This. There's just so many possibilities in how you deal with each machine.HZD has my favorite combat mechanics in a 3rd person openworld game. It can't be overstated how good combat feels in that game. BoTW did amazing things for openworld traversal, but HZD did the same for combat.
Horizon is awesome and easily the game of the year. As an overall package, not a single game this year has or will come close and the only game that I would put ahead of it this generation is The Witcher III.
Can't wait for the DLC later this year.
In many RPGs, you find epistolary evidence that fills you in on exposition or colorful detail. These are the diaries where an enterprising farmer tells where they've buried a treasure or hidden a key; news articles about the crimes of the villain you're about to confront; wizards or scientists describing just the key details of an experiment gone wrong that you'll need to know to survive the area before you. (Some games are self-aware about this tendency, too. Witcher 3's expansion Blood and Wine lampshades this trope and features a journal from a bandit leader complaining about how all of his underlings are constantly scribbling in diaries, rather than conducting proper banditry.)
In HZD, the landscape is likewise littered with pieces of media that expand the narrative universe and fill you in on important facts that help you to navigate the world more effectively. But for the most part, these are digital artifacts from a time that is their ancient history (and our future to come). There are advertisements for futuristic dating services and luxury apartments, an obituary for the leader of a cult, news reports on the construction of a spacecraft.
And there is a wealth of multimedia content, too. Aloy doesn't just find textshe finds audio and video recordings, as disparate as a long-dead soldier's message to his family, private therapy sessions, recordings of what went down in a conference room long, long ago.
You learn about the past and the wider world in the same ways and at the same time as the character you're playing. There's no as-you-know-Bob here.
And everywhere you go, the past is there under your feet, inescapable. Here is a thing that can happen in HZD: you are climbing across a large stretch of rusted metal, overgrown with lichen and vines. Slowly you come to realize that you're walking along the wing of a downed aircraft. Or you venture down a straight, wide road and see the unmistakable silhouette of broken parking meters running along the side. Or you climb high into the mountains, and discover that the way is dotted with long-abandoned tanks, rusted and dormant but somehow still menacing.
These signs of the past-yet-to-come are everywhere in HZD, and they tell a story just as compelling as the story of Aloy and her struggle to find the truth of her heritage.
Game isn't even 6 months old and the OT is still pretty active, hardly LTTP.
Honestly Rockbreakers are the easiest enemy in the game. Just get the sling that let's you drop bombs that are proximity. All you need to do is put down a shit ton of them, have the Rockbreaker run into them, and they instantly die.
I am playing it now and while I overall really like the game, I also have some problems with it.
The traversal for example is pretty terrible. It's really dumb when Aloy can't climb up a small ledge simply because it was not a "climbable" ledge. The upgrade system being reliant on random drops isn't good, if you want to upgrade your damage for example but have bad RNG you simply can't. The menus can suck and keep having to open it and scroll to inventory to switch outfits gets old fast. Your inventory for resources is also too small, even when max upgraded. Having to pick a bunch of flowers after a bad fight takes too long, there really should have been a skill that doubles the amount you get from healing herbs. The camera during certain fights can be a bit of a pain and no lock on means you have to fiddle with it quite a lot. The game also fails to explain certain things (like how shielded blaze canisters work.) Tutorial quests only counting up when you have them active is incredibly dumb. And certain parts of the storytelling are far too relient on you reading a shitton of text logs. Don't mind audio logs since you can just listen to them while running around, but having to read pages of text isn't fun.
However, the world is interesting enough and the combat is incredibly fun making up for these gripes. Still, a sequel could improve the game quite a bit.
Extremely competent. Overrated on here, imo, but I can see why people love it. I just found it beautiful but ultimately too conservative and too guilty of the same things we slam other open world games for, whilst fudging some details (weather shifts are far too swift, Magic Stealth Grass, economy) as it nails others (robot design/look). Combat against humans was utterly rote, against bots it was much better, but it was not as clever as it wanted to be.
I liked the main city though, it looked lovely.