When I first saw gameplay previews of LEGO Horizon Adventures, I was transported back to the early days of TT Games’ LEGO Star Wars: father and son seated on the couch, striving to defeat the Empire. Harry has since grown up, and is a passionate fan of the universe created in Horizon: Zero Dawn. So when a LEGOfied version of the game was released, we went to the shops to pick up a copy for the Nintendo Switch. Around a month later, Sony via the LEGO Group sent through some codes for Steam – which was useful to compare the graphics/gameplay experience. I got distracted by work, and Harry finished playing the game. Here are his thoughts
Introduction – and possible Spoilers
LEGO: Horizon Adventures aims to be a kid-friendly adaptation of Guerrilla Games’ blockbuster 2017 RPG Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game that was partly about tribal humans hunting robot dinosaurs and a chosen one trying to prevent cultists from unleashing an ancient evil, but was also about how, centuries ago, a guy who legally isn’t Elon Musk accidentally caused the end of the world with rogue unstoppable kill-droids and in the face of inevitable destruction, the world’s governments lied to the civilian population about there being hope so that they would lay down their lives by the millions in the fight to buy time to complete Project Zero Dawn, which the governments led people to believe was a superweapon that would wipe out the robots and save them all but was in fact a project to create a sapient AI and facilities that would, after humanity’s extinction, allow said AI to complete the decryption and transmission of the kill-droid’s shutdown codes, reconstitute the ravaged biosphere, and release cloned humans and animals back into the rejuvenated planet (…err, spoiler alert).
When LEGO Horizon Adventures was first announced, my first thought (after I’d been sufficiently convinced that it wasn’t an elaborate fan-made fake, because I’ve been burned by those before), was that it was going to be an ambitious project, for sure; comparable to trying to adapt Dune as a pop-up book. While I am disappointed but not surprised that Guerrilla Games have chosen to strip out most of what I considered to be the most interesting narrative ideas of the original in the process of abridging it for a younger audience, the end result is a functional and even fun game about fighting cultists and robot dinosaurs for about eight hours that does an admirable job of trying to make high-concept sci-fi accessible to a target audience of ten-year-olds and their exhausted parent(s).
In the interest of full disclosure…
If it wasn’t clear already, I should say that I’ve played the original Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West, along with their respective expansions, and while I found the gameplay to occasionally be a bit of a drag, the story was what really kept me pushing through. They did a really good job of setting up mysteries and pacing out nuggets of information to foreshadow or be recontextualised by big reveals, and while it was mostly quite a serious and mature story it knew when to ease up and also had some really good comedic bits, like the collectible quest in the first game’s Frozen Wilds DLC for the Montana Recreations figures, or the hot air balloon guy in Forbidden West. These were effectively peppered in among more expository or melancholy moments spread across all the little snippets of collectible documents from the Alphas and Betas working on Project Zero Dawn and the enlisted civilians fighting in Operation: Enduring Victory. So, having established that the story was (for me at least) the main strength of the original games, let’s start by taking a look at how Horizon Adventures stacks up on that front.
Characterisation
For starters, they’ve changed a bunch of characters’ personalities. Aloy stands out most prominently, if only because she’s the main character so it comes up more often. Opinions may vary on this as the original games did let you choose to lean into or shy away from various attitudes at certain points with dialogue options, but my read on Aloy as a character was that she was primarily driven by her anger over Rost’s death (again, spoiler warning[1]) and her sense of duty towards both a people that had shunned her from birth only to expect her help when they needed it, and a world at large that she had to drag kicking and screaming into action against a mutual existential threat (which fit in with the occasionally quite pointed environmentalist themes of the narrative). There are a couple of characters that she lets her guard down around at various points – particularly in Forbidden West, which leant a lot more into the ‘recruiting NPCs to your ragtag Scooby Gang’ vibe that this game has going on, but Zero Dawn has a few moments of this as well; the main example I remember is Talanah, who is notable by her absence in Horizon Adventures (save for as an unlockable costume), considering that she was actually an NPC companion for a prominent side-quest chain in Zero Dawn[2], unlike Teersa who they did choose to make a playable character here despite as far as I remember all but vanishing off the face of the Earth once you finished the prologue in the original. In Horizon Adventures, however, Aloy is much more cheerful and upbeat, without any of the righteous anger, and comes across as a lot less mature than she did in the original. The cheerful demeanour I put down to the overall tone of the game being aimed at younger kids and trying to be a family-friendly game with a comedic bent, and the change in maturity I suspect is because the change in target audience means that she’s got to be an audience surrogate for players who themselves are less mature and might need a bit more reminding of plot elements.
