Horizon Zero Dawn
For a long time, HZD was the only PS exclusive I wanted to play, so I was pretty happy when it came to the PC. It took me a long time to actually get it, because of the price, but I eventually got it.
In many ways, this game feels like Assassin's Creed Dino Thunder or something like that. And I was having a lot of fun with it, until I got close to 40 hours of game. Then I just dropped it for about 8 months. It's hard to say why exactly. A friend called it beaultiful, but souless. I'm not really sure that that is the problem exactly.
Other than the visuals, this game has a lot systems, most of them very well designed, but there's almost always that slight detail that makes you feel like "if this was changed, this game would be better". Then, there's the matter of bloat. Not in the AC way where every activity is copy and pasted to exaustion, but there is a ridiculous amount of different armors and weapons, and even at the endgame, you still have to keep combining them in different ways for different enemy types. You have three different bow types with three different arrow types each. Why? Why? And each has multiple different quality levels to acquire. The same can be said about the armors. "Oh, I'm gonna fight the fire thingy creature, let me pause the game and change to the fire protection armor". It never really stops feeling like a grind, or, more specifically, a chore. The game generally wants you to be stealthy and it works well, but you rarely can eliminate machines in an effective way without completly breaking stealth, specially the bigger machines. You can carry health potions made from animal meat, and up to 4 extra health bars that are composed of herbs you collect that each fills a bit of said bars. But you never have an easy way of refilling these herb health bars. You have to always slowly rebuild them, a small herb at a time.
After returning to the game, I started noticing the pacing problems it has as well. The game has a lot of dungeon crawls through old lab ruins and they're almost always very empty. They're complex looking while having very little color and detail variation. And they want you to find a lot of logs, marked by purple lights in places where almost every detail is a purple light of somekind. These crawls go on and on and there's a lot of them near the endgame. There's also the shield armor, you get a mission to retrieve it early on, but you can only get it right before the final mission. As the slightly better lance, though it isn't hinted at early on. And... why? Allowing the player to retrieve it around 60% to 70% of the campaign would make a lot more sense.
There's also a lot of other small things here and there. You have a very limited inventory, even fully upgraded, but you can carry unlimited reward boxes. Many enemies randomly drop some types of these, but why not make all loot just these boxes? Why can't I pack inventory items into boxes like these anyway? That would be useful.
The world, despite being amazing to look at, very often feels too static. There aren't any breakable random things, or meaningless objects that you can touch and move. NPCs are always just standing there waiting for you, night and day, or walking set paths, very similar to Morrowind, actually. In what seems like a smart move, almost every store in the game is a random NPC that has no conversation lines. It just opens the store screen. And, save for a few special ones, they are all and always the exact same store. It didn't feel like a smart move anymore after a while. Just bland.
The Frozen Wilds expansion seems to recognize a number of these problems and try to solve them a little bit, with more powerful weapons (that eat through your resources quickly), a few extra armors, including health regenerating ones, a few unique and rather powerful weapon and armor modifications and so on. It doesn't really solve them, specially with the abundance of new harder to beat machines, but, overall, it helps the experience.
I know I sound too hard on the game, but I enjoyed it and it was worth my time with it. I just felt that it was always right at the edge of being trully phenomenal, but it never really got there.
As a final thought, the Brazilian dub was mostly very well done, with the occasional wrong voice for the wrong character here and there, nothing offensive, but I wish the director had given better directions for the actors regarding character names. Every other character, including Aloy, has his/her name said in a different way by different actors, sometimes in the very same scene. It gets a bit annoying.
