#aloy is one of those cursed protagonists | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

smokeybrandreviews · 4 years ago

Text

Here Comes A New Challenger

Apparently PlayStation is launching a production company in partnership with HBOMax. I had no idea this was a thing. I heard whispers of an Uncharted film starring Tom Holland and a The Last of Us series in production but i had no idea they were all under one production umbrella. This sh*t feels like the power move executed by Marvel when they decided to create Marvel Studios. I’m on record as to be an egregious PlayStation shill, mostly because of the quality they put into there games, but in this age of micro-transactions and multiplayer nonsense, PlayStation feels like the only company that values narrative and you know how much i love good storytelling, man. I have concerns, mostly wondering if PlayStation productions is going to be independent of Sony Pictures because Sony can’t make a quality movie to save it’s life and id hate for that stigma to poison the well before PlayStation Productions gets and opportunity to drink, you know? That said, there are a ton of dope properties in the PS library to pull from. Some have already been announced; the aforementioned Last of Us and Uncharted but a few more have with the rumor trades.

Sly Cooper is rumored to be in production as a television show. I like this look. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Sly franchise but I've always respected the games, themselves. The amount of passion and legit storytelling therein was pretty commendable. Another franchise looking to get the big TV production push is Ratchet and Clank. This one is a no-brainer. The merchandising, alone, makes this a top option. It’s kind of weird though, because out of all of these early PS3 property, Jak and Daxter is not among them. You’d think that franchise would get an enthusiastic nod because, not because it’s got a unique look, but the story was pretty legit, too. Of these three, i actually beat all three mainline Jak games. Those were dope and it’s kind of ridiculous to me that no one is trying to develop that sh*t as a production. Also ridiculous to is the fact that Twisted Metal got a nod. Twisted f*cking Metal. Why? How? You pass on Jak but green light Sweet Tooth? Really? That’s a little concerning, however, the one franchise said to be n the works for film that i think has a shot at being something truly great is Horizon: Zero Dawn.

I love this game. Love it. When i first saw the trailer way back in 2015, i knew i needed it. I knew it was going to play like a champ. I knew the story was going to be, at the very least, serviceable. I mean, how can it not be a real experience? You got a scrappy, redhead, heroine, taking down robot dinosaurs with f*cking arrows and then gutting them for tech to increase your own abilities? F*cking sign me up, man! If you know me, then you know i love dinosaurs and robots. This sh*t was both. I mean, it’s tailor-made for me, specifically. If this sh*t was set in a cyberpunk dystopia, I'd f*cking marry it because I'd love it so much. Plus, i mean, another bad ass heroine to add the the echelon of bad ass game heroines? Aloy is an amazing protagonist and i instantly fell in love with her. That makes casting very tricky because she is such a fan favorite but there is a name being whispered to take up that charge and i think is a perfect fit; Rose Leslie.

Rose is best known for playing Ygritte on Game of Thrones. She was the red-headed, firecracker of a Wildling, that was basically Jon Snows first female everything. She was amazing in that show and easily became my second favorite character, after Arya. For the record, Arya, Ygritte, and Daenerys. Thems are my faves, that’s the rank, even if they’re all kind of problematic. That entire show is problematic so, you know, par for the course. After Leslie’s unceremonious exit in service to the development of Jon Snow, my girl got fridged, y’all, she ventured into other avenues. I happened to catch one of these endeavors, a low-budget horror flick called Honeymoon. It was awesome, a true underrated gem. I really enjoyed everything about this movie. I might do a proper review one day, maybe a revisit or something, but this movie showed me the emotional range Leslie has as an actor. I knew she had the physicality from Thrones but it was my viewing of Honeymoon which sold me on Leslie’s overall versatility. She’s need both to realistically embody Aloy, a challenge i think she is more than up to tackle. Plus, if things come together correctly and this thing gets a budget, it can legit compete with with the most ardent of franchises like Star Wars or Dune. If Leslie gets this role, she has a real opportunity to be a cultural icon like Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor and that’s just dope.

