I want to play the game! But, no PS4 :-(

I have actually been eyeing it for a while now but it just makes me sad that there has to be multiple consoles out there...

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The combat is slick, tight, and exciting (closest comparison I can think of is the recent Tomb Raider games in terms of feel and pacing).

It's one of the few games to make me go "Holy Cow!" in recent memory, and then make me say it again, and again.
For example, the first time Sammy fought a Scrapper, it caught us off guard with how fast it was, and how hard it could hit (Holy Cow!). But she learned how they worked, what their short and long range attacks were, and what weak point to capitalize on. Nice.

Then she fought her first Corruptor, and despite the fact that she could handle Scrappers easily by that point, knew all about weakpoints, and knew not to underestimate the machines' speed, we were still caught off guard by this guy. The moment he jumped across the arena to close the gap between them (Holy Cow!), she ran for her life, only to have it pick up a boulder and fling it at her, taking half of her health with a single blow (Holy S***!).
Fundamentally, the fight was set up as a natural progression from the Scrapper (even similar weaknesses), but this guy had moves that we hadn't considered, and it was awesome.

And to think that there are over two dozen types of machines in the game, each with their own behaviors and attacks? We still have a lot to learn...

I always appreciate the personal opinions here.
I really wish there was a playable demo, if good, that would ultimately sell me on this game and its potential future.

Have there been any other big reviews that have dropped with the official release date?

Years ago I stopped caring about gaming press and quit following it altogether.

I wish there was a site that is rotten tomatoes -like, but just for video games )rather than movies/TV).
Something that is "by the people for the people", not backed by the industry or paid off.
I looked around a little bit and found these 2 sites that might be a little bit like that?
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/horizon-zero-dawn
http://www.gamerankings.com/ps4/168644-horizon-zero-dawn/index.html

I've been playing for about five hours now, and I'm still on the tutorial valley. I've been playing with the photo mode for a while, and have a small batch of screens that you might like. This game is gorgeous...

Every game needs a photo mode...

Note: This ended up being much longer than I anticipated. TL;DR is that I really like Horizon. It's really fun and engaging. Comparisons to The Witcher 3 are more appropriate than I thought, but not in the ways I expected. It's better than TW3 in a lot of ways, but not in any of the ways that make TW3 so engaging for me.

I'll echo everyone else that I think Horizon is just terrific. It's really hitting all the right notes for me at the moment. People often talk about "open world fatigue," and I've even found myself suffering from it myself. Except, I'm becoming increasingly certain that it's not a real thing, and that "open world fatigue" simply means the game isn't a well-designed open world.

Horizon adds basically nothing new or groundbreaking to the open world formula. It has a huge map. It has towers to climb (with a neat twist that everyone is probably aware of at this point). It has tons of collectibles, it has crafting, fast travel, mounted travel, etc, etc--it has it all. What makes the game notable and special, is that all those things actually work together, make sense within the game world, and are designed with a sense of care and purpose that we don't normally see.

The real highlight of the game is the combat, I think. Bow combat is pretty similar to what we've seen before in the new Tomb Raider games, but I think it feels better. There's a sense of fluidity, speed, and agility in this game that seems pretty rare. Most of the combat really is just shooting a bow, but with all the different ammunition types and enemy weaknesses (and some other weapons), it doesn't feel repetitive. It seems totally possible that a player might get caught in a loop of tackling every encounter the same way, but the options given by the game have certainly pushed me to experiment quite a bit. There is one particular ability that seems completely broken. When hiding in tall grass, you can whistle to pull enemies and stealth kill them as they approach. Pretty standard stealth game stuff. But the ability will only ever pull one enemy at a time, and the enemy AI (particularly the human AI) is pretty dumb and will basically ignore the huge pile of corpses that you're collecting and continue to walk right towards you. I also wish melee combat was better. It really feels like sort of an afterthought, and they definitely want you to primarily use the bow. Melee is fine, but it's just light/heavy attack with your spear, and it's not really engaging or fun, I don't think.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the looting and crafting loop in the game. I hated the system in the Far Cry games, wherein you hunt random animals to craft upgrades. This has a mixture of that for crafting more carry capacity for basically everything in the game, along with a constant need to collect parts to craft arrows, potions, and other expendable supplies. That sounds absolutely awful on paper, I think, but I've found it incredibly engaging and it adds a sort of weight to preparing for combat and ensuring that you're ready for a variety of situations.

