stopped to question whether there was a new or better way of doing any of the things it has simply transplanted wholesale from other games. I mean, it doesn't even try to disguise them.

The closest Horizon Zero Dawn gets to anything original is in the hunting. Running headlong into a herd of metal beasties, armed with your spear and bow, will only get you killed or skanked-up. Instead, you're faced with the choice of sneaking around them, or taking them down through stealth. Later in the game you get to hack into these machines, and turn them to your advantage.

It's a fun - and surprisingly tough - conceit, but somehow even this element feels like we've seen it before. 
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STUNDRA 
Horizon Zero Dawn's world is stunning. Without a doubt it's one of the best looking games ever. From tundra to desert, from day to night - the constantly evolving scenery could take away the breath of even the hardest cynic. 

What makes it even better looking is how seamless everything is. Nothing is a chore. It all feels robust, and just the right side of realistic. Nobody in the real world can jump and climb and roll in the way that Aloy does - but what it sacrifices in realism, it more than makes up for in sheer playability. It's a very easy game to spend time with, if not always so easy to succeed at (in a good way). It lets you enjoy that gorgeous scenery without wrestling with the controls or frustration.

Where it's less successful is in its storytelling. Frankly, the acting is dull and all over the place. There's no consistency between accents or tone, even within members of the same tribe. Why do some characters talk like they've stepped out of Lord of the Rings, while others sound like bus station puffy jackets? The names are back-of-a-fag-packet lazy (Bast, Teb, Den, Brom, Rost...), and the dialogue is just risible.

And all of this is a shame, because the world and the story are compelling and interesting - you just have to suffer through so much half-hearted nonsense in order to let Aloy's story play out. It's a pet peeve of mine, because of my day job, but it feels even more of an issue in a game which has clearly had so much money lobbed at it.

If you're going to inflict cut-scenes on us, you'd better make sure they're worth watching. Spend some of that budget on a director who can work with actors to get the best performance out of them, and a writer who knows how to give them material they can get their teeth into. There's little wit, emotion or humour anywhere in HZD's script.

I'm sick of it, because it feels like it's where video games are letting themselves down, by only ever employing writers and directors who've worked on video games, and whose experience with writing extends only as far as having watched every episode of Game of Thrones.

Yes, video game writing requires a writer who understands video games... but first and foremost, with this amount of story and cutscenes, you need a writer who knows how to write, for pity's sake. 

In all honesty, I'm embarrassed by it. It's a massive barrier to the mainstream acceptance of games as something other than a nerdy thing beloved of nerds. Or, at least, that's how it feels to me. 

Even the title - Horizon Zero Dawn - is off-puttingly clunky and sci-fi.
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TIRED IDEAS
For all its unoriginality, for all that I've tired of the ideas that Horizon Zero Dawn trots out, it somehow still succeeds in becoming a consolidation of those ideas rather than running them into the ground.

I'd like to think that this is a last hurrah for these sorts of games - arriving at the precise moment at which the new Zelda points to a future which offers a fresh template for open world games. Indeed, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda are night and day. Where HZD is bloated and pompous, Zelda is full of space and whimsy... yet both are playable and succeed in their own right.

Unfortunately, I suspect that Breath of the Wild will continue to be the open world exception. Horizon Zero Dawn is so slick and polished that you can already hear the bandwagon leaving the station, continuing on its pointless journey to Law Of Diminishing Creative Returns Central. If it ain't broke, why try and fix it? Well, because sooner or later everyone's going to get bored.

For now though... there's no doubt that Horizon Zero Dawn works. For all its unoriginality, despite its dreadful scripting and acting, it's still an astonishingly polished, gorgeous, and massive experience.

SUMMARY: Very nearly exhausting my patience for these sort of games, but somehow still an enjoyable experience. Just sort out that script and acting, eh?
​SCORE: 8.123123555 meets 10.19991123112
16 Comments
Euphemia
13/3/2017 12:31:27 pm

I will say this - first game of it's ilk in quite some time that had me hooked until the very end. Despise the bland script the story was right up my alleys. Fatigue normally sinks in for this type of game around the halfway mark.

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Biscuits the character
13/3/2017 01:06:34 pm

Am I living in reflecto-bizzaro-backward-o land? o? It seems as though every review, blog post and most of my friend's leavings on social media have been surrounding Zelda and the Switch, but people still speak of it as if it's a scrappy underdog jus' tryin' to make good, instead of a decades-spanning medium-defining behemoth. In comparison, I've barely heard of the terribly-titled game reviewed above....!...!.!.....!

