Wenzel Games

• Overview

Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West a post-apocalyptical adventure where the player takes control of Aloy, an outcast of the Nora tribe. The Nora tribe, already being considered the most primitive by the other eastern tribes in the world, Aloy is essentially an outcast among outcasts. The world is overgrown with vegetation and the ruins of old-world cities dot the landscape and wildlife still prospers. However, life had a helping hand; GAIA, an artificial intelligence with tasked with reviving the world after machines had consumed all organic life on the planet. How did GAIA revive organic life? By the use of animal like machines. This is the world in which our main character, Aloy, is born. In a world where nature and machina collide, this is where we begin our story.

• Story

We begin our journey as a young Aloy, already an outcast among the Nora due to her being “birthed by the mountain“. We are trained by our adopted father figure, Rost, in order to compete in the Nora coming-of-age ceremony and gain the permissions from the elders to travel outside of their tribe-lands. However, there was another coincidence to Aloy’s birth. New more aggressive machines have started to appear and other machines that once paid humans no mind have started to kill humans on site, the water is being poisoned, storms have become more deadly, and the vegetation has fallen to a blight called “the rot”. It’s our mission as we take control of Aloy to explore the world and find out how to calm the enraged machines, quell the storms, and find a cure for the rot. We meet and make many friends and allies along the way and we even learn the how the world came to be this way.

• Gameplay

Armed with nothing but a spear and a bow you have to hunt down large dinosaur-like machines in order to level up your character and upgrade your weapons in order to take on larger and more dangerous machines. There are many side missions, collectibles and challenges along the way. You even gain the ability to override machines and have them fight along side you for a limited time. There are also a wide variety of machines from the odd bipedal Watchers to the massive T-Rex like weapons platform known as the Thunderjaw. You will be able to utilize a machines elemental weaknesses; fire, acid, frost, shock, and purgewater in order to take the larger ones down and some machine weapons can be shot off and used against them. Use every weapon at your disposal to scrap the most dangerous of machines and go on an adventure to heal the world.

• Closing

I’ve had so much fun immersing myself in the world of the Horizon games and I’m sure that if you have a PlayStation or gaming PC, that you will too. Though I have come across some breaking bugs in Forbidden West, the first was a side mission that I could not complete because the boss wouldn’t reset so that the arena could be re-entered and kept the battle music going for the entire time that I was playing. (This has been fixed.) The second were machines clipping below the map, but this is a rare occurrence. (Happened to me at most twice.) There’s also some texture pop-in on the Play Station 4 but it doesn’t bother me so long as the story is good, which it is. Also, the Horizon games do something that is very rare in the gaming landscape today. They are direct sequels to one another with Forbidden West picking up only months where Zero Dawn left off.

I highly recommend you pick up and play Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West.

Thank you for reading.

J.C. Whetsell.