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You'd be forgiven for going into this one expecting something a little different. For developer Guerrilla Games, at least, Horizon: Zero Dawn sees a remarkable change in both pace and tone, a well-earned break from over ten years of stoic service on the gritty battlefields of Killzone and a step away from the crushed concrete and exposed steel mesh of Helghan towards something brighter, breezier, more open. Horizon Zero Dawn is a sumptuous, slow-burning adventure that stretches its 30 hour tale across a vast and beautiful map that's light years away from the killing fields of Guerrilla's first-person shooter series. It's an open world game of admirable scope and craft. And yet there's something wearisomely familiar about it all.
Perhaps that's down to this being Guerrilla's first big open world, the studio lacking some of the confidence to forge its own path, for you'll have seen much of Horizon Zero Dawn elsewhere. This is a genre piece that's a little too generic: Horizon: Zero Dawn is too liberal with what it borrows, and often too literal to boot. The result ends up feeling like an imitation of something you'll have played countless times before, and often in finer form.
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