10-15 hour game report. The game is great, it’s more Horizon, but is it better, yes and maybe? The improved is the facial animations, the depth of the side quests (though still basic), the skill tree is deep, grapple hook and glide is a nice addiction, new combat moves add more depth. It’s still a blast to fight monsters, it’s more fun to get around and explore than ever before. Oh and there is an awesome board game mini game!  

The problem, a lot of this feels like a side ways step than the big leap forward. Grapple hook and glide in a game with a lot more verticality is usually an easy upgrade but I rarely find grapple points, and when I do it’s just there instead of normal climbing. A few battle fields to have grapple points but finding them in the heat of battle is kind of tough, it’s not available everywhere so it feels so limited. This is nothing like Halo infinite where the entire game is different because of the grapple.

Next the combat still fantastic, frantic, leads to some extraordinary cinematic like battles but with all the new offensive moves they couldn’t add a defensive one? The only real way to defend against attacks is still to constantly roll around. Enemies have a shield! Why can’t I have a shield? Or a parry? Anything?! Melee still feels way too sloppy to be called improved. It uses the Batman Arkham kind of gravity to suck you into attacking the closest person and this could lead to you attacking someone you didn’t. Also the animations in general is a clipping nightmare, even stealth kills Aloy is murdering air half the time.

I don’t know what’s up with the graphics, game still looks pretty but it seems the two options have drove people nuts and they are just upset cause there is no right answer. Yeah performance can be blurry, it sucks oh well. In general the game looks great except for this dumb brown filter a lot of the world gets, brown is never a good color, stop it devs!

Clearly not the big step up sequel like Uncharted 1 to 2. That said I felt Horizon 1 was one of the most polished first attempts at a new franchise I have ever played, they nailed it. So I think this almost feels like the standard 3rd game in a series where they try a few new ideas to add some changes but in the end it’s too much like the second one but not as good. I still have a whole game to finish so the story and set pieces could be incredible and rise this game up but I think at its core it’s more of the same