3/5 ★ – QuantumLeapFrog's review of Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition.

It took a little while for this game to click with me. The world it initially presents is intriguing and the mysteries offered at the beginning kept me interested to keep the story going but I was struggling with the combat system. I think part of the issue is that a section of the combat system, namely the melee combat, is quite clunky and tagged on compared to the rest of it. So when I would try to go into combat encounters spear first, it would end badly quickly. One I got used to using the weapon wheel and all the ranged weapons is when the game opened up a bit more. I started really enjoying using my improved bow to pick off all the detachable parts from the giant robot-beasts, and that’s where the game really shined for me. All the parts where you fight human enemies, on the other hand, felt unnecessary and distracting. Almost like it wasn’t meant to be there and was thought about later in development. I think the game would have largely benefited from focusing solely on large boss fights and ignoring stuff like the stealth sections and bandit camps. Though of course, that’s largely dependent on the type of game you’re looking for, I’m sure others enjoy the variety of traps available for example, even though I hardly ever used one. I also didn’t care much for the “open-worldedness” of the game. While I enjoyed the main story missions I personally didn’t get much out of traversing the world, overriding mounts, climbing tall necks or having to run away from all the enemies I would alert when going from point A to point B. I do appreciate, at least, the the leveling system is largely more of a suggestion than a necessity. You can easily tackle story missions several levels above your current one once you get the hang of the gameplay, which is a lot better than how the new Assasins Creed games handle leveling, for example. The world looks beautiful, although maybe more work could have been done with some animations, especially when talking with other characters. Thankfully they let you speed dialogue up, which felt necessary quite often as a lot of the characters and dialogue was fairly dull. Overall it’s a good time, but I was happy it ended when it did.