Sylens is the other notable change. In the original games, Sylens was a ‘support’ character in the most technical sense, insofar as he shared information and offered suggestions when his goals broadly aligned with Aloy’s, and then only to the extent that he deemed necessary; but he was also an aloof bastard who at any given time was working towards at least one of several hidden ulterior motives, some of which ran in direct conflict to Aloy’s, and the only reasons she couldn’t make good on her promises to beat the snot out of him were that he stayed over encrypted comms to avoid getting tracked/beaten up, and that he was too useful to kill; a fact which he was smugly aware of. In Horizon Adventures, he’s so forthcoming as to be suspicious, is generally pretty friendly (except for one bit where he claims credit for someone else’s idea) and is also a DJ, which in context is unironically pretty impressive given the work involved to scavenge the equipment. He’s also been recast, as he was originally voiced by the inimitable Lance Reddick (rest in peace, Commander), and while I don’t envy Tim Russ (Star Trek: Voyager) the task of filling those shoes they’ve instead opted to take the voice in a completely different direction, which while fair enough I suppose is one of those things that won’t be an issue at all to anyone for whom this is their first exposure to the franchise, but for me it initially stood out as feeling a bit off.
Erend and Varl have made the transition largely unscathed. Since Erend was already a bit of a boisterous comic-relief character in the original games they didn’t need to change much to fit the tone, though they do replace his ‘captured sister’ backstory with something about a hoard of donuts, presumably because they needed to abridge the plot a bit and while keeping his original backstory intact would have required paying it off, his new one is much less serious even in context (other characters openly mock it on multiple occasions), so they’re free to keep going with the main plot unabated. As with Aloy, Varl comes across as a bit less mature than he did in the original but they’re expanding on his zero-to-hero arc so it fits with the theme.
Abridge(d) Over Troubled Water
Speaking of the main plot, If you’re an adult without prior knowledge of the franchise, you might find it to be a bit lacking in substance; After the prologue/rescuing villagers from the cult, Aloy is given the goal of finding three metal flowers that will somehow help build a weapon to stop the ancient evil the cult is in league with; she then spends a chapter on hunting down each of the flowers, gathering party members and quipping like they’re auditioning for the MCU as they go, and then they win with the power of friendship and also this gun they found – it’s not exactly War and Peace.
I can accept that it needed to dumb things down a bit because it’s trying to be baby’s first high-concept sci-fi, but it seems a particular shame that they basically cut all the stuff with the Faro Plague, Project Zero Dawn, and Operation: Enduring Victory. There’s literally a bit at one point where Aloy says something like “Gee, I wonder why there’s all these robots around?” and the character she’s talking to goes “Yeah, it’s probably a really interesting story. Anyway, moving on-” and then it literally never comes up again.
“Oh but Harry,” I hear you all saying, “It’s meant to be a kids game! Kids wouldn’t be interested in all that backstory stuff!” Really? Because If I was a kid being told “all these robots are here and look like dinosaurs because the AI in charge of rebuilding the world was a massive nerd and thought it was sad that the dinosaurs got wiped out”, my response would not be “yawn”, it would be “Oh hey, me too!”