The story is a particularly neat surprise for me--I wasn't expecting it to be anywhere near as engaging as it has been. Or maybe intriguing is a better word. It's too early to tell whether it's "good," but it's certainly keeping me interested. The world they've built here is interesting and compelling to a level I definitely didn't expect.

Technically, the game is gorgeous. It's not quite Uncharted 4, I don't think, but it's pretty close, and with a considerable large scope, it's certainly impressive, with a few caveats. Character models range from nearly Uncharted 4 good to deep into Uncanny Valley creepiness. Lip syncing is basically always laughably bad, and voice acting ranges from really good to very bad. So by no means not a perfect game.

Comparisons to The Witcher (LONG)

So, alright, here it is. We all know I love, love, love The Witcher. It's easily my favorite game of the last five years (note: not what I think is the best game, just my favorite). I sort of blocked out all the reviewers making comparisons between Horizion and The Witcher 3, if only to save myself the disappointment when it inevitably wasn't true. Well, I was only slightly wrong.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is almost nothing like The Witcher 3, predictably. However, it's still closer than I anticipated, and the comparison is perhaps a bit more apt than I anticipated. Besides the obvious (They're both huge open worlds, so we have to make the comparison, right?!), they both do some of the same things, just in different ways.

The biggest one that sticks out for me is preparing for fights. The Witcher 3 tries to give you the experience being a Witcher: investigating a monster attack, determining the culprit, and using the Bestiary (and past experiences in the game) to prepare for a fight--brewing health potions and stat boosting decoctions, creating and applying the correct oils to your silver sword, going in armed with knowledge of a monster's weakness to certain signs. The early game succeeds in this, but nothing quite lives up to the first big monster fight--the Griffin in White Orchard. It's a story quest that you can't skip, and it's set up in a way that has you traveling all over the are investigating an attack, finding the Griffin's nest, determining what it is, and then finding ingredients to use as bait (which leads you to a small sidequest that encourages you to brew your first health potion). It's an absolutely brilliant set up and presentation that I don't think the rest of the game quite matches, despite it's best efforts.

The biggest problem with the concept that causes it to break down, is the way potions, bombs, and oils work. You must find recipes throughout the world for every potion, bomb, and oil. Then you must find recipes for the upgraded versions. I went for a long time without finding essential recipes--my first time through the game, I never found the upgraded health potion. As a result, none of these items can be absolutely necessary for a fight, which I think could have been a neat mechanic that really forced the player to prepare for a big monster. Instead, blade oils just add a damage boost to a particular monster, and monsters have a weakness to a certain sign, but are still vulnerable to all of them to some degree. The game doesn't force you to engage with those mechanics. The other problem is that once you craft oils, potions, or bombs, you have those items forever. Resting will regenerate your supply of all of those items, provided you have alcohol (which is so common that it might as well not even be a requirement). This is convenient for the player, definitely, but it destroys any sense of having to prepare for a fight. Once you've found a good portion of the recipes in the game (which can take a long time, or no time at all, if you explore quite a bit), you no longer have to prepare by finding ingredients or brewing potions. You simply rest and refill the ones you have.

Now, compare this to preparing for fights in Horizon. It doesn't have a system anywhere near as deep or involved, and, so far, there hasn't been any equivalent to preparing for a specific type of monster. Every mechanical beast has specific weakness, but so far I haven't found any quests that equate to The Witcher's monster contracts that would encourage you to prepare for one specific fight. Instead, Horizon just encourages you to keep stocked up and prepared for anything. You must stay stocked up on sticks and metal shards for arrows, along with specific machine parts to add to those for specialty arrows and ammunition that do elemental damage. The plants you collect work as healing items, but you can also use them with some other things to create better health potions, and some bombs and other things. So you must constantly be crafting arrows, specialty ammunition, health potions, bombs, etc, as you use them or want to have them. It is both less complicated, more constant, and better at making the player feel like they are genuinely preparing for a fight or just a voyage into the wild. The Witcher's system is engaging at the beginning, when you must constantly find recipes and ingredients, but once you have many or all of those, you never have to engage with it again. I suspect Horizon will become a bit like this towards the end, when the player has huge bags for resources and ammunition that allows them to go longer and longer without having to craft refills, but even so, there's no automatic refills as found in The Witcher.

