izigame.me

Horizon is one of my favorite franchises, and I've always enjoyed the LEGO games so I was pretty excited for this game. I really wanted to like this game and give it a good review but I just can’t. I honestly have no idea who this game was for, or why this was greenlit. I spent $100 on this game (CAD) which considering what was delivered, I feel was way too much money. TL;DR at the bottom.

Pros:
- Graphics are amazing for a LEGO game
- The world is stunning, being all in LEGO
- It actually made me lol at a handful of jokes
- Gadgets, weapons, and characters are fun enough, nothing like the Horizon games, but a lot more depth than other LEGO games
- Soundtrack is good, not as good as FW, but better than ZD

Cons:

First, it was marketed as based on Zero Dawn, and I have no idea what this story was. Based on all the other LEGO games, I was expecting a re-telling of the story, but with cute / lighthearted moments like every other LEGO game. This story you can maybe generously say was 10% faithful to the source material and the rest was a children’s book story telling with so much cut out. The lore and story of Horizon is one of the best things about this franchise and this for lack of a better word, butchered it completely. Mario games have better stories than this.

The way death works in this game is annoying, especially compared to previous LEGO games. Being reset to an early checkpoint, forcing you to re-gather all the little secrets in the level feels peak Xbox 360 era. Didn't Outlaws just patch this out of their game being people hated it?

Surprisingly there was a lack of different machines in the game. I was expecting a lot more variety, and even some FW machines considering they had FW machines as decorations in Mother’s Heart. If they aren’t following the Zero Dawn story, might as well bring in some other machines from FW.

It doesn’t follow traditional LEGO game co-op rules which is baffling to me as the game feels broken without this. Instead of two characters always joining with you, if you solo you go by yourself. But the other character still has voice lines as if they were there. It also means some side activities that require a certain character are locked out if you happen to choose the wrong character at the start of the mission. Plus it makes leveling them up that much more annoying and the annoying death system happens more often because you can't be revived.

It is somewhat broken on UW. Some cut scenes will play in 21:9 but not all, and most of the game is locked to 16:9. But, a bunch of UI elements will appear in 32:9, even though you can see there was space given for them in the 16:9 scene, so it just looks broken.

The game stutters and is glitchy on my 4090. Weird pops in, a lot of stuttering going between scenes, assets flicker a lot during fade in and outs.

The game crashed when the final boss had about 20% health left, and didn’t save any checkpoints so had to re-do the longest mission and the spongiest boss in the whole game twice so that put a pretty sour taste in my mouth to top it all off.

TL;DR
There are a few great things like the graphics and the more in-depth combat system vs other LEGO games, but the story was butchered (even by LEGO standards), the solo system felt busted, the death checkpoint system is annoying, and lots of technical issues. For $100 (CAD) it’s just not worth it, compared to previous LEGO games, the other Horizon games, and other games that are this long (10ish hours). It’d say this is worth $30-40 (CAD).