I really like the idea of PlayStation Production and i look forward to what they actually create. If that company handles their IPs with the same passion and reverence they have for the gaming side of the business, PSP will be in good hands. imagine the wealth of stories that could be told. The aforementioned Jak is at the top of my wish list but the potential of Kojima making an adaption of Death Stranding in the same, surreal, vein of Twin Peaks. Maybe a stab at a CG animated version of Battle Arena Toshinden or a Heavenly Sword historical epic akin to Netflix's Marco Polo or Thrones, itself. Maybe a few Spyro or Crash Bandicoot shorts to round everything out. The PlayStation IP library is as deep and rich as the MCU There’s a lot of opportunity for quality storytelling there, as long as you get the right creatives behind the right projects. The potential of this production company is really profound and i look forward to what the create. It anyone can break that game movie curse, it’s definitely PlayStation Productions. With all of these resources behind them, this thing has a real chance to be a legitimate rival to Disney going forward. If they don’t f*ck it up and let Sony dictate terms. I am terrified Sony is going to f*ck all of this up, man.

#Sony #PlayStation #PlayStation Productions #Horizon: Zero Dawn #The Last of Us #Sly Cooper #Ratchet and Clank #Twisted Metal #Uncharted

22 notes · View notes

st33d · 4 years ago

Text

All These Worlds Are Yours (Except Europa)

It’s been a while since my last CRPG report and I have played quite a lot of CRPGs in the meantime. I’m going to keep it brief. It’s by no means all the games I played over the past year or so, but it is all the games that are worth playing in some fashion or another.

Yet again I didn’t really bother to get decent screenshots so you’ll have to endure some tangentially related Shutterstock photos.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

It’s like Etrian Odyssey but made by horny 14 year olds. Monsters take the form of purple-black eyes that move only when you do. Colliding with them triggers a JRPG battle with your team. You must conquer around a dozen or so dungeons to defeat a mysterious evil whilst learning about your protagonist’s horny hubris.

I like how it automatically fills in the in-game map, only drawing tiles you have stepped in. Stairways also connect perfectly on most dungeons, leading to some detective work to solve them. The combat is passable. The story is PG13 with random suggestions of poop and sex without really showing any. It’s… a good game with a lot of simple mechanics that it layers up over time to make something quite complex. I really enjoyed solving the dungeons but it’s such a multilayered ball of weirdness that I hesitate recommending it.

Dragon’s Dogma

It’s like Skyrim but with less items, less map, and decent fights. Like, really decent fights. You can climb on the back of beasts and hack pieces off of them or shoot magic arrows that do a host of cool things. The story is pretty anime - I can’t get into why without some major spoilers. Safe to say that after the first (and honestly entertaining) chunk of the game you get an overlay of falling ash pinned to your screen and the monsters become hit point sponges. That’s around when I stopped playing because it felt like I’d reached “an” ending and the rest was about beating as many dead horses with whatever sticks I could upgrade enough to hit them with. Last time I fired it up I got in an hour long fight with an off-brand beholder that basically respawned all its limbs eight times because of its egregious hit points.

You’re joined by some enthusiastic AI companions called pawns who have no story and just kinda throw themselves at enemies whilst repeating the same phrases over and over. I’m not really sure if they’re a blessing or curse. The game overall is pretty jank with terrible traversal (don’t explore, the quests will send you to every corner of the map anyway - twice). Despite all my complaints it’s a lot of fun - at least until the 1st ending. It’s cheap and I recommend it.

Sky Rogue

It’s like a lot of aircraft dogfight games but a bit random. I’ve played this a bit on single player and it’s alright. However I have played many, many, missions in the 2 player mode with a coworker. It’s just very satisfying doing the whole Top Gun team thing taking on a bunch of enemy planes whilst working on upgrades.

Disco Elysium

It’s like Planescape Torment but without the tedious combat or problematic writer behind it. There’s a video of one of the devs explaining how the dialogue is laid out like Twitter in tabloid format for easy reading. This is revolutionary. I want every computer text game to use this format from now on.

I cannot stress how important it is to enter Disco Elysium unprepared. To have no grasp on just how far you will be allowed to explore, who you will meet, who you will travel with, or what you are expected to do. It is a game about amnesia and becoming someone new - if that is at all possible.

I have two pieces of advice however:

Don’t start with Psyche or Physique stats below 2, they’re both your health and the game will surprise you with damage to either in the most unexpected places.

