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TLDR: Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD) is a decently fun action game with a variety of content and engaging combat, though the thin world-building and cardboard characters detract from the fun.

INTRODUCTION: HZD is an open-world third-person action-adventure game taking place in our future. After an unspecified fall of society, humanity has devolved into scattered tribes living a pre-industrial existence. Sentient beast-shaped machines stalk the land, threatening the fragile remnant of humanity.

The player steps into the role of Aloy, a young woman cast out of the Nora tribe at an early age. Raised by another outcast, she grows up learning the skills to survive the wilds, including brandishing her bow and spear, gathering materials from the wilderness, and stealthy acrobatics. She also finds a "focus," a leftover piece of technology that allows her to scan the environment and hostiles for information. After disaster strikes the sacred Nora lands, Aloy sets off on a journey into the wider world.

GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW: Facing the land's hostile machines is the primary focus of gameplay and despite being somewhat repetitive, the combat is basically enjoyable. Enemies range from the man-sized two-legged Watchers to the building-sized Deathbringers and Thunderjaws. Learning how to fight each machine—their tactics, strengths, and weaknesses—is the path to success.

Aloy can wield a variety of bows, a tripwire caster, a rope flinger to tie down machines, bomb-throwing slings, traps, and her trusty spear. The player has a ton of options in combat, whether it's rushing in to use spear strikes and perform rolling dodges, luring machines into traps, using sniper shots to strike weak spots and blow components (like fuel canisters and external weapons) off the robot's chassis, or rapid-fire elemental attacks to exploit machine weaknesses. In many cases, fights require a combination of these strategies and careful planning can make the difference between life and death. Players can learn to override individual machines, turning them into mounts or getting them to attack other foes. There are also human enemies of various strengths and unlike machines, headshots work best against them. Some fights will go exactly as planned and the player can revel in a well-executed operation. Some will inevitably go wrong and you might be plunged into a desperate melee fight against multiple enemies ... and those are pretty satisfying to win too. Most of the key storyline battles are intense and exciting, including the final one of the game.

Combat is not a gimme, though. Aloy will gain some durability as she levels, and various outfits can help against specific enemy attacks (if you remember to change to the right one) but realistically, the player will never be able to tank attacks from the upper half of the machine hierarchy. The dodge roll is not an invincibility and you'll still be hit if you don't get all the way clear. Even with heavy skill and equipment upgrades, the largest machines take an enormous amount of damage before going down and hitting their vulnerable points take practice and patience. Experiment with all the tools in your arsenal, try to disable enemy weapons, and use the terrain for cover/distance as much as possible.

Aside from the main quest, there's quite a lot of side content in the game and the key is that the player can do as much or as little as they want. In addition to experience and skill points, most of the side content has tangible bonuses. Overriding the Tallnecks (basically mobile radio towers) reveals nearby map points of interest. Delving into the foundry-like cauldrons unlocks different classes of machines that can be manually overriden and turned to the player's side. Once a whole group of collectibles is gathered, they can be exchanged with specific vendors for money and upgrades. There's a lot to get into, and quests and purchase-able maps will steer the player to most important locations.

STORY / WORLDBUILDING: I feel this is where HZD falls down. In terms of characterization, I liked Rost (the outcast who raises Aloy in the story's opening) but most of the characters felt kind of flat and uninteresting, including Aloy herself. Ninety percent of her development takes place in the first few hours of the game, and then after that, it's, "oh, I'm off on an adventure." The primary mission feels vaguely important but since I never connected with Aloy, I never had much concern about the outcome. The main plot points are competent but the basic idea (man versus machine, resulting in a wrecked world and near-total destruction of everything) has been done to death and there's nothing particularly fresh in this version. It was all just ... meh.

While the wilderness has a number of interesting locations, swaths of the world between points still feel empty. Sure, there are robots to fight and the scenery is pretty but it's all kind of bland. In town, the NPCs in towns kind of just hang around, Some move on predetermined circuits but just as many stand in place. The number of people the player can speak to and interact with for more than a single line of throwaway conversation is surprisingly small and after a while, none of them stand out from any other. Merchant prices and item availability varied little from town to town, and all of the population centers somewhat came off as static window dressing.

All this—a lack of relatable characters, thin story, indistinguishable NPCs, on top of the landscape being largely empty between quest points—gives the world a very flimsy feeling, without much depth despite its beauty. It took me over one-hundred hours and eight months to complete HZD, and I think that was because the story never hooked me. I wasn't invested in anything beyond bouncing between quests, bashing a few machines, and collecting loot.

DLC: This version comes with one DLC included, Frozen Wilds (FW), which takes Aloy to the north and into a snow-covered land. The DLC adds about thirty hours of content, with new quests and robots. I found FW significantly harder than the base game; it's definitely for high-level characters that have or all but finished the main story. The new machines introduced are even faster and more damage-spongy than those in the regular areas and have a tendency to toss Aloy around. Against two or more at once, it is very easy to get pinned against terrain and get stunlocked to death. The rewards in FW match the difficulty but I didn't enjoy it all that much and had to grit my teeth to complete it.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS: The game was recently remastered but even so, this version is lush and enticing. The landscapes are beautifully rendered, as are the native villages, ruins, and underground bunkers left over from the old world. It's a gorgeous spectacle. Ambient sound is excellent, with the calls of animals and thundering steps of heavy machines, and dripping water in subterranean areas. However, the voice acting is stilted throughout, with too many NPCs delivering their lines in a near-monotone, absent emotion or interest.

The game basically ran well, with no crashes of game-breaking bugs. I did encounter a an incident of clipping and unloaded polygons here and there. Load times were acceptable. Getting one-hundred percent on Steam achievements requires doing all the side content, maxing everything, and beating New Game+ on the highest difficulty level.

FINAL VERDICT: Overall, I did mostly enjoy HZD. It's a competent action-adventure game with a whole bunch of content. The story and characters are basically forgettable but the gameplay is good enough to keep most players entertained for a while.

SCORE: 7/10