Re-Review #12: Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn

PlayStation 4

For my original review of this game, click

>HERE<

I first played through Horizon Zero Dawn a little over 2 years ago. I absolutely loved the game, and I ended up giving it a perfect review score of A+. I always knew that someday I was going to return to Horizon Zero Dawn and play it again, but I had no idea it would be so soon.

In 20202 my wife and I welcomed our first baby to the world. As a new parent, it was quite the hectic time for me. All of a sudden I found myself with no spare time to play video games or attend to any of my favorite hobbies and pastimes. Since I am the type of guy that fully invests himself when he plays a video game, I didn’t want to start up a brand-new game that I was going to constantly be distracted from by the baby. So I figured I’d play something I had already played before. I settled on Horizon Zero Dawn.

Normally I am not a New Game + person, but because I had played through this game so recently I figured I’d give it a shot for once. If anything, it would earn me an extra trophy on the PlayStation Network. Plus, this time around I could focus more on the game’s story since I remembered combat being somewhat difficult the first time around.

At first, I regretted my decision. I was destroying enemies and carving them up and left and right. The game was offering no challenge to me whatsoever. Sure, I was able to focus on the game’s story, but I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I was losing too much of what had made the game such a fun experience for me the first time around. Without that feeling of fear or being on edge, because any enemy encounter could kill me, the game became too easy. And thus: less enjoyable.

Plus, the game’s story itself had lost some of its magic for me. As I played, I found myself simply going  through the motions. I wasn’t enjoying myself. I wasn’t having fun. How could my mind change on an A+ title so quickly?

As my interest in the title waned, so did my time playing it. Days and weeks would go by between playing sessions. As the baby started to develop a normal sleep schedule, I found myself with more time to play video games again. I renewed my GameFly subscription and put Horizon Zero Dawn on the backburner for several months while I turned my attention to newer and flashier games.

2020 turned into 2021. March came around and I decided I was going to cancel my GameFly subscription and start focusing on playing and reviewing my backlog of games again. Well, I am not the type of guy who likes to leave loose threads dangling when it comes to video games, so I made up my mind that I was going to come back and finish Horizon Zero Dawn before I played anything else. And that I did.

Luckily I was able to jump back into the game just as it was getting good. It wasn’t long before Aloy encountered Sylens for the first time. From that point on, I was hooked. The story really grabbed me this time around. The Faro Plague, the Zero Dawn Project, the audio and the holo logs, Dr. Sobeck, all of it. Even though I already knew what happened based on my first playthrough of this game, I really was digging it this time around. I played it every day religiously for about a week. And then all of a sudden the game was over. It seemed really short in my mind, but I had to realize I had been playing this game off and on for about a year. I must have made better progress initially than I had thought! The fact that I skipped some of the side quests and didn't explore 100% of the map this time around, may have had something to do with it as well.

This game’s story really takes quite a long time to get going. I couldn’t care less about the tribes and the hunting lodges and the Sun King and all the NPCs you have to help as you explore the world map. All of that stuff is just, well – meh, at best. Things didn’t take off until I started digging up what happened to cause the apocalypse that destroyed humanity, and the resulting project that arose to save humanity. That shit was fascinating to me, and was the real heart of this game in my opinion.

Still, even as I began to really enjoy the game’s story on my second playthrough, I couldn’t fully embrace its combat. It’s so clunky and poorly designed. Maybe I didn’t notice how bad it was the first time I played this game two years ago, but this time I had just finished playing Ghost of Tsushima – and it couldn’t be more obvious that Horizon Zero Dawn can’t hold a candle to that game’s combat and overall gameplay.

Whenever it is that this game’s sequel comes out, I hope that they’ve fixed the combat to make it more smooth and not so clumsy and awkward.

All in all, I still consider Horizon Zero Dawn to be a good game. Amazing graphics, atmosphere, storyline. Top of the line stuff. Am I as infatuated with this game as I was when I first played it two years ago? Absolutely not. This game was new and exciting back then. It seems to lose most of its magic when I went back to play it a second time. Which is kind of a shame, really. I had it all built up in my mind as this wonderful, A+ title. Now it doesn’t even get a grade in the A range.

There is no question that this is a good game. I would even say it is a really good game. But a great one? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh……

 

Final Score:

B+