Horizon Zero Dawn Review

In 2017 I was too preoccupied with Breath of the wild to even think about playstation games, the world of post apocalyptic Hyrule was just too enveloping for me. But eventually I turned my attention back to my PS4 and the amazing world of Horizon Zero Dawn.

The setting of Horizon Zero Dawn is the world we all know and love, Earth. Our Earth, just 1000 years in the future. Starting off things look very different. All our cities are gone and the environment has reclaimed the land. Also humanity has reverted back to tribalism. Our character (Aloy) is exiled from one of these tribes at birth due to the nature of her birth and grows up an outcast. When Aloy was a young girl she fell into some ruins of the old world and finds a device called a Focus which allows her to scan and read data from the old world. Using the Focus she is able to help the tribes understand more about the world and discover the unknown purpose of project zero dawn.

Horizon Zero Dawns world is quite barren when it comes to wildlife. There are pigs and rabbits and other little creatures but that’s it for real animals. Instead the world is inhabited by animalistic machines. These machines resemble animals from throughout history like Striders are based off of horses and the Thunderjaw is a T-Rex. Along your journey you discover that the machines were initially made to help restore the environment. Each machine has a role to play. However something isn’t right. The machines are hostile toward humans and some machines don’t seem to have an environmental role. It’s up to you to figure out what happened.

There were many moments in this game where I thought I can’t do this. The developers intentionally made the game visually demanding. Not great when you already struggle with that. At times I just stood still and waited for time to pass because the rain made it impossible to see anything or the sunset is too bright so machines start to blend in. Also the icons were quite small. Using the Focus you can see enemies through walls and you can tag them so you know where they are but I couldn’t really use this because the tag icon was so small I kept losing sight of it.

At the end of the day I loved Horizon Zero Dawn and even earned myself the platinum trophy for it. This very quickly became one of my favourite video games and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone who will listen.