“Well, sure, they maybe could have mentioned Gaia, but they couldn’t bring up any of the other stuff because that’s all super dark and mature!” Listen. The Clone Wars was a kids show. As were The Owl House, Steven Universe: Future (pictured below in order from left to right), etc.; It may have required re-writes to be age-appropriate in terms of accessibility and messed up-ness, but it is perfectly possible to write dark themes in a way that young audiences can understand and deal with.
Even accepting the arguments against all that other stuff, they could probably have managed the original ending without breaking continuity. It wouldn’t even be that significant a tonal departure from the scene they have already, at least before they made it a @$&**#$% dance party ending, spoiler alert. (I mock it for this, and rightfully so because it’s essentially writer shorthand for “insert proper ending here”, but truth be told I’ve gotta admit the song for it is actually pretty catchy).
The whole LEGO theme doesn’t add much narratively, either – there’s two, maybe three occasions in the plot where the characters have to build something (not counting the occasional bridge or random set-dressing in platforming sections), and if they’d been told mid-development that the deal had fallen through and they couldn’t use any LEGO branding, none of them would need to have been changed much. It’s got a similar sense of humour to the voiced TT LEGO games, but for some reason I seemed to get along with it better this time around than I did in, say, Skywalker Saga. I’m not entirely certain why; maybe it’s that they’ve got a better sense of when to let serious moments have weight without crowbarring in gags at every turn, maybe it’s the overt change in framing device making the family friendly version of the plot gel better with the jokes, maybe it’s that half the story bits are done as conversations where you can skip the voiced dialogue ahead and just read the subtitles, I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Having said all this, I know that I probably shouldn’t hold it against the game that much that they dumbed down the story. I’ve said before that I try and keep in mind the intended audience for these things (not always successfully, granted), and I accept that at least part of my disappointment at the scrubbing of this stuff is because I have prior knowledge of and investment with the franchise, which I’d hazard a guess most seven-to-twelve-year-olds don’t.
Narration
Moving on from the realm of ‘it’s bad because it’s different” complaints, I have mixed feelings about Rost as the narrator. On the one hand, the framing device of “Rost is telling a story and acknowledges that he’s taking a bit of artistic license with the details” does a bit to mollify my issues with the changes to the narrative and characters. On the other hand, between this and LEGO 2K Drive I’m starting to notice a pattern with recent LEGO games being unable to take themselves seriously as consistent narratives, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall just in case you’d started getting immersed. It’s bloody frustrating as someone who wants to engage with a story in good faith when it feels like said story keeps jerking its thumb at you and making asides to passerby to the effect of “lmao, get a load of this clown trying to take me seriously as a narrative like some kinda English major (derogatory)”.
Not that there aren’t good fourth wall breaking narratives, but unlike, say, Undertale, I rather suspect the use of the fourth wall break as a device is less out of a desire to subvert and meaningfully comment on the narrative or format and more out of a belief that the audience doesn’t possess the media literacy necessary to understand basic themes and subtext; although now that I think about it, considering the target audience is literally at a primary school reading level, it’s entirely possible that they’re right about that. This would also explain the bit towards the start where Aloy and Rost basically have to turn to the camera and explain what a cultist is for the audience. But on yet a third hand, sprouting out of my chest Zaphod Beeblebrox-style, some of Rost’s metajokes were admittedly pretty funny, and I suppose when you think about it, the fact that Rost’s ghost or voice inside Aloy’s head or whatever is diegetically narrating means that it’s arguably not so much breaking the fourth wall as calling attention to the framing device…you know what, just forget I brought it up.