Do every quest. Explore every nook and cranny. Not knowing is the very essence of the game. You’ll have lost that feeling after the ending.

I don’t need to tell you how good the game is. Just look at most reviews.

Everspace

It’s like Descent (that 1st person spacecraft game on the PSX) but in space and it’s a roguelike. Everspace has you mine, salvage, fight, trade, and quest - but you do it all from the comfort of a spaceship that has responsive controls and interesting weaponry. I had a lot of fun skulking round wrecks to salvage parts whilst avoiding patrols of hostiles until I had enough kit to take them on.

It has a substandard storyline but great meta-progression, asking you to grind cash from each run to unlock parts for a better ship on the next. I put in a great deal of hours into this game and I’m looking forward to what the studio does with the sequel.

Horizon Zero Dawn

It’s like Shadow of Mordor but good. My only major complaint was how constant use of the bow had the camera staying uncomfortably close to Aloy’s arse and burying itself in grass during frenetic combat. When the camera wasn’t trying to kill me the combat was astoundingly good. You fight lumbering robo-dinosaurs with special weak spots and various attacks. The quests are also good with a surprising amount of cutscenes and dialogue for a lot of completely optional content.

I was also amazed at how they managed to pull off an almost believable backstory for a world full of robot dinosaurs. Despite some frustrating combat encounters I had a good time exploring its large and very pretty world.

Pathfinder Kingmaker

It’s like Baldurs Gate but not as good. Only on my 3rd attempt at playing the game with the newly patched in turn based mechanics did it start to make sense. It uses Pathfinder’s rules which are deep and tactical - as tactical rules go they’re pretty good. However when those rules fly by at real time speed you don’t learn how opportunity attacks work (they’re more complex than modern D&D) or how to utilise charge and positioning.

The story is pretty forgettable and the encounter design is relentlessly dull. A lot of areas are just simply fight after fight after fight. In turn based mode the fights are pretty good but too many of them are identical. The ones that weren’t I found inscrutable and impossible to pass. If you like min-max fighting and little else then have at it - but I warn you that the UI is lagging behind most popular CRPGs. You can’t even check the world map whilst in a town.

Metal Gear Solid V

It’s like an RPG. Despite not having a main character with stats, in this open world game of hide and seek you kidnap soldiers who in turn become your stats. Through them you gain access to new abilities. Through them you are drip-fed the resources you steal, only becoming able to spend all that you’ve stolen by having enough accountants to do your taxes. It is a brilliant work of roleplaying economics and a thoroughly enjoyable open world game. One where I can completely ruin a mission yet chuckle at my attempts to save what’s left of my dignity.

It also fails to stick the landing. At around the 20th mission the game starts committing to its plot and the rot sets in. Bit by bit it becomes worse to play. There was trouble at Konami when the game was made and it feels like the end of the game was hit the hardest. This was the part that was tested the least and had the worst ideas thrown into it. Metal Gear Solid V is still worth it for the 1st half of the game.

Final Fantasy 8

It’s like the other Final Fantasy games but poorly paced and balanced. The junction system is incredibly interesting in that it tries to sidestep the whole issue of items by gluing your characters to guardian angels. It’s built in card game Triple Triad is simple and engaging. The story is kinda interesting with some time travel shenanigans going on...

But it’s pacing is dreadful with endlessly copypasted rooms. The magic draw system is miserable (and yes I know you can get GFs to convert items to magic but then it’s more tedious busy work to upscale all the magic into something work attaching). The world map is shockingly empty. And the characters are just yawn, yawn, yawn.

Pick it up on sale.

Torchlight 2

It’s like Diablo 2 but not quite as good. Still worth playing though. I got it on the Switch and found that playing it with a gamepad was a pleasant experience.

It has a few balance problems with the Engineer class being ridiculously overpowered compared to any of the others (and way more fun). And there’s some annoying bugs that prompted a few reloads. Still pretty entertaining however.

Pokemon Shield

It’s like every other Pokemon game (surprise surprise) but easier. As much as I like how they’ve removed a lot of busywork from this entry, it makes it feel like the only challenge in the previous titles was the busywork. When really it was the busywork that held you back from just kerb-stomping everything in your path.

