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Horizon Zero Dawn’s world is beautifully borked - and I can’t wait to revisit it on PCBehold!
Behold!
There’s just four weeks to go now untilHorizon Zero Dawndoes a massive electric roar and charges towards us through our PC screens, and as RPS’resident HZD obsessive, I’m excited. And to my own surprise, possibly the thing I’m most excited about is the chance to just drink in the look of the game again. In fact, no. I don’t want to drink it in at all. I want to chug it down as if it were a protein shake, and my eyes were a pair of totally shredded bros.
Spoiler alert: some people got upset because point 6 in this list mentions one of the boss fights later in the game, so… yes. Don’t read point six I guess, if you don’t want to know about that.
1. The Metal Devil
As part of its long-post-apocalypse setting, one of HZD’s hallmarks is the casual blending of the landscape with corroded technological horrors from a distant age, and the Metal Devil is the dad of them all. Part geography, part religious icon, and part parkour run, old Metty D is a sort of tentacled slaughter leviathan that’s draped over a mountain range like it got home pissed and fell asleep on the sofa, and it’s equally magnificent whether it’s sprawling in the background of a scenic view, or giving you vertigo as you scamper through the sky across its massive legs.
2. A nice walk in the woods
As Aloy, the main lass in HZD, you spend a lot of your time hunting mechafauna in order to scrounge up ammunition, weapon upgrades and trade goods. As one might expect from a hunting game, this involves a lot of crouching in bushes. It’s lucky, then, that the bushes look really, really good. So do all the game’s plants, actually: grass rustles gently in the breeze, trees actually look like trees, and riverbanks teem with creeping plants and stands of rushes. Vegetation is always a hard thing for games to get right, and I’m pumped to see how it grows in the fertile soil of… a computer. Ok, rubbish metaphor, let’s move on.
3. Mesa country
The landscape looks just as good when there’s barely any plants at all, of course. In fact, possibly my favourite region in the game is the sprawling Northwestern desert, and in particular the bit where algal green rivers snake through classic sandstone mesas in an otherwise parched landscape. Yeah, you have to fight a load of robot crocodiles there, but it’s more than worth it.
4. The Frozen Wilds
HZD’s PC release will include the Frozen Wilds expansion, which introduces - you guessed it - a honking great snow level to the game. It wasn’t my favourite, I’ll admit, for its habit of ending each story quest with an ever-increasing number of huge mechabears to fight. I found that quite stressful. But the titular Wilds were just as gorgeous as anything that had come before, and I’d happily stare at that ominous volcano, pictured, for hours.
5. The Thunderjaw
6. Helis' monster arena
Admittedly, gladiatorial duels against huge monsters in dusty arenas are not exactly virgin territory for video games. But if you’re gonna do a cliche, it’s worth doing it well, and HZD does not disappoint. Later on in the game, maniac-in-chief Helis dumps you in his personal thunderdome to fight the Behemoth, a kind of Pacific Rim pantomime horse of a beast, and it’s one of my favourite set piece boss fights in games.
7. Borked old war machines
As I mentioned above, Aloy’s world is rammed with subtle relics from an ancient gigawar, and there are all sorts of moments when you realise a rock you’ve been using as a landmark for hours is actually the rusted-apart turret of a tank or such. My favourite old wreck, however, is the bipedal death machine you find snarled up in vines, deep in the Soutern jungle. I couldn’t get a good shot of it for this post, but it’s pretty faithful to the concept art above, and I’m really looking forward to running into it again.
8. Tallnecks
The answer to the age old question “what if the Starship Enterprise fucked a giraffe”, the Tallneck is the only non-aggressive megabeast in the game, and acts as HZD’s equivalent of FarCry radio mast things. It’s always a pleasant surprise when one comes trotting mightily into view from behind a mashed-up old skyscraper, and as you can see from the screenshot above - one of the few released from the PC build so far - they’re looking extremely handsome these days.
9. Biggest Bird
10. Old cities
Skyscrapers just look so damnednicecovered in plants. And weirdly, considering their apocalyptic undertones, HZD’s ruined cities are some of the most relaxing environments to explore. The old cities are considered off-limits to Aloy’s people because of religion and that, and this means they’ve become these sort of ironic nature reserves for mechanical wildlife. Sometimes you can find old mugs and watches and stuff in them, which I also suppose will look marginally better with cranked-up graphics settings. But it’s the skyscrapers I want to see.
11. New cities
12. Weird AI dinosaur factories
The Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition, including the Frozen Wilds expansion, will launch onSteamand theEpic Games Storeon August 7th for £33/€50/$50.
