With the Lego game complete I had a renewed interest in playing the game it was based on. First I had a struggle trying to actually obtain it, as it wasn’t on the Playstation Store because it turns out I already had it on the PS4 when Sony gave it away a while back. So I thought I’d pay for the £10 PS5 upgrade for it but then it kept giving an error when I tried to buy it. Eventually I gave up and decided to just play the PS4 version but when I tried to load it it updated and became the PS5 version anyway. I’m sure my PS5 is haunted.
Anyway, it took a few hours to get into it because I was trying to play it like the game so many people said it was a clone of – Breath of the Wild. It isn’t. Well, superficially it is, I suppose, but actually what Zero Dawn is really like, is Assassin’s Creed. Only with big metal dinosaurs. You got all the sneaking about and using distractions and exploring weird underground bunkers with relics of an older but more technologically advanced civilisation, and you’ve got the creeping up behind people and stabbing them in the neck stuff. It’s Assassin’s Creed in Far Cry Blood Dragon World. And that’s fine.
With the majority of the plot spoiled because of Lego, albeit that was a simplified version, I sort of already knew where the reveals were going. Luckily, the path to them was fun and there were still surprises, plus it’s all just a bit more adult.
Exploring the world was enjoyable, and once I’d got used to the combat and slightly complicated weapon system, I was well into setting traps for the big robot animals and then picking off their armour before blowing up their faces. Or, even better, you get the ability to control them later in the game so you can make them fight each other and just stand nearby and watch. The Borgia Towers – sorry, bandit camps – where you have to take down loads of humans ideally without them seeing you was peak Assassin’s Creed and perhaps my favourite bit of the game. I also like the JJ Abrams blue lens flare effect you get when enemies are nearby.
My only real gripes with Horizon are the inventory management (I never had enough space for everything, so kept having to dump or sell things) and some of the world traversal (you can’t climb except in specific places), but they didn’t affect me too much. Except when I was trying to jump up a mountain because there didn’t seem to be any other way up and fell through it and died.