It’s not until the final DLC that you’re given some pokemon that are needlessly tedious to catch and some group battles using randomly selected pokemon that test your knowledge of the game’s systems. The only real challenge in the game is in the online multiplayer against humans where your pokemon level is normalised and encyclopedic knowledge of the title’s history is required.

My internet is terrible so the online gameplay is dead to me. It’s a very fun game, but also a very disappointing one.

Burnout Paradise

It’s like a sandbox game for cars. Except that you’re not really driving a car, it’s more like you’re driving a bobsleigh with a rocket attached to it. Unlike most driving games you aren’t given terrain that slows you down. Even if you hit a wall you’ll skate off it so long as you collide sideways. The game just wants you to drive like an arsehole and go faster and faster - to the tune of Epic by Faith No More (literally).

I mean yeah, it’s not an RPG by any stretch but it’s one of the best sandbox games I’ve played. Even when you’re not doing a “mission” you can just drive around the city finding back alleys and ramps to fly off of. It’s just a massive playground with very little negative feedback.

Cyberpunk 2077

It’s like a bunch of different games you’ve played before but not quite as good. The story is the best bit. I really liked the characters I got to hang out with. I guess I would have enjoyed the gun fights if I hadn’t been playing Doom 1 before I played it. And I would have enjoyed the stealth if I hadn’t already played Metal Gear Solid V with its superior A.I. It has cool Obra Dinn style brain movies to explore for detective work but I enjoyed the spectacle of them more than the execution (though I did enjoy them more than Obra Dinn which I found tedious to navigate or understand).

I saw one review say it was the most backwards view of the future. Not imagining what could be but endlessly paying homage to cyberpunk stories of the past.

I see other reviews say play it when it’s fixed. When the myriad of bugs (and I experienced enough to impact gameplay) are solved.

I say play the sequel. It’s worth experiencing but there’s too much going on that’s playing catch up to other titles.

Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate

It’s like Rogue. I first played Shiren 2 on the Nintendo DS and was amazed by its deep systems and story meta progression - various tales progressing in the game only after each death and subsequent replay.

This entry is technically Shiren 5. Holy shit the content in this thing. There are 15 optional dungeons with different rules. Over a hundred block pushing puzzles using various mechanics of the game that you can just walk up and play in the 2nd village you enter. A minesweeper minigame. Loads of tutorial levels. All of these give you rewards which you can take on your main adventure which is a wholly different set of dungeons. I’ve unlocked several companions to adventure with and the game is hinting there are even more later on. It is obscene the amount of value there is packed into this title. And it’s fun. A little unfair at times, but as with all roguelikes the later depths require knowledge and a lot of caution. Strong recommendation for roguelikers.

Dicey Dungeons

It’s like Dream Quest but with dice. I played the prototype of this at the 7DRL after party. Terry was quite bashful about his creation and didn’t want to submit it. I honestly didn’t see why he shouldn’t as many of us had made far worse in the past.

I put off playing this until it finally landed on the Switch as complete as any roguelike can hope to be. It’s quite different to Dream Quest in that it requires a bit of math to do well in. If you’re not prepared to do basic sums then it’s hard to make progress. Also unlike Dream Quest it’s very balanced. There’s definitely some cheesy tactics you can pull off to get cheap victories but not without some thought and planning.

In a sea of deck building roguelikes, Dicey Dungeons is quite simply refreshing. There’s a lot of good ideas in here you won’t see elsewhere - give it a go.

0 notes

smokeybrand · 4 years ago

Text

Here Comes A New Challenger

0 notes

operationrainfall · 8 years ago

Text

Title Horizon: Zero Dawn Developer Guerrilla Games Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment Release Date February 28, 2017 Genre Action RPG Platform PlayStation 4 Age Rating ESRB T for Teen Official Website

The comparisons between Horizon: Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild were inevitable. In fact, during E3 last year when the first major trailers for both games were released, I came to the opinion that Horizon: Zero Dawn seemed to be the adult Zelda game that I was looking forward to more than the Switch canon release. Now it has turned out that both games were released within a week of each other, so in many ways they will always be tied together. Zelda has the additional pressure of trying to be a system seller, and Horizon has the pressure of trying to start off a brand new franchise that Sony and Guerrilla hope to be the new face of their system for several years to come. Now I have played Horizon: Zero Dawn to completion, and the first question I should answer (since that article was so long ago) is whether the game did indeed turn out to be a take on the Zelda formula. That way we know if we are comparing apples to apples or whether it is some other flavorful fruit.