The two comparisons most have seemed to make are in world design and story/lore. These are the areas in which I don't think Horizon even comes close to The Witcher 3. Horizon is beautiful, and is more impressive looking than TW3 are first glance, and technically is probably more impressive. The world design (and by that, I mean a combination of the map, environmental design, player paths, routes through the environment, etc) is very, very good. Absolutely top tier, I think. But I still feel like it doesn't match TW3. I think TW3 is as close to a real world as video games have ever come. I don't know how else to describe it--walking around The Witcher 3 feels like walking around a real place. Most, I think this comes down to attention to detail. They really nailed it, I think. There are subtle details everywhere--stone stairs worn realistically from years and years of use, incredibly realistic landscape with thought given to water flow and erosion. I'll embed a video at the bottom that highlights that stuff extremely well. Horizon is an impressively designed world, but it feels very much like a video game space, I think. At a quick glance, it looks impressive and real, but the edges are much more visible, I think. Cliffs and rocks look great independently, but they feel like they've been placed to create a playspace more than to create a realistic world, and it's much the same for everything in the world.

Story and lore is a similar situation, I think. Horizon's is very good (or, like I said, intriguing, at least). It's certainly deeper than the surface level Far Cry type story than I was expecting. I genuinely want to learn about the tribes and cultures and societies of the people in the game. I definitely want to know more about the old world and what happened, and the game does a wonderful job of presenting that stuff through it's collectibles. Guerrilla certainly gave all of that quite a bit of effort. Again, it's just not as deep or engaging as TW3. I think that's an unfair comparison, in the end, though--The Witcher 3 has the benefit of being based on a series of books and two previous games.

This has become an absurdly long post, so I'll stop there. You all know that I think The Witcher 3 is a very special game, and I still have a hard time putting why that is into words. I think Horizon might be a better game. At the very least it's a tighter game. It's almost sort of a Witcher-lite, in many aspects, I think. But when I'm done with Horizon (and then probably Mass Effect), I'll certainly be diving back in for a fifth play through of The Witcher 3.

So, just a few videos here. They're long, and I don't expect anyone to watch them. It's ACG over on YouTube. I really like this guy's reviews, just as an FYI for people that seek out video reviews of games. But he also does these videos, called Walking the Walk, in which he spends 40-60 minutes, typically, walking around a video game world, showing off it's tech and design.

The first one is for The Witcher 3. This video is a very good look (by no means a comprehensive one) at the attention to detail in the design of The Witcher 3. As I said, it's long, I can see that most people would find it boring to just watch some dude walk around a video game world. I encourage you to watch it if you're interested, and to at least scrub through it a bit and see a few things as an example of what I think makes the TW3 so good.

The second video is the same thing for Horizon: Zero Dawn. I haven't watched it all yet, but I noticed it was there when I was grabbing the link for the TW3 video, so I figured I would just add it here given the subject. I'm eager to watch it this evening, though. Maybe he'll show me some things I haven't noticed and give me a greater appreciation for what Horizon got right.

The Witcher 3:

Horizon:

So good!

The Tomb Raider in the far future analogy is pretty apt. I am also fairly stunned at the quantity and quality of the dialogue in the game. Gameplay is pretty fun, and the skills dramatically increase your power. It's a really nice way to allow the player to self-guide through their powerups.

The TL;DR version, I'm still completely hooked by the gameplay, thoroughly absorbed by the world, and impressed by the way this game constantly makes me say "wow", then immediately raises the bar again.

Now that I've sunk more time into the game, there are a few things I'm starting to notice and appreciate.

• Restraint.

