On its face, I think that Horizon should be at least a candidate for GOTY. It is a gorgeous open-world with some really cool world-building, intricate systems that are fun to play with and you get to fight g.d. robot dinosaurs! But there are just a lot of things that rub me the wrong way, and the more I played, the longer the list grew.
Let’s start with a very small thing: I dislike Aloy’s name so, so much, and it is emblematic that Horizon gets a lot of the big stuff right while either being tone-deaf or being too much by the book on everything else
This is all to say that at a base level, I don’t find the majority of the game fun to play or interesting to see. At its best, you are walking through graveyards of human civilization, discovering how the world came to its current form or skulking through the brush, stealthily picking off enemies one by one with what are still frustratingly shallow stealth mechanics. But for the rest of it, you’re either taking part in the now standard open-world tasks of completing side-quests, revealing more and more of the map via ‘towers’, taking part in sort of mediocre combat, or going through the main campaign that is kind of meh outside lore Guerilla Games has crafted and the robots; and make no mistake, the design (visual and sound) of the robots is really cool.
I know that calling the combat mediocre may set off some anger, but let me explain. It is not really the basic mechanics of it, I like the idea of fighting these high-tech machines with bows, spears, etc.; I think that for the most part, it works, especially in the smaller encounters where you are given the ability to strategically take out one enemy after another through a mix of setting traps, stealth and strategically using weaknesses to inflict max damage. Unfortunately, in larger encounters and the game’s boss battles, this system completely breaks down and turns into a cycle of getting a few shots in, running, healing, and repeat. It just is not fun, and on harder difficulties turns into more of a chore than it is worth.
And all of this is not even to say how lazy a lot of the trappings are in the game. First, and perhaps foremost, it is super weird to me how the player-character is a white woman in a clan, the Nora, (even if you have only been allowed to join through a trial) made of predominantly white people, and you’re basically parading around in faux Indigenous attire. Side Note: I am a white cis man who has no ties to any indigenous people in North America or abroad, so take this for what it is worth (pretty much nothing). Then it goes further, Aloy and ‘her people’ are classified as savages. The game itself essentially makes you (again, a white woman) the ‘Noble Savage’! Like, just, please stop it. Obviously, I am nowhere near equipped to dive into this subject matter. I’d suggest reading @dialacina as a start for that.
Overall, I think that Horizon: Zero Dawn is beautiful game falls into the worst trappings of AAA game design, it seems to think that the number of things to do on a map can be equated with worthwhile things to do, the combat scenarios is more a hindrance than something enjoyable, and it does not have the courage to just end (instead leaving it very open for a sequel).
(Sorry if this post rambly/not on topic, there was just a lot that I wanted to say; and I didn’t say nearly half of it)