The princess of this castle can save her own kingdom.

It has turned out that Horizon is even more similar to Zelda than I knew from the early trailers. It’s true that I went on a major media blackout after those first couple trailers, but even then it’s still a little surprising how much they did with that established formula. There are indeed dungeons in the game, particularly the Cauldrons, but also a few other similar buildings and outposts, and they include a large boss fight in them (usually at the end). The focus on bow and spear combat also gives a fairly common feel between the two series, as well as the option to ride mounts (only mechanical this time). But the largest Zelda feel is in figuring out how to use all your different weapons and items to take out giant creatures in a strategic method. In that area I would say that they take that Zelda classical style and move it forward several steps. Not only does it end up being a lot of stressful fun figuring out how you are going to take out these creatures, but you have many creatures just wandering around in the world that would have been dungeon bosses in the old Zelda games. So in fact you are getting to actually play with your weapons and items and the game mechanics much more than you would in the other series. But, make no mistake, that feeling is still there in Horizon: Zero Dawn and it’s super satisfying. Because you can take those giant monsters on in several locations and in several situations, you end up learning so much more about how those monsters operate, how they are weak and different situational strategies to use.

Aloy is an outcast among her people for reasons that are no fault of her own.

Aloy was raised as a child by an older gentleman named Ros, who was an outcast of their primitive tribe, called the Nora. The tribe is a very matriarchal society, governed by a council called the Matriarchs, and it becomes apparent very early on that she is an outcast due to her mother or the situation in which she was found. It remains an early open question (one that you will not find out the answer to until well into the game) whether Aloy is even a Nora at all, or whether she was just found among them. Either way, without a suitable mother she is considered an outcast and some of the Matriarchs strongly disapprove of anything to do with her, calling her a curse. This attitude permeates among the lower class Nora as well, as it would, and therefore she is treated with open disdain any time she gets near one of the village folk. Forever alone, with only her outcast caretaker to associate with, she trains to become a great warrior so that she can earn the right to join the tribe and to learn the secret of her origin.

The Old World can provide boons and it can provide objects of terror.

When she is young she accidentally falls into the ruins of the Old World, and in the efforts to find a way out she discovers an electronic interface item called a Focus. You can basically consider the Focus to be a smart device that overlays its UI over your vision and interfaces with your own brain waves to translate what you are seeing into an interface for you to make use of. In other words, it can translate text or it can label hostile or friendly creatures and it can store memories of what you see and hear. Thankfully it is very small and fits into one of her ears, barely sticking out. The Nora are deeply offended by any relics of the Old World and would not take kindly to seeing her using it. In practice the Focus often works like the Witcher Sense in The Witcher 3, such as tracking and finding things of interest. Only in many ways they added some very useful mechanics to this because the Machines in this game are so complex, with different regions of their body that are susceptible to different types of damage being displayed. This, added to the physical training with a spear, the bow, sneaking, and climbing that she is taught, makes her a very formidable warrior.

She earns their respect, but it is no longer a place that she can stay.

The training Aloy has gone through earns her the respect of her tribe, but the events which occur during her Proving show that she does not really belong there and that a much larger destiny awaits her. It becomes apparent fairly early on (even if you ignore how little of the map you have explored by that point), that the Nora live in a very closed off world and there is much that she needs to see in order to find out her origins and about the people who seek to destroy her personally. It is really difficult to talk about some of this in a review because there are so many wonderful twists to the story, and I would be horrified to spoil that for anyone else. The story in this game is definitively a major strong point, it is both personal and epic in scope. There is a very fine line between the struggles of a girl trying to find out who her parents were, and the needs to save a world that doesn’t know how much danger it’s in. At times several NPC characters will get frustrated with her over how narrow her view is, but to me it felt very accurate to how anyone would react in that situation. In fact, the tragedies of her circumstance are handled quite well by her, in my opinion, and the worst reactions that you are going to get from her are a bit of self pity at times and a whole lot of snark (which I found quite endearing).