Gameplay
That’s about all I’ve got to say for the story, so let’s take a look at the gameplay, which is actually pretty fun, and in some ways even manages to improve upon the original for me. There are four characters you unlock over the (linear, mission-based) campaign, each with their own signature weapon: Aloy uses her classic bow and arrow, Varl has a throwing spear, Teersa throws bombs, and Erend swings a big hammer. The change to a wider-angled camera means that for Aloy and Varl (whose weapons are both variations on ‘throw a sharp stick at it’), aiming is now essentially just on the 2D axis, but this is effectively balanced by the game being pretty strict about only being able to hit weak points from certain angles (though occasionally, this can be a bit arbitrarily exacting). Aiming with Teersa is a bit harder as her bombs have pretty sharp damage drop-off from the centre to balance them being an area of effect weapon and requires dragging a cursor around rather than just pointing in a direction and charging the shot, and Erend’s hammer swings in a flat arc so you need to jump to hit some components on machine enemies. The controller haptics, sound, and visuals on hit lend your attacks a satisfying impact, and playing on the middle of the five difficulty settings none of the enemies felt too damage sponge-y. It even managed to feel decently challenging for me, which was nice, although I do have a slight quibble that dying sends you back a bit down the path before the bit you died in, so if you’re neurotic like me you’ve got to re-collect all the secrets before you can have another crack. Another slight quibble I hesitate to bring up because this is probably subjective is that on Switch, playing it docked on the TV while over on the couch it felt a tad difficult to keep track of where I was in the heat of battle (and before anyone gets at me about just needing glasses, Dad, I’m actually slightly farsighted, so there). However, playing on my PC monitor instead through the PC version or plugging in my Switch dock, it became much easier to distinguish.
To an extent, I actually prefer the gadget system in Horizon Adventures to the one in Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, as it cuts out a lot of faffing around. I remember this was a particular thorn in my side throughout Forbidden West; to use an item in the heat of battle you had a ‘quick select’ inventory where you used the d-pad to scroll through a list of items, then pressed whichever button that item type was bound to to use them, which sounds simple enough. However, any time you picked up a new potion or tripwire or mine or distraction item it got added to the quick select wheel, so it took ages to scroll through, and once you picked it up the icon stayed in rotation even if you’d run out of the item in question so you had to manually remove icons you didn’t want clogging it up, and you also had a limited inventory for healing berries but you could refill from your ‘stash’ at any time at zero cost, which negated the point of having a stash mechanic except to make me fiddle about with an extra button while trying not to get blatted by a giant metal thagomizer.
In Horizon Adventures on the other hand, gadgets are a limited consumable that you can find randomly in chests, from the mysterious trader midway through each level, or dropped by machines both as a random drop and from destroying specific components. You can have one gadget equipped at a time, picking up a different one than what you have equipped replaces it, and they have whichever button or combo it’s mapped to as an easily readable on-screen icon next to it. Easy peasy, with a squeeze of proverbial lemon.
Additional weapons are handled similarly, as the switch to co-op focus means that the original games’ weapon wheel with its time-dilation effect had to go the way of the non-robot dinosaurs. Each character has their own set of consumable weapons which in itself wouldn’t be so bad but playing solo, the mid-mission gear chests can still spawn weapons for characters other than the one you’re playing as, which led on one awkward occasion to me not being able to use any of the gear the game had spawned for me.
In the complete opposite direction in terms of both function and design changes, healing berries are no longer a consumable item and instead are now scattered around the combat arenas, so you have a finite amount for each encounter and have to actively break away from combat or kite the enemies around a bit to use them. I generally don’t mind this change, but unless you listen to the characters’ mid-fight barks, the game isn’t great at telling you when you’re almost dead (And after a certain point you do start trying to tune them out, because the nature of mid-fight quips in games is that it doesn’t take long to have heard all of them). There are heart indicators in the corner of the UI, but no non-diegetic low health sound, no raspberry jam on the edges of the screen, and none of that red flashing effect on your character like the TT LEGO games had.
