A Beautiful Dystopia: Horizon Zero Dawn.

Horizon Zero Dawn might be one of the most futuristic, and visually stunning game among all the "Triple-A" releases in the last decade. Though it's not just futuristic, it's prehistoric, too, at the same time. Prehistoric because mankind now lives like the Cro-Magnons in caves and makeshift tents created from bamboo shoots. And the land is crawling with mech dinosaurs and animals. The humans who are left now lives as small tribes, and this game's story mainly revolves around a specific one named The Nora Tribe.

While playing Farcry primal, something kept repetitively coming to my mind and bothering me. What would it feel like to play a game that is both futuristic and contains similar elements of tribal warfare that was present in primal at the same time? So I googled it "Prehistoric sci-fi tribal games"(Don't dare mock me. Please? !! Cat eyes!! ). Horizon Zero Dawn popped in the results. Like an idiot, I just sat on my chair, thinking about what is happening to my mind. I saw the E3 demo event on Youtube that was 11 mins long "2 years ago," and I forgot that this game ever existed. And so after I was done with primal, I bought this, Horizon Zero Dawn. And it was worth it.

_Credits

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Gameplay:

Horizon Zero Dawn is an Open world TPS Action Adventure RPG with survival elements like Crafting. Actual, if you play this game long enough, you'll start to find so many similarities that have been pulled out from other games. You can trap animals in a way similar to The Witcher. It has open world TPS elements like Farcry, and The RPG dialogue delivery is somewhat like the fallout.

All those elements culminated cumulatively in one game blends together quite nicely and what ties in everything is the completely revamped and the new generation of the open-world map.

Imagine for a second that all those elements you can play in any open-world game, this one has all.

The in-game map is crawling with very unique mechanical monsters, of which you have to defeat most of them throughout the campaign. When killed, these creatures drop materials needed for Crafting, weapon modification, etc.

Aloy wields very unique stuff that can cure the creatures that got corrupted due to the derangement. She has to sneak around at the back of the monster and shove it as hard as possible and wait (No pun intended XDXD). After curing them, most are ridable.

The game has a skill tree that can be upgraded as the game progresses. It includes three categories which allow different skill sets—Prowler, brave, and forager. As the name suggests, these are basically creative nouns for stealth, combat, and health.

Including the newest DLC, there is quite a diverse environment present the which looks impressive if your dynamic range is increased to the max. You have to traverse through forests, verdant jungle, mountains, desert snow, and whatnot. Its quite a big map but fast travels save time. Unlike red dead redemption 2, going places is not as enjoyable in this one.

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Setting:

I'm not sure about when this game takes place, but as the game developers have stated, this game takes place in a post and more "Post-apocalyptic world." At a time when the earth is not recognizable as the one, we live in. The world is filled with both animals of flesh and metal alike. And in this world, a child comes to life whose name is Alloy. But due to not having biological parents, the tribe that finds her casts her and her adoptive father out. In a nearby, quiet valley, they both lived for the next decade or so when Rost, the father, trains her to hunt, climb, and craft. One day, while hunting, she falls in a cave where she finds a small device called the focus. Focus allows her to see things, hints of the old world that was all about technology.

As she slowly grows up, she becomes far more fierce and light on her feet. And as she turns eighteen, despite Rost discouraging her, she participates in it which will make her a Nora brave if she wins. Nora braves are warriors with the highest respect available, and if she qualifies, shell no longer is an outcast. But, as the events proceed, a group of nihilists named the cultists attacks them. Just before the cultist leader is going to kill Alloy, Rost gives his life and saves hers. Then she losses consciousness, and after waking up, a matriarch of the Nora Tribe tells her what had happened. She also Tells Alloy about some of those machine animals getting corrupted and increasingly violent. But somehow, the cultists have taken control of over those machines. SO now, it's her destiny to save the world again.

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Screenshots

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I was entirely lost in its vast outlandish open world and in its diverse plethora of environments while playing. But a few things kept bothering me here and there. After a while, the game gets quite repetitive. The usual side quests, essential if you want to upgrade things, loses its attractive initial perks.

All the main quests hint at something grand. Like what had happened to the world and Alloy has to find why to stop the machines from getting more corrupted. If the side quests were downsized, the main story would've gotten more attention instead of being a drag.

For example, the main story is concise, exciting, and it goes something like this.

Very long ago, the technologically advanced human society created peacekeeping robots. These robots could multiply by themselves and could sustain from eating biomass. And their owner is a company named faro who lost control. So the machines multiplied like crazy and devoured all the biomass around the world-devouring everything destroying the world. As this went on, Dr Sobeck, created a failsafe AI called GAIA that will reboot the earth by terraforming with Zero Dawn. Zero Dawn is a database that has samples of every living thing. So GAIA slowly destroys all the corrupted robots long after the old world dies and creates her own machines. These new ones terraform the earth, and as it becomes habitable, GAIA creates humans and other animals by cloning. But there's another program named HADES. This program is supposed to destroy the world if zero Dawn fails. To try again. But somehow It got activated and seizes control. So GAIA clones Dr Sobeck as ALLOY as a last resort and self destructs. So that Alloy could manually override the system, destroy HADES, and restore GAIA.

That's it—the whole game in a single paragraph. I know, I know. To make it more interactive, the story has been dragged a little bit, But along with all the great visuals, fluid control, and dynamics, if the story was not draggy, this could have been the best open-world game ever. So there's that.

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_{All the photos are either credited or belongs to SONY; Playstation}