4/5 ★ – Exynos's review of Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition.

If I had to sum up Horizon Zero Dawn quickly I would say it's a good game with spectacular lore. Now for the longer review. The first of the franchise and a huge change of pace for Guerilla Games is something I didn't expect. Initially, I had a hard time really getting into this game. It wasn't bad or boring. It just didn't click for me. However the more I unlocked different weapons and more complex fighting, the more I saw the interesting machines, the more I learned the lore of the world, really just the more I played the game, the more I fell in love with it. In my opinion, it's best described as a post-post-apocalyptic RPG-Light game. Its skill tree is fairly basic with very little branching and no real hard choices. It did give me the feeling of fairly consistent progression though and felt like a natural way to evolve some aspects of my gameplay which I appreciated. It's got a small but decent amount of weapons and armor with some small amounts of upgradability but nothing too crazy. This was done well though. I didn't feel I needed to spend significant amounts of time sorting through what armor or weapons I'm throwing out. I didn't spend time reading everything in my skill tree first to plot things out. It was balanced well to give me a fair amount of flexibility without taking up too much of my time. It even has dialogue choices though they don't have big impacts on the game. This game does a lot well but nails a couple of things. The machine enemies have a decent variety and lead to some extremely fun fights. I tend to find most boss fights in games tedious and annoying but this game's more difficult fights all felt like a more natural extension of the game's combat and story. The lore. Wow, the lore. This is absolutely a top-three backstory for a post-apocalyptic world and it isn't three or two. I've never been so sucked into audio and text logs in a game. Usually, I just listen to them here and there. With Horizon Zero Dawn I listened to all of them and read most of them. I don't want to say more for those who are considering playing and have been lucky enough to have not been spoiled. The game has plenty to be improved upon. Traversal is OK but not great, the pacing feels too slow at first, side quests and side activities seem pretty similar in many cases (though they do change up the formula on some of the repetitive things leading to a few fantastic stand out versions), and character animations feel too stiff and sometimes a tad emotionless. Despite all of that the positives easily outweigh the negatives so much that I would easily consider this game worth anyone's time and highly recommend anyone who is interested give this game a try. I can't wait to explore the Forbidden West.