Horizon Zero Dawn is a game for the PlayStation 4 that was released this past February. It is an immersive, open world, action, role-playing game. The setting takes place in the distant future which is "a thousand years from now." This is a time where machines have taken over the world and humanity is reduced back to a primitive hunter-gather type of culture. You follow the life of a outcast warrior Aloy who, over time, begins to discover new things about the machines and who ends up leaving her own village over the course of the game. The main goal is to find out about her origins and why she was cast out from her tribe.
The game was developed by Guerilla Games, who also makes the Killzone franchise. Initial concept started back in 2011 where Guerilla started to pitch new concepts for new video games and this was considered to be the 'most riskiest' concepts that they had. Initially when they were writing the story, they had almost 30 different story-lines and over 3 playable characters where you can choose but they have definitely narrowed their scope to having one playable character, Aloy. The game blends the combat of hack and slash games with the more relaxed path of choosing a quest, leveling up a skill tree, and completing side missions along the way.
Upon the first scenes of the game, a story is introduced establishing a backstory that a young girl is born and named Aloy from her guardian, Rost, a partner-less man and fellow outcast. Over the course of the game, Aloy finds a mysterious headpiece while spelunking in a cave that allows her to identify machines and immediately know their vital points.
There are a wide arrange of weapons you can take with you to tackle corrupted machines from a standard bow and arrow, to a tripcaster, a machine that sets up traps, to a spear that you can use as your main melee weapon. You get the best of both worlds of using melee or ranged attacks choosing to combo melee attacks with ranged while you can level up skills to make your melee attacks knock off critical components to a machine, causing them lots of damage, to slowing down time when you aim a bow.
Some things that i did not like about the game was the writing and speech mechanics of the characters. Some parts of the game'e engine mismatched the sounds and voices from the pattern of their lips. Also the choice of words and diction in the universe is quite mysterious. One character who is a outcast won't speak when directly spoken to and will only make references to "All Mother", a deity in the universe. Other times, there are ramblings that are spoken by a drunken warrior. These are my only complaints.
Overall, Horizon Zero Dawn is an amazing game and is the fourth best-selling PlayStation Game of all time according to Polygon. Overall reviews are quite general with 9.3/10 for IGN and 9/10 rating for Gamespot. Purchasing and playing this game is highly recommended
