2.5/5 ★ – oneandonlyjosh's review of Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition.

An inoffensive, tried and tested, risk adversed glorified Ubisoft open world paraded as a Sony exclusive Everything done in this game has been done better in others I was intrigued by the premise right away, I mean you literally fight huge robot dinosaurs with primitive weapons. That just sounds badass. Unfortunately, the dinosaur combat is, well, serviceable at best. Your roll, the only means of reliably avoiding attacks, has no invincibility frames whatsoever. It’s a nitpick, but when a robot pounces at you its hit box is wealthily times bigger than yours. So if you’re caught off guard you have no means of turning the tides because you just get destroyed in mere seconds. Combat in general felt super clunky and unsatisfying. There is no drop off for arrows, so if the enemy is at a crazy far distance, you can just kind of aim directly at them. It caught me off guard so many times because like how could you not have drop off for arrows in a modern videogame?? The game at times felt either too easy or too difficult. Sometimes it was a breeze to just kind of shoot everything in the face, but then the very next mission you do has you fighting an overpowered robot that deals half your hp. Speaking of, I played this game on the standard difficulty. Robots absolutely decimated my health at any point they got. They do so much damage especially for such a milquetoast difficulty setting. There are also some QOL things I don’t know why they didn’t do, like picking up items. Aloy has to come to a complete halt and do an animation for you to get one plant. It wastes so much time and im so confused what they were thinking when they made that decision. The gameplay loop includes you having to find plants to fill your medicine meter thing, god forbid on your way to a mission you somehow don’t find any. It breaks the flow and pacing of the game if after every important mission you’re having to walk around and pluck plants. Story is alright, gameplay is meh, graphics are nice but it’s realism again, voice acting’s SUPER ok, mission structure is Ubisoft if they thought people cared about their story and wanted to cram even more exposition. The sound design is actually quite nice though, sometimes when looting a robot this like low bass would play that sounds like an 808 soundboard. It sounded weirdly cool and I like that a lot. If you’ve never played a videogame in your life, I strongly recommend this one. If you have, there are better games for much less cheaper.