What compels a man to review an old PC port of an even older PS4 game in 2023? I’ll tell you what: too much free time. This is the first time I’ve come around to playing through Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD). It’s been in my backlog of games since 2019, but the PS4 was a subpar experience, and frankly the beginning hour or two of HZD is such a drag I couldn’t get through it. It was only upon playing its sequel Horizon Forbidden West (HFW) that I had the desire to push on through the cringe-fest that is the prologue of Zero Dawn – of course, this time, on PC where it is a much more pleasant experience with high framerates, beautiful graphics, and getting to play with a controller designed for humans with normal hands (i.e. anything but a Playstation-brand controller).
So the aforementioned dragging beginning aside, I really enjoyed HZD. I would in fact say I might even have preferred it to its sequel, which I also played through to completion and beyond. Sure, there are some improvements that HFW offers that were sorely missed in Zero Dawn, but, the game wasn’t designed with these in mind, and for the most part, I did fine without them. So coming into HZD and being comfortable with being able to freely move around the world with the improved mobility Aloy possess in Forbidden West was, at first, a bit of a bummer. But I relented, and as I said, trying to keep in mind that Zero Dawn was not designed with these things in mind, made it a bit easier to readjust to being a lowly ground-based peasant, when I had previously been able to climb any wall, glide down safely from great heights, and eventually even friggin’ fly – not to mention being able to swim in any direction. Whew. Though to be fair, not having to participate in swimming based missions was a relief. Why do game developers insist on water levels?
So what makes me prefer HZD to HFW, well, I wouldn’t kick either out of bed if that’s what you’re asking, but a big part of what I like about Zero Dawn is that once you get past the beginner area, a lot of the cringeyness disappears. It’s still there, no doubt. Basically every time you have to interact with any other character outside of Sylens (if you know, you know). But because Zero Dawn is basically a scaled down version of Forbidden West, there’s a lot less of that. Where Forbidden West had dozens and dozens of annoying characters going on and on about their strangely post-modern problems in this post-apocalyptic, tribalistic world, Zero Dawn has considerably fewer. And the fact that I have to interact with less of them, these nonsensical people that sound like they’re from all over the world, despite the fact that they’re all supposed to be from the same small area of the United States I might add, I instantly favor Zero Dawn over its successor.
I love the premise of humanity having been wiped out through its own hubris. That’s great. Especially in the gruesome manner that it happened. Killer robots devouring everything? Dope. But why couldn’t that just have been the foundation for which this world was built upon? Why couldn’t there have been something slightly smaller in scale to motivate our hero? Why did the world have to end AGAIN? You need to start with a smaller self-contained story, especially when you have already decided that it’s going to be a trilogy. That way you don’t have to keep making it bigger and bigger every game. Just have a small thing that leads into a bigger thing. Don’t threaten the end of the world every damn time. Let that build up instead.
What I would have done in their place with what they have set up is scrap the whole “there’s a rogue AI trying to kill all humans again” plot, at least for this one, and let the conflict between the different tribes take center stage in Zero Dawn. We’re told very early on in the game that there used to be this mad king that enslaved and butchered smaller tribes. But his son killed him, we learn, and he’s a really good guy, like, comically so. I say, scratch that. Let the mad king by the big bad of Zero Dawn. Let Aloy’s journey be to stop him. Have Aloy aid the overthrowing of this mad king. Let mankind’s end, the evil robots, and all that, be set-dressing. Backstory fluff. Go ahead and reveal that Aloy is her own grandma, that’s fine. Go ahead and reveal what went wrong with the human gene bank, and the AI and all that. The mystery of it all is a great reveal. But leave it at that. And with the next game, set up the return of the bad robots, and then have the big showdown in the third game. Why would you blow your load at the starting line?
So if it wasn’t obvious yet, what appeals to me about Horizon isn’t the story, it isn’t the characters, and it certainly isn’t getting to play The Chosen One™. What appeals to me about Horizon is the world, like, the literal world. Not the world as in the lore and all that crap – no, I mean the canyons, the forests, the rivers, trees, mountains. And the creatures in it. The robots, the mega robots, the super mega robots. Being set loose in this altered Colorado (or somewhere there about) and running, jumping, climbing trees, while killing robots with arrows, bombs, spears, and whatnot, is just great. It’s such a beautiful world I think I spent half of my game time in the photo mode getting my landscape photography on. It all just feels really cool in this beautifully realized world with some truly grandiose vistas. Of course, HFW improves on the combat greatly, with many, many new weapons and ways to tackle the robo-dinos, but the important bits are all there in Zero Dawn. The stuff that matters. The stuff that made me actually stick around for almost 60 hours (as logged by Steam).
And you really feel your own progression in terms of fighting these things, as the start has you struggle with the tiniest of machines, whereas you will later be able to take them down by merely giving them a nasty side-glance. Mastering your technique in fighting the mega-robosaurs makes you feel like a total badass, and learning how to use them against each other is even more rewarding, as you can sit back and watch giant metal t-rexes battle it out while you take potshots at the winner with your special sharpshooter bow.
I couldn’t imagine playing this at anything other than the very hard setting (maybe the ultra-hard mode, but I’m saving that for New Game+), because the game needs that edge that comes with the tough-as-nails metal-dinos. They need to be a threat. You need to be a weak little maggot at the foot of these behemoths, so that when you actually take them down, it felt like you did something. Because, as I said, that’s where the game shines: Fighting the robot dinosaurs in these ridiculously gorgeous environments – because it really doesn’t have much else going on. The YA style story telling is just embarrassing, the characters and their millennial attitudes are less interesting than watching paint dry, and as soon as the game tries to do anything even remotely interesting in terms of world building, it rushes through it, moving on to something else – so why even bother? Just shut up and let me fight mecha dinosaurs.
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