GAME BURSTS WITH COLOUR
Horizon Zero Dawn shines
Horizon Zero Dawn Sony, for the PlayStation 4 ★★ ★ ★ out of four
As a longtime video-game player, I’ve spent many hours roaming around post-apocalyptic wastelands. I thought I’d seen it all, from vicious gangs to bloodthirsty aliens to horrifying mutants.
Then Horizon Zero Dawn (Sony, for the PlayStation 4, Cdn$79.99) introduced me to the snapjaw, a bionic alligator that froze me with torrents of ice pellets before turning me into lunch.
The snapjaw is just one of the dozens of cybernetically enhanced beasts roaming the Horizon wilderness, from the pesky, raptor-like watchers to the overgrown giraffes known as tallnecks. The mystery: Who made these monsters and set them loose on Earth?
Your character is Aloy, a headstrong young woman who’s been raised to fight by a wise old hunter named Rost. When Aloy was born, she and Rost were outcast by their village’s matriarchal rulers. And there’s your second enigma: why?
Horizon keeps building mystery upon mystery: Who was Aloy’s mother? Why are the matriarchs so secretive? And what’s with the underground “cauldrons” everyone’s so afraid of ?
Aloy gains one advantage in an early trip to a cauldron: a “focus” that provides an augmented-reality overlay on the environment, letting her scan the monsters and find their weak points. The high-tech focus’s other functions are less immediately apparent, but try not to be surprised when strange voices start talking to you.
Aloy has some other tools at her disposal, such as a sword and a bow to help take down those ornery critters. She can also domesticate a few of them; the equine striders are particularly useful for getting from one settlement to the next. And she can craft bombs and traps from the body parts of her downed quarry.
Of course, Aloy has to deal with plenty of stubborn humans, too, from bandit gangs to slave traders to wary civilians who are just trying to rebuild a culture. I was largely impressed with the variety of side missions in Horizon, which usually take unexpected detours from their original goals.
Even when you’re on an urgent mission, though, you should take the time to appreciate the gorgeous world rendered by developer Guerrilla Games. This isn’t the drab, grey environment of the post-nuclear Fallout games, instead offering breathtaking vistas bursting with colour.
Horizon is the work of an experienced studio that’s finally been allowed to take the chains off, and it’s exhilarating.