Aloy is such a badass character, a wonderful action heroine in her own right.

That range of emotions and reactions with Aloy turned out to be a very strong plus in the game. She was never one note or entirely predictable, and she was quite powerful but also vulnerable. In short, I’m very happy that my primary console of choice has her as their mascot for the foreseeable future, now that Nathan Drake has retired. The game ends on a very satisfying note, but there is no doubt at all that this is planned to be a series and that Aloy is intended to be the continuing protagonist of it. And while I’m not one to promote diversity only for the sake of diversity when it forces an alteration on a creator’s vision, I’m also one to celebrate when the creators themselves come up with something new and fantastic that does include a new demographic. I can tell you that if I had a daughter, I would be sitting down in front of a TV to play it with her for hours on end because she is such a positive female character in so many ways. My one issue with many other “strong female characters” such as Commander Shepard (as much as I loved Jennifer Hale’s performance), is that they often make them gender neutral so that they only look female. But with Aloy she is definitely a woman, but still has a full range of human emotions. The only thing you really don’t see much from her is romantic love (which is a fascinating decision, in and of itself), but when you consider all the other things that are going on with her, that is quite understandable. Although I strongly suspect that you’ll see the potential for it in the sequel, they already have the dialogue option system in this game, so it would not be out of the realm of possibility that she will have optional romantic interests as well.

More Horizon on Page 2 ->

The Machines start out small and easy to kill with a single Silent Strike.

But Aloy and the human tribes are only one half of this world, the other half are the sentient machines which populate the world. Many of these machines have very obvious agricultural purposes, but some of them seem to be militaristic and aggressive in design. You will learn over time that the machines have become increasingly aggressive against humans in the past two decades, and that several new designs for them have appeared. That tells you two things; the first is that new machines are still being created all the time, and the second is that something in the world is changing. You also discover quickly that there are certain humans that can corrupt machines to make them work for them, and they can also use those machines to corrupt other ones around them. Aloy finds a way to steal that technology for herself and make better use of it. Afterwards it becomes an important mechanic in the game that she is able to learn how to control machines to make them either rideable or make them temporary allies to fight on her side. She can only turn a machine over to her side if she takes them by surprise and only if it’s a Machine type that she has learned its construction (she learns new ones by reaching the end of a Cauldron and downloading the Machine Schematics). That means that even the largest enemies in the game (Earthbiters, Stormwinds, and Thunderjaws) can be potentially controlled by Aloy and used for her own purposes. The one weakness of this game mechanic is that she can’t command them to go anywhere, they are only going to go after an enemy that enters their aggro circle. However, the larger the Machine, the larger aggro circle they have (the Thunderjaw aggro circle is simply massive).

Each Cauldron was different and they were all surprisingly fun.

As a result of the ability to control the Machines, Cauldron diving becomes an important task that you will want to do fairly early on. But they are not a part of the main story, they are only a side-quest, so the game can be completed without ever doing them. And that is one of the major characteristics about this game is that the main story is very fascinating and surprisingly long, but there is a lot of side stuff that is optional but go a long way towards making the experience a much more satisfying one. You could potentially never download the data out of a Tallneck machine, the map does fill in simply by you entering that area and exploring around it. But each Tallneck has its own area of influence and the zone has a different design that will allow you to get high enough to jump onto the roving giant in order to download all the map data for that region. If I just did a critical path run with this game, I’m sure that I could have finished it in slightly under 20 hours. Much like a Zelda game, the levels really only increase your health and they give you 1 Skill Point to use. But you can also gain Skill Points from a lot of different quests, for example; most of the major story quests, a lot of optional quests, and areas that are either very difficult (Cauldrons) or have a large story importance.

In addition to trading with Special Merchants, the exploration items fill in the world story.

