Damn solid game that. Was good in ways I wasn't expecting it to be.
(Wild spoilers roam beyond. You've been warned.)
(Also, probably going to be a wall of text, for which I apologize. I mostly write these for my own sake, just to get my thoughts in order.)
Never would have thought the Killzone developers would have this in them. Actually makes me a bit sad that they've been stuck churning out First Person Gears of War with Gas Masks for a decade. Then again, that's probably what gave them the experience to make HZD, and this way it gets to leverage current-gen tech.
Graphically fucking gorgeous. I don't want to lightly throw around phrases like, "Most visually impressive game I've ever seen", but yeah, it's way up there. This is a game where even toward the end after many, many hours of playing I would still frequently pause to admire the scenery. Not just big set pieces either, just walking through a random bit of forest in the rain looks damn amazing. I was actually tempted to use the 'photo mode' feature. I intend to go back post-ending just to wander around a look at stuff. That's almost unprecedented for me. I often see concept art for a game and find myself wishing that the final game had looked even half as good. HZD is one of the few where the final result measured up to the concept art, which is about as high praise as I can give.
Machine hunting was a hoot. It was good fun setting traps and putting down even the tougher enemies in a few well placed shots by exploiting weak points. Had some crazy fights where, for example, I got engaged by a Stormbird, then the noise of the ensuing fight attracted a bunch of Longlegs, and then while trying to fend them off I stumbled into some Snapmaws and a Trampler. Turned into a mad roiling clusterfuck as I tried to dodge incoming charges and projectiles from multiple angles while juggling damage types and scrambling to find a moment to get off precise shots at weak points. The way that the battlefield would be strewn with debris and dead machines afterward was really satisfying.
Story was better than I was expecting. I went in thinking it would be completely standard video game pablum. And, to be fair, it often was. A lot of the story elements dealing with the factions and villains and sidequests were decidedly unimpressive. However, I found the central mystery more than compelling enough to keep me looking, much of the material dealing with the fall of the previous civilization and how they dealt with it was pretty great and I enjoyed Aloy's personal journey. The epilogue came dangerously close to making me tear up. (Elisabet Sobek found her way home after all... just in time to submit to the inevitable and die amid the ruins, knowing she'd done all she could. I mean, God damn. *sniff*)
Speaking of Aloy, I liked her more than I was expecting to. Once again, I was expecting Standard Heroic Hero Doing Heroic Hero Things and, once again, to be fair, she often was. However they give her enough personality and emotional range to make her relatable and enough snark to lend her a sense of humour without going full Nathan Drake.
So yeah, fantastic game in my opinion. Solid 7/10 stuff. (Or 9/10 if we're using the stupid video game 7-to-10 scale.)
Buuuut that isn't going to stop me nitpicking the shit out of it.
Firstly, I'm not quite convinced that the game's open world improved it. Granted, it was better than the vast, vaaaast majority of open worlds. It was big enough to feel epic but small enough to not feel empty. Collectibles were restrained in number and some of them were linked to quality narrative content that actually made me want to find them. Plus the aforementioned gorgeous graphics really take the sting out of travelling around. And yet, despite all that, I still found open world fatigue setting in towards the end.
Adding to that, I wasn't a fan of the MMO-esque enemy placement. Machines just kind of mill about doing very little waiting for you to kill them, or not. It makes sense for some of them, but it makes the world feel less alive. Even if they just wandered around it would be better. Hiding while a pack of Ravagers walk past would be a lot cooler than circling around them as they walk back and forth in their assigned 50m radius.
Secondly, the combat went downhill in a hurry when fighting human enemies. Stealthing them to death was kinda fun, but open combat was pretty crappy and felt like a complete afterthought compared to the machine fights. Whenever it came to that I would just beeline for the nearest heavy weapon so I could mow everyone down and get it over with.
Thirdly, fuck Glinthawks. No fun to fight at all. The game's camera was clearly not designed with aerial enemies in mind. Terrain and foilage would often obscure the camera whenever I tried aiming upwards. Combine that with the Glinthawk's eratic movement and you have a recipe for frustration. Really shouldn't have made it through playtesting.
The dialogue suffered from a dose of Bioware face. Although, funnily enough, playing HZD alongside ME:A made me appreciate how much worse it could have been.
A lot of the scenes felt a bit sparse and unpopulated. It was as if they blew their entire crowd budget on the Nora festival at the start. Later major moments felt like there really should have been more people around. Notably during the final defense which seemed to consist of a couple dozen people. Shouldn't I have been seeing entire battalions of soldiers running around, considering what was going on?
Weapon-swapping was a bit annoying. Why can't one bow fire all arrow varieties? Do I really need three different arrows that all just do basic damage? Do the ropecaster and tearblaster really need to take an entire quarter of the wheel each? Does the blast sling need to exist, couldn't the regular sling just fire a bomb? Do harvest arrows really need to exist? Why do traps and proximity bombs exist when tripwires are better in every way? In short, I felt like they could have streamlined the weapons and fit everything onto the one wheel.
Lastly, I don't think Rost should have died, and not just because he was a cool guy and I liked him. The whole mentor-dies-to-protect-and-motivate-hero thing is awfully cliche. Plus it would have been even more poignant if he'd done as he intended and wandered off in a second self-imposed exile to prevent Aloy from breaking taboo for his sake.
