Something creates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the Earth
Guerrilla describes Horizon: Zero Dawn as post-post-apocalyptic. It’s quite a studenty way of putting it, but it fits. It’s been over a thousand years since human civilisation, and much of humanity with it, was wiped from the face of the planet. Nature has reclaimed the landscape, resulting in a lush, vibrant world filled with the swaying dynamic foliage that is rapidly replacing the particle shower as this console generation’s calling card. In the intervening millennium, Horizon’s world has been overrun by strange machines modelled on the animal kingdom. Where they came from, what they’re up to, and quite why they’re such a threat to female protagonist Aloy are among the mysteries to which Guerrilla is happy to refer, but declines to explain during the game’s debut demo, which we see behind closed doors in a plush E3 meeting room the day after its unveiling on Sony’s conference stage.
Aloy belongs to one of the few remaining human tribes. We’re told she’s gifted, with an understanding of physics and combat unmatched among her people, able to craft the tools to help her surmount seemingly impossible odds. She’s also blessed with the agility to get out of trouble when things go south. That nimbleness is demonstrated when she sprints and slides beneath a giant beastmachine, aiming an arrow at a weak point on its belly, then dashing away from gigantic robotic jaws a split-second before they snap shut, leaping through a gap between two rocks to put some distance and scenery between her and her chasing aggressor.
Not that it slows it down very much. Horizon’s environments are fully destructible, which is one heck of an achievement in a world this size. But even when great big robodinosaurs aren’t clattering through rock formations, this is a clear step up from the Dutch studio’s previous game, PS4 launch offering Killzone: Shadow Fall. The two share an engine – albeit one that has been worked on heavily since Shadow Fall’s launch – and there are visual ties between them, too, in particular their use of light and lens flare.
They share a love of glowing-eyed things, too, though in the place of Killzone’s chunky Helghast are a much more varied set of foes, each requiring notably different tactics to take down. Watchers, seemingly built to mimic velociraptors, prowl alone while scanning the environment in front of them, but call for support if they spot you. They’re best crept up on from the side or behind, where a canned animation will dispatch them in an instant. Aloy apologises for the kill as she retrieves her blade from a flank: “Sorry, little one. Couldn’t let you call for help.”
Grazers, meanwhile, are deer-like robots that wander the landscape in herds. They’re skittish things, too, which proves more than a little inconvenient for Aloy, since her current quest requires that she provide a local tribe with a specific resource only found in the canisters mounted on the Grazers’ backs. During Sony’s E3 show, Aloy felled one with an arrow and the rest of the pack promptly scarpered, forcing her to take potshots at them as they ran, hoping to catch just enough to fulfil the quest requirement. Before our eyes, she takes down almost a dozen in one go by using a mode of the Ropecaster – the default function of which should be obvious – to lay down the even less imaginatively named Explosive Tripwire. Several, in fact, strung between rocks at the water’s edge.
With the trap set, Aloy fires an explosive arrow to the other side of the scene. This spooks the Grazers and sets the herd running straight into the tripwires, with predictable results. Most of those that remain turn robotic tail and run. Had we not killed the Watcher, the explosion would have alerted it and prompted it to summon help. In the absence of that, Aloy is faced with two Alpha Grazers, which stay behind to fight so that the others can flee to safety.
Replaying a scene in a different way to demonstrate a game’s strategic potential is fast becoming a Sony trademark – we saw it a few months ago with Uncharted 4 – but it’s an effective way of showing off the possibilities afforded by the toolset and the flexibility demanded by enemy types that function in markedly different ways. Doubly so since we see just two weapons, the bow and the Ropecaster, plus a couple of ammo variants (each weapon will have a maximum of three). Building a space so rich in approaches has surely been liberating for Guerrilla, a studio that has spent a decade making enemies that simply shoot or get shot. There is a sense here of a team enjoying being untethered from the demands of the FPS, the corridors of yore replaced by vast open expanses, its enemy designs held back not by convention, just the limits of its designers’ imaginations.
The sentiment is reinforced by the colossal robo-dinosaur that suddenly arrives on the scene. The Thundermaw, as it’s known, is 80ft long, 33ft high, made of 550,000 polygons and shielded with over 90 individual pieces of armour, each with its own stock of hit points that govern when it can be knocked away to expose the ‘muscle’ beneath, attacks here dealing triple the damage to the beast. Most of its dozen attacks are performed by its snapping jaws and long tail, but some come from onboard weaponry that can be knocked loose and used against it. For instance, Aloy dislodges a disc launcher, which is only good for a few hits but takes off a decent chunk of health and some critical armour plating, exposing one of the beast’s two weak points. She uses electric arrows to briefly stun the leviathan, tethers its head to the ground from multiple angles with the Ropecaster, then aims an arrow at the weak point on its flank to finish it off. Here ends the lesson and the quest, with Aloy looting the Grazer corpses for the resource she needs before the screen fades disappointingly to black and our demo ends.
There are plenty of points of reference. The bow naturally invites comparison with Tomb Raider, but this is a far more open game, and already more systemically varied. The overabundant setting nods to Enslaved: Odyssey To The West, though this will surely be less linear too. Aloy, sneaking through the snowy undergrowth in her furred garb and with her long, red hair, recalls a Game Of Thrones Wildling, but they don’t have any 80-foot-long robotic dinos north of the Wall.
There are whiffs of Monster Hunter, Xenoblade Chronicles and Skyrim too, but all that this really shows is that Horizon is a commendable departure from what Guerrilla knows best. It has long been a studio of frightening technical ability, but it has never reached the all-round heights that were once expected of it. Perhaps here, long after the fall of mankind, stripped of its gruff military finery, it will succeed.