There are plenty of collectables to find in the game, and they can all be traded into Special Merchants for nice rewards, but more importantly they fill in details about the world such as the location where all these events happen (an area of the world that I’m intimately familiar with). That made it much more satisfying to search for everything than it would be if there was only a Trophy reward for finding all of them. And even though there were many objects to find on the map, it never felt overwhelming or just busy work. And there were always enough hints about where they were located (obviously Viewpoints will be high up in the region shown on the map, etc) that it never was frustrating for me to search them out. One feature of the part of the world where this story takes place is that the land there is extremely diverse, so even though most of the preview footage showed her in a very cold and and mountainous region, there is a lot of different scenery to look forward to. In addition you will discover that while the Nora have gone back to a tribe that bears a lot of similarity to the Native Americans and the Vikings, other peoples have not gone in a similar direction. In fact, the greater population of this area of the world seems to combine more aspects of the Mayan tribes and the Romans.

The game has the best overworld map that I’ve ever seen, and should be the new standard.

Beyond those cultural influences, it’s very interesting how diverse the cast of characters is. All the characters run the gamut from different size and shapes to different races and cultures and also a couple cases of sexual preference. In fact, it turned out to be a major spoiler that I figured out fairly early on something about the diversity that didn’t add up. And that is one of the most fantastic aspects of this game is that the story and the science behind the story do work together. So if something is not making sense, it’s probably for a good reason. Also taking place in this region of the world turned out not to just be for the diversity in its weather and topography. There are certain businesses, facilities, and government institutions that make a whole lot of sense for them to take place in the Old World. As a scientist it made me extremely happy that all those details were played out so well and so much thought went into everything. The fact that this game is the first one in a series and that the developer is the makers of the Killzone franchise (which I kind of liked, but didn’t love) deeply impresses me.

There was a lot of good dialogue but there were a few technical hitches.

As you can tell from all the screenshots so far (and you’ve probably heard online), this is one of the most beautiful games ever made. I played on a normal PlayStation 4 in 1080p and it was still the most beautiful game that I’ve personally ever seen. But even then it made me start to crave a PlayStation 4 Pro and a 4k Television just so I could see it in all its beauty. There was only one aspect of the game that didn’t look it’s best, and that was the face to face dialogue. It’s not a huge thing, but there were a few funky hitches with the character models when they were talking to each other. But the character models in this game are so beautiful and expressive that I have no doubts that being at the bleeding edge of technology is what tripped them up here and I have no doubts that it will be fixed for the sequel. This new game engine is truly amazing, and having both Guerrilla and Kojima using this engine to move gaming forward is deeply exciting. But I do want to stress that the dialogue itself was very stellar and the voice acting was all top notch, it was only a technical glitch that I got used to over time in the game.

For as amazing as the story was, just being out there hunting machines could keep me happy too.

That is literally the only thing bad I can say about this game. I suspect that this game will turn out to be a classic thought about for years to come. I earned the Platinum Trophy in 69 hours of playtime, and still can’t wait to get back to play it again. I’m going to keep my 100% clear and just go back and hunt some more and play in the world, and then I would also like to go through the story again to re-experience one of the greatest gaming stories that I’ve played in years. So they have combined some of the most fun and addictive gameplay with one of the best stories and put it in the most beautiful gaming engine I’ve ever seen. I was excited going into this game and I had high expectations, but they were all met and exceeded. I cannot recommend this title enough, even for it’s normal MSRP of $59.99. From the reviews I’ve read on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild so far, it looks like that game is also going to be a classic, and I’m really happy about that as a fan of that franchise over the decades. But with Horizon: Zero Dawn I have not had a single moment of regret that I’ve chosen to wait and see on the Nintendo Switch to find out if they are going to have longer term support than they have for their previous couple home consoles, for now my Zelda itch has been more than adequately scratched. I know already that Sony is going to be killing it during that time, and with Guerrilla Games providing the new face of their console I cannot be happier with where my PlayStation 4 is going and the entertainment I’m getting out of it. Horizon: Zero Dawn might be the prime example of what this generation of gaming can aspire to be.

[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”5.0″]

Review Copy Purchased By Author

#gallery-0-3 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-3 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-3 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-3 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

REVIEW: Horizon: Zero Dawn Title Horizon: Zero Dawn

#Action RPG #Guerrilla Games #Horizon Zero Dawn #PlayStation 4 #Sony #sony interactive entertainment

2 notes · View notes