Still, very good game.
(Wild spoilers roam beyond. You've been warned.)
(Also, probably going to be a wall of text, for which I apologize. I mostly write these for my own sake, just to get my thoughts in order.)
Never would have thought the Killzone developers would have this in them. Actually makes me a bit sad that they've been stuck churning out First Person Gears of War with Gas Masks for a decade. Then again, that's probably what gave them the experience to make HZD, and this way it gets to leverage current-gen tech.
Graphically fucking gorgeous. I don't want to lightly throw around phrases like, "Most visually impressive game I've ever seen", but yeah, it's way up there. This is a game where even toward the end after many, many hours of playing I would still frequently pause to admire the scenery. Not just big set pieces either, just walking through a random bit of forest in the rain looks damn amazing. I was actually tempted to use the 'photo mode' feature. I intend to go back post-ending just to wander around a look at stuff. That's almost unprecedented for me. I often see concept art for a game and find myself wishing that the final game had looked even half as good. HZD is one of the few where the final result measured up to the concept art, which is about as high praise as I can give.
Machine hunting was a hoot. It was good fun setting traps and putting down even the tougher enemies in a few well placed shots by exploiting weak points. Had some crazy fights where, for example, I got engaged by a Stormbird, then the noise of the ensuing fight attracted a bunch of Longlegs, and then while trying to fend them off I stumbled into some Snapmaws and a Trampler. Turned into a mad roiling clusterfuck as I tried to dodge incoming charges and projectiles from multiple angles while juggling damage types and scrambling to find a moment to get off precise shots at weak points. The way that the battlefield would be strewn with debris and dead machines afterward was really satisfying.
Story was better than I was expecting. I went in thinking it would be completely standard video game pablum. And, to be fair, it often was. A lot of the story elements dealing with the factions and villains and sidequests were decidedly unimpressive. However, I found the central mystery more than compelling enough to keep me looking, much of the material dealing with the fall of the previous civilization and how they dealt with it was pretty great and I enjoyed Aloy's personal journey. The epilogue came dangerously close to making me tear up. (Elisabet Sobek found her way home after all... just in time to submit to the inevitable and die amid the ruins, knowing she'd done all she could. I mean, God damn. *sniff*)
Speaking of Aloy, I liked her more than I was expecting to. Once again, I was expecting Standard Heroic Hero Doing Heroic Hero Things and, once again, to be fair, she often was. However they give her enough personality and emotional range to make her relatable and enough snark to lend her a sense of humour without going full Nathan Drake.
So yeah, fantastic game in my opinion. Solid 7/10 stuff. (Or 9/10 if we're using the stupid video game 7-to-10 scale.)
Buuuut that isn't going to stop me nitpicking the shit out of it.
Firstly, I'm not quite convinced that the game's open world improved it. Granted, it was better than the vast, vaaaast majority of open worlds. It was big enough to feel epic but small enough to not feel empty. Collectibles were restrained in number and some of them were linked to quality narrative content that actually made me want to find them. Plus the aforementioned gorgeous graphics really take the sting out of travelling around. And yet, despite all that, I still found open world fatigue setting in towards the end.
Adding to that, I wasn't a fan of the MMO-esque enemy placement. Machines just kind of mill about doing very little waiting for you to kill them, or not. It makes sense for some of them, but it makes the world feel less alive. Even if they just wandered around it would be better. Hiding while a pack of Ravagers walk past would be a lot cooler than circling around them as they walk back and forth in their assigned 50m radius.
Secondly, the combat went downhill in a hurry when fighting human enemies. Stealthing them to death was kinda fun, but open combat was pretty crappy and felt like a complete afterthought compared to the machine fights. Whenever it came to that I would just beeline for the nearest heavy weapon so I could mow everyone down and get it over with.
Thirdly, fuck Glinthawks. No fun to fight at all. The game's camera was clearly not designed with aerial enemies in mind. Terrain and foilage would often obscure the camera whenever I tried aiming upwards. Combine that with the Glinthawk's eratic movement and you have a recipe for frustration. Really shouldn't have made it through playtesting.
The dialogue suffered from a dose of Bioware face. Although, funnily enough, playing HZD alongside ME:A made me appreciate how much worse it could have been.
A lot of the scenes felt a bit sparse and unpopulated. It was as if they blew their entire crowd budget on the Nora festival at the start. Later major moments felt like there really should have been more people around. Notably during the final defense which seemed to consist of a couple dozen people. Shouldn't I have been seeing entire battalions of soldiers running around, considering what was going on?
Weapon-swapping was a bit annoying. Why can't one bow fire all arrow varieties? Do I really need three different arrows that all just do basic damage? Do the ropecaster and tearblaster really need to take an entire quarter of the wheel each? Does the blast sling need to exist, couldn't the regular sling just fire a bomb? Do harvest arrows really need to exist? Why do traps and proximity bombs exist when tripwires are better in every way? In short, I felt like they could have streamlined the weapons and fit everything onto the one wheel.
Lastly, I don't think Rost should have died, and not just because he was a cool guy and I liked him. The whole mentor-dies-to-protect-and-motivate-hero thing is awfully cliche. Plus it would have been even more poignant if he'd done as he intended and wandered off in a second self-imposed exile to prevent Aloy from breaking taboo for his sake.
Still, very good game.