The upgrade menu has also seen a bit of a change to accommodate co-op focus, now being a vendor in the Mother’s Heart hub area rather than part of the pause menu. It’s structured differently too, no longer an upgrade tree but rather a grid of icons that can be unlocked in any order as long as you have enough studs, with most upgrades having multiple levels and more unlockable upgrades becoming available as you earn more gold bricks through the game, awarded at the end of story missions and for completing optional objectives from the request board. These upgrades are applied to all characters and are separate to the fixed level-up upgrade tracks for each character that govern meat-and-potatoes stuff like additional health and weapon damage. Most of them are fairly useful, things like ‘do more damage with explosive barrels’, ‘start each level with a random gadget and consumable weapon’, etc. and only a couple filler-type ones like ‘get more xp from environmental kills’ when most of the time I was too busy attempting to kite enemies around and hit their weak spots to tell the environmental hazards apart from the background, which came back to bite me a few times when I accidentally stumbled into what I mistook for a random puddle only to be frozen into an Aloy-sicle.
Cosmetics and Customisation
Since the four playable characters get one main weapon each and everything else is either a consumable rare weapon or gadget, the other thing the game has to reward you with besides character upgrades are cosmetics. These take a few forms: there’s costumes for Aloy and the gang where you can dress them up as different characters from Horizon: Zero Dawn who didn’t get included in the abridged version of the story, like Talanah and Petra, as well as characters and generic outfits from other LEGO themes such as City, Ninjago, and uhh…Theme Parks? Which feels a bit non-sequitur; but then again, so does the existence of this game to begin with, so it’s at least consistent in that respect. There’s also cosmetics for the hub area in the form of assorted decor items, hut roof accessories, and little gadgets to go in the yards next to huts with some sort of interaction or animation, like a feast table with a contextual button you can press to make your current character scarf down some food if you feel those grandmotherly instincts kicking in.
I never really felt a major desire to engage with either of these systems, though. In the instance of costumes, without the mainline games’ obligation to change armour for better stats and buffs, I was happy to keep Aloy in her iconic Nora Hunter or Shield Weaver looks, because the nature of LEGO minifigs is that you can only change so many details before the distinction between character and costume is lost and they just fully look like whoever they’re dressed as. While I’m sure a younger audience might find it amusing to play through the game dressed in a theme park mascot suit for the lolrandom humour factor or as whatshisname from Ninjago because they have prior familiarity with that franchise, I don’t have prior attachment to Ninjago and I don’t get enjoyment out of dressing my character up in a silly outfit if the overall tone is also silly. The humour value in such things relies on it being a subversion of the established tone rather than a continuation of it; For example, funny costumes work as cosmetics in Hitman because the game is otherwise pretty straight-facedly about a deadly assassin taking down bad people for serious and important reasons, which makes it amusing to see him doing that while dressed as a party clown; here it doesn’t feel special, because ‘being outrageously silly’ isn’t noticeably different from standard operating procedure.
The cosmetics for the Mother’s Heart hub area I did engage with a bit more, because the hub feels pretty empty otherwise (which I’m sure is intentional to not make it look overcrowded when you add a bunch of statues or whatever), but for previously stated reasons of visual consistency I mostly stuck to the ones from the Horizon: Zero Dawn theme. I particularly liked the hut roof cosmetics based on the various machines from the game.
On occasion, the optional side-objectives I mentioned earlier while discussing the character upgrade system sometimes call for specific cosmetics, like ones that ask you to interact with a certain yard cosmetic or get elemental kills dressed as the appropriate Ninjago character, which is a nice little idea to get players to go back to the cosmetic vendor and see the new costumes that have unlocked. In practice though, I mainly remember this because one of the optional objectives asks you to dress up as a cop and beat people up, which raised an eyebrow.
Graphics and Visuals
Lastly, in terms of the graphics I’ve got to give the game kudos on a few fronts. It looks good, for one thing; everything is realistically modelled, both in the sense that there’s no illegal building on any of the environments or machines if you can’t wait for the official tie-in sets and want to try recreating them yourself, but also in the sense that they’ve evidently gone to pains to make everything look like real LEGO; the lighting and reflections, the little scratches on some of the pieces in cutscenes, the way you can make out the texturing on Varl’s cloak in close-ups. On the PC version you can even make out the slight texturing and scratches on the printed character decals. One touch I thought was particularly nice is the way that fires all use fire pieces that shift size like