Guerrilla Games
Horizon Zero Dawn

That robot tyrannosaurus armed to the teeth has left its mark on the hearts of many former children. It is a dream come true, an extreme fantasy of many that becomes a video game. And you can tear it apart piece by piece, detach its cannons and use them against it, slide between its legs and shoot it in the balls.

Horizon Zero Dawn is something that marks the imagination, it is a milestone for the video game world and beyond, for the world of children's daydreams that turn into movies, books, or video games, especially video games. I tried it a year after its release, after playing (and finishing) God of War from 2018. Not the ideal conditions to enjoy a great video game, right after diving into one perhaps even more beautiful and profound.

Did I like it? Well, I reached seventy or maybe eighty hours (and I have very little time, so I've been dragging it since July) and I put aside Final Fantasy XV, I haven't even started Dark Souls III; I bought Red Dead Redemption II last week but haven't started it yet, I'm obsessed with this one.

Yet, if I have to be completely honest, the relationship I have established with this giant is one of love and hate. A hatred due to the fact that to enjoy this treasure, you have to give a lot, spend hours leveling up, collecting materials to craft arrows and bombs, metal parts to buy stronger weapons. The balance between the available arsenal and the mechanical beasts to face is particularly challenging. In the sense that you start with a little bow and arrows that barely tickle, and soon you have to take down behemoths that spit fire or saber-toothed tigers of gleaming steel. It's almost impossible to take them down at close range, with brute force, so you need many, many arrows. And you need to acquire a lot of skills and new weapons to start being truly respected, strictly from afar.

The combat system is certainly the best thing about the game, it is three-quarters of the game in my view. And Guerrilla has bet everything on that, simplifying many other aspects of its work. But not everything convinces me, even in that. I mean, progressing in Hzd means fighting a lot, a great deal, because it is the only way to truly grow, but at the same time, this requires consuming a lot of materials. The result is that the player (or maybe me, enormously inexperienced) finds themselves having to play a lot, too much even. It's a game that becomes addictive because it's essentially impossible to play it "straight", doing the bare minimum. You have to roam the huge world, searching for machines and side missions to accumulate and then spend everything to replenish supplies of metal, ropes, and ever-stronger weapons.

In short, an expensive system that traps you in the game mechanics, but maybe dilutes the narrative just a bit too much. It becomes an obsession because resources are always scarce and enemies many. If you avoid them, you save but don't grow, and you find yourself lacking against bosses. In short, it's the classic RPG mechanics, but here enemies must be killed also to recover material to sell or use to craft ammo. So it's a vicious circle that devastates your free time.

At least in the first dozen hours of play, it is impossible to face secodonts, scrappers, and company frontally, also because the melee combat system is particularly cumbersome. So you have to hide, position yourself high to strike without being massacred. Sometimes this is tedious because there's always or almost always a protected spot where machines can't reach. So you just need to buy the precision bow and strike from afar, like villains. Close combat is more fun, but you have to be decidedly cunning and armed to the teeth. After countless curses, I discovered that you can anchor beasts to the ground with special arrows. And then wrangle them at leisure. Until they break free.

In reality, the system is even more complex: each monster has different elements of weakness (tanks, cores, armor) that can be destroyed or removed with different types of arrows and bullets. So, aiming at the right spots allows you to take down machines with less resource expenditure. But these beasts flail like mad, and even with the ability that slows time, it's difficult to hit certain tiny and hidden components in the T-Rex's butt.

For this reason, I followed much rougher strategies, hiding and covering the beasts with arrows, bombs, traps. But doing so I always spent a lot to craft ammunition, leaving me with few resources for new dazzling bows.

You get it, Hzd is a magnificent obsession, precisely for its ostentatious difficulty.

The graphics are amazing, but there are some hidden flaws. The world is devoid of physics; everything is immobile and immutable. The combat absorbs everything, even the game's potential, and thus the rest of the mechanics resolve into minimal, very simple puzzles where interactions with the world are always minimal, rudimentary. There are buildings or mountains to climb, but the paths are obligatory, automatic essentially, there are hunting challenges that are always battles, side missions that more or less echo the play style of the rest. Or, the cursed areas to cleanse. Even exploring is quite tedious; I mean, you have to do it because it helps to accumulate resources and experience points, but there's not much to discover or treasures to find. The treasures are the hearts of the thunderjaws, stormbirds, and so on.

In short, mechanical beasts and such ambitious battles make the rest of the world decidedly empty and uninteresting. Considering then that the graphics are mind-blowing, you realize how little potential remained to create complex environments, truly stimulating dungeons, articulate, and varied mechanics.

And not just that, Hzd is also poor in how it tells the story, which in potential was even remarkable. But it is told with static dialog sequences, directorially null, based only on the technique of shot-reverse shots, with minimal cut scenes, or worse through holograms that narrate the past of this post-apocalyptic world. It might be me, having played it over a long period and not paying much attention to the story, but the plot didn't grab me at all. There are some good ideas, certainly not new but fascinating, yet this narrative mode trivializes them, and after a while, you stop having special interest, at the two-hundredth dialog sequence full of explanations and various narrative bric-a-brac, one starts clicking the x quickly. Not to mention the various written fragments (never read) or audio (listened to distractedly). And the collectibles? I didn't have time to think about those either.

God of War is decidedly better: a more measured experience, a game with amazing cinematic direction and narrative. But after a while, I set it aside; I didn't feel like leveling. Instead, I continue playing Horizon, even though I have Red Dead Redemption II ready to be enjoyed. It might be those crazy metal beasts, the enjoyment of taking them down with bows and arrows, or that it's so tough to level up (initially) that when you become strong, you can't tear yourself away.

It has vertiginous aspects combined with almost skeletal game structures because there wasn't more processing power to insert other stuff. What sense does it make to create a huge, beautiful world to explore if every mission has its marker on the map and you're precisely instructed on what to do at every step? It was more adventurous to explore small, non-open worlds, but without markers and arrows guiding you as if you were half-witted. It's a contradiction in terms, or rather, it makes it clear that the open-world concept is just a chic feature that seems cool but doesn't bring a real revolution in gameplay. Also because the beasts can surely be avoided, stealth play is possible, but since it's an RPG set entirely on combat, ultimately it’s counterproductive not to fight.