Finally, finally, I was able to get decent hardware in the form of a laptop, albeit a 3060, and play Horizon zero dawn… And remain partially disappointed. Yes, I had fun during the forty hours that I played the game, but… There are as many of these “buts” as the useless modules that the game crams into you. Here they are, from left to right, until people learned to read from right to left:
1. Horrible PC port. Even a year after release. I will not take this into account in the final assessment of the quality of the game, but I simply cannot help but note this sad fact, coupled with the inadequate price. FPS drops up to twenty in Meridian, in some places there is soap instead of textures that does not want to fix even after trying several methods suggested on the Internet. Plus, the game loads these textures in cutscenes right in front of the player’s face in the first second. Yes, not always, but it takes you out of the immersion.
2. Save Mechanics. She’s terrible. The darkening of the screen while saving is sad, the disappearance of loot after saving is even sadder – you kill the pigeon king in the desert at level 11 by shooting at him with sushi chopsticks, and you kill him on the 8th attempt, while at the same time shooting the shitting support aircraft, there is not enough space in the inventory for the heart of the winged fool, you run to the merchant, at the same time saving at the stake with the idea of consolidating your progress, you return – there is no heart, but you are flying peck your low-level face another newly spawned scum.
3. Progression system, resources, gear. Things are really sad here. The game literally overloads you with all kinds of crafting materials – in the first six hours of the game, as it turned out, I had, as it turned out, the strongest bow in the game, almost all the clothes are also easy to craft and look the same, but, worst of all, there is catastrophically little of it – which, on the one hand, is logical from the point of view of the lore of the game, but from the point of view of motivation for exploring the world – and, whatever one may say, we are playing an openworld game – an extremely bad decision. Why should I go hunt exotic monsters, explore the map, if for this I get at most a rare modification, of which there are already a dime a dozen, these mechanical animals almost shit with them, why?? For the sake of a dubious challenge and another note about lore, which I will talk about later? It’s disgusting from the point of view of involving the player in extra-plot content (of which there is still a lot), the devaluation of points of interest on the map, because of which I, as a player, do not want to deal with almost half of the content that the game offers you with its rather hefty price tag – as if you were buying a Microsoft Office package to make a presentation in powerpoint.
Add to the same pile the rudimentary mechanics of increasing the capacity of an already quite large inventory – it is clear that the developer wants the player to change equipment depending on the position in the game and adapt to the opponent, but in reality I have never felt the need for this, and only the departments with modifications and resources are clogged, and after that, when you realize that you do not need half of the available resources due to their suitability only for crafting low-grade gear, after you almost stop even looking into the carcass of a dead monster, well, you know.
Skill tree. It can be said to https://888ladiescasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ be almost useless. The ability to receive even more resources, which are already in abundance, the ability to strengthen spear strikes, whose animations are, to put it mildly, so-so, the ability to heal faster and increase the capacity of the healing bag, and if increasing the speed of regen may still be needed, then increase the bag when regen is almost always used up and does not accumulate, and if you get carried away and decide to fill double capacity, then you need to do this exclusively in stealth and crawl to tear these plantains, because if you openly scour the map, your healing will be wasted, since you will inevitably enter into battle, you feel dissonance? The ability to shoot three/two arrows, relevant only for a heavy bow, not to mention the fact that after you press RMB and take out the bow, you have to wait another second before Aloy can charge another Twix stick. Ability to shoot from ropes (. ), which I met in the game in order to run straight through it, in 40 hours, in the amount of one piece, the possibility of accelerated movement with a heavy gun (. ), the possibility of covertly eliminating an enemy makes sense as a development of stealth mechanics, but when the possibility of a one-shot is separated, and even in different branches for each type of enemy..
As a result of the above, we get the lack of adequate incentives for completing side effects (exp to pump up a stupid skill and a random modification that you don’t need – well, uh, s), which are also not of the highest quality and three of them was enough for me not to bother with them anymore, lack of adequate incentives for exploring the world. Climbed on a giraffe? Based on experience, level up a stupid skill, read a text with a piece of lore, and God forbid that there really is lore there. Killed a big animal? For experiments, upgrade a stupid skill, add garbage to your inventory and another random modification. Well, as a result, only the plot remains playable. And since the openworld of this game is rather large, then all the other content begins to harm the plot to some extent – running from point A to point B (attacking mechanical trash, which is not interesting to kill after the first 5 times at best) the distance between which in the plot is very, very significant.
Do you know what else kills interest in additional content, among other things?? Trader of knock-out craft components – why go kill a big animal to collect the tool you need if your pockets are full of currencies?
3. Broken toys
The petrel broke the module responsible for spamming electric poop? He will hover in the air and will take pictures of you and post them on bird insta, write about what scum you are, and only after that he will deign to perform another attack animation, remembering that the Zeus excrement thrower has been destroyed. The toys are not only broken, but also tied to the location, which opens up the possibility of their abusive killing – so in one of the three additional quests completed, a huge earthworm could not get out of the arena, and I just went outside it and methodically shot the high level fool – and it cannot be said that the player should play honestly, because abuse of the boss is the so-called ingenuity shown, the game sets you a task, and you find a way to solve it. The whole problem is that the game should not allow the player to do this, and this is a great example of bad level design.
4. Story Bosses.
There seem to be four of them in total. And three of them are the same. And not only does a game of this level allow itself three identical bosses, they are also completely disgusting. Speaking of bad level design – the first time you meet this disgrace, the game allows you to stand behind cover and just shoot with it. There are no factors that should force the player to leave cover and at least compensate for its presence, there are no combat dynamics, you just shoot at grandma’s giant chest of drawers. The second time, when we are trying to get pension savings from there, the location is made better, the shelters are destructible, but even here it was not without shitting your pants – the game does not warn you about the boss, it saves you until the cutscene, all 6 attempts that I completed it, I had to re-craft my consumables. The same ones. Every fucking time.
5. Plot and ending
We are dumped with all the information and an awful lot of lore one chapter before the final bossfight, and it feels like the game ends before it, because there is simply no plot development after it) There is no plot development after the final bossfight, Karl) The final bossfight itself does not stand out in any way, the boss itself is just another mechanical crap, one battle phase, and the same poor level design with cover.
So, a game in which, as it turned out, only story content is playable, presented it so-so – both running from one end of the map to the other, and dialogues at the level of talking heads, it’s intriguing, you’re interested, but nothing more. Many scenes of the prologue and a couple after even look like a stingy tear, so stingy that she takes the best bread only at a discount, but still, they are very good. So much so that, coupled with a nice picture and well-developed lore, I give this game as many as 6 mechanical ass out of 10.