The Dev team seems to have fantastic instincts when it comes to knowing how much of something is "enough". So far, I have yet to come across a single task that felt overly repetitive. Nothing drags on too long for its own good. This comes across in obvious ways, but subtle little ways, too. For example (I'll be as vague as possible to avoid spoilers); I was exploring a specific area, and I reached a point where I needed to activate a thing in the middle of the room. I'm looking around, and I see 3 small towers around the edge of the room. I climb one of them, and sure enough, there's a button I can press. My immediate thought is "so I need to climb these three towers and press all 3 buttons"... because that's how videogames work, right? But when I pressed the first button, I turned and saw that it had activated all 3 towers. This seems like a tiny thing on its own, but the game is filled with examples of this sensibility. Resource gathering is another example. Lots of games feature hunting and skinning wildlife to gather materials. There's usually a little animation to go along with it. The first time you do it, it's gross. The 10th time, it's already taking longer than you wish it would. The 100th time... you get my point. So Horizon just skips that. You kill an animal, press a button and there's a split-second animation of crouching down to pick something off the ground. That's it.
I can't stress enough how refreshing it is to play a game that is so big, yet so respectful of the player's time. The developers realize that repetitive busy work and other time-vacuums are no substitute for actual CONTENT, and are best avoided.

*Stops. Takes sip of coffee. Turns and gives a long, pointed look in Bungie's direction. Continues.*

These little details are so important because the game really is HUGE. With so much to do, any repetitive tasks taking longer than they need to would suck all drive and momentum from the game. Horizon dodges this issue beautifully.

• Double down

After rambling about how much restraint the developers have shown, I do need to point out that they also seem to know exactly when to take things further. Specifically when it comes to cool, "epic" moments. In a game full of things that make me say "wow", it's amazing how often these moments hit back-to-back. It feels "emergent" at the time, but I run into these moments in pairs so often that I'm starting to think it must be intentional. Sometimes these moments are subtle, like coming across a new area that looks so gorgeous that I just need to stop and stare at the scenery for a moment, and then the weather changes and it looks even better. But a lot of these moments are combat-oriented.

* Enemy-type spoilers incoming *

At one point, I come across a small lake with an island in the middle of it. I swam through the water, and just as I reached the shore I heard something to me left. I turned and saw, coming around the edge of the shoreline, a giant robot alligator. It was by far the largest enemy I had come across at that point (easily 30 feet long), and it was coming straight for me. I instantly launch into a knock-down, drag-out battle with this monster. I hit it with everything I have while trying to get a feel for its attacks and weaknesses. Finally, I destroy it. I salvage the materials, and run happily inland, feeling like a genuine badass after my victory. I was feeling so happy and carefree that I almost yelled when I rounded a corner just a few seconds later and found myself face to face with THREE OF THE FREAKING THINGS that I had just fought.

I had another experience last night that was just jaw-dropping. I was exploring a new area of the map, and I came across a large, long-horned bull creature. I'd seen similar robots before, but this one was a bit larger. I managed to sneak up on one, and was pleased to discover I could tame and ride it! This thing was so much bigger and cooler looking than the other mounts I had ridden, I couldn't wait to see what it could do. I launch into a gallop, feeling like the world's biggest badass on my badass mount. I ride around the corner of a cliff edge, straight into the gigantic T-Rex monster from the E3 demo. It's massive... gotta be 50-60 feet long. And I'm heading straight for it. My mount has decent speed, but it isn't the most maneuverable thing. I don't want to stop and s-l-o-w-l-y turn around, so I decide I'm going to try and run past the T-Rex, then circle back and go the other way. It sees me as I approach, and the whole world explodes. There's rocket fire all around me, and just when I think I might actually make it through, a laser shot cuts straight through me and destroys me and my mount in a single hit. It was AWESOME.

If you go to Rost's house from the beginning of the game and travel down the single path to the east, there is a Scrapper site at a dead end. There is also a campfire along about halfway down the trail. Four scrappers prowl the area, with two lootable scrapper piles. Anecdotally, there is a high change of finding purple weapon/armor mods. I've farmed the place about fifteen times and have never found less than a blue mod in one of the piles, and found purple mods about half the time.

Purple mods all seem to be in the 40% range. I have a 46% Tear boost mod, and a 42% damage boost, along with different element protection mods. This spot has been a reliable source of mods, and they can make a huge difference if you get them at the beginning of the game.