...can't wait to play both of these amazing looking games though! They both seem like Summery titles to me so I'll grab 'em in a month or two

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Nocturne
13/3/2017 01:08:47 pm

I've not played a whole lot of it yet but what I did kept making me think of Ubisoft does Monster Hunter.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
13/3/2017 02:19:20 pm

This won't win me many friends, but I sort of feel similar about Breath of the Wild. My flatmate's playing through t right now, and while it is really cool, it also feels like one of those "X meets Y meets Z" games.

Don't get me wrong, it's a bloody good game, and a total revolution for a series that had previously given us essentially the same game for generations (and I generally ate them up, even the unfairly maligned Skyward Sword). However, I can't shake the feeling that running around a giant fantasy open world collecting herbs and foodstuffs to make potions, climbing towers to unlock the map, and fighting enemies with irritatingly fragile weaponry with the fear of getting one-hit killed at any moment unless you master the combat. It's like a sort of Elder Scrolls meets an Ubisoft map-mopper in a survival game meets Souls with maybe a touch of Monster Hunter meets Zelda.

It's all very well done, and filled with amazing little touches that other companies likely wouldn't bother with, but somehow it does feel very much like something both different and yet not really that new.

Back on topic, Horizon does look beautiful, but yes, more of the same.

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Biccies
13/3/2017 04:31:05 pm

Yeah, the thing that has defined this Zelda for me is how liberally it's borrowed from other titles - not that this is a bad thing at all

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RG
13/3/2017 04:11:03 pm

Out of interest - would you consider a job writing for video games?

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Spiney O'Sullivan
13/3/2017 05:29:58 pm

Biffo actually did write for a game: Future Tactics.

(I remember this because while he was quiet during the wilderness years, his name rather stuck out when it appeared)

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Mr Biffo
13/3/2017 08:21:01 pm

Yes, I did the script for Future Tactics... and having had that experience I'd like to give it another go, if I had the time to fit it in...

Pudding Gentleman Type B
13/3/2017 08:23:32 pm

>Okay, okay - robot wildlife and that... but comic creators Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill did the exact same thing in 2000AD years ago.

Yes. Also: Zoids. In fact I got excited and genuinely thought it might be an actual Zoids game when I saw the first shots from HZD.

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Starbuck
13/3/2017 09:08:12 pm

Zoids, how I loved Zoids! So much better than videogames. Especially Mighty Zoidzilla. Not so much the one whose wheel/leg kept falling off.

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Pudding Gentleman Type B
13/3/2017 09:31:31 pm

There have been quite a few Zoids games, in fact, but most of them were Japan-only. However Zoids Legacy (Pokemon-esque RPG for GBA) and Zoids Battle Legends (GC) had at least North American releases with English translation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zoids_video_games

Penyrolewen
13/3/2017 09:15:05 pm

There was a Zoids game. On the spectrum. Anyone remember it? I do. 98% Crash Smash, 'best game ever'- and it was awful. Dunno what happened. Crash was usually pretty reliable so my brother and I actually spent hard-earned teenager's cash (instead of taping it off a mate and spending the cash on special vat cider, natch)- and we hated it. Didn't get it. Did anyone else? Not that this still rankles, no, I'm over it.

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Kelvin Green link
13/3/2017 10:02:25 pm

It was also available on the C64 and had great music from Rob Hubbard...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtKyHqqXB8g

...except Rob Hubbard sort of borrowed it.

https://youtu.be/Q-_iTC5E9nU?t=16m20s

Oh well, Rob Hubbard is still ace.

PS1Snake
13/3/2017 11:52:55 pm

Couldn't agree more. I can't believe this game copped a 9 from EDGE. It has run-of-the-mill written all over it. It's a looker but that's all it has going for it. I don't like the generic tribal art direction and "Horizon Zero Dawn" is a terribly cheesy title - was "Zero Dawn" supposed to be a subtitle? It sounds like a title David Cage would come up with to describe his interactive dramas.

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Pasta Cornet
14/3/2017 08:06:40 am

Biffo also says he likes it...

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PS1Snake
14/3/2017 11:07:44 am

The general theme of his review seems to be while it is technically and visually astounding, the game has a "seen it all before" quality to it. At least that's how I interpreted it. In hindsight, I should have specifically defined what I agreed with in my original post.




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