HORIZON ZERO DAWN (PS4)

For a while Horizon was in my "to-do" list, but I had a good bunch of unfinished open world games in process. I eventually found a gap to give a try, and my intention was to play 4-5h to get a sense of what the game was about... and I ended up getting the platinum trophy

I remember reading about the story setting, and feeling skeptical about it: Robots vs cavemen? How are they going to pull that off? After a couple hours of playtime, the story was enticing and mysterious enough to keep me engaged as to decide to keep playing, and see where that´d take me. Admittedly, there was a huge section in the second act - the one about tribal frictions and lore - that made me question if it was worth it. But focusing on the main story, and thanks to the low difficulty of most secondary challenges, I found it satisfying to play, and kept moving forward

The game is not perfect, though. To start with, it succeeds and fails in the same areas than other similar open worlds: The main character falls constantly into what I call "the good samaritan syndrome" (you go around the world helping people you don´t know and don´t care for, often doing menial tasks for them that make no sense for an epic world-savior), there are many "template-based" gameplay elements copy-pasted across all regions, and traversing can be often frustrating. On top of that, the visual design of most characters is too Tenerife carnival queen to my taste. The UI is functional, but a bit too crude in my opinion. Some 2D artists could spend some time to spike up its appeal

On the other hand, for a company who´d been known for linear shooters the change of genre is always a big challenge, and they completely succeeded at it. The game has an innovative unique selling point (Beast-like robots), a good combat system taking advantage of the specifics of those enemies, and a good story that keeps enough hidden elements as to keep you interested until the end. And as I said, the game difficulty is not layered like many other games nowadays (meaning you have different challenges, each more daunting that the previous, to please all sorts of players, from casuals to hardcores) and seems to be happy to offer easy content just to keep you playing

Overall a good game, great way to start a new IP and if they can build upon this foundation we can have a great franchise for many years. Good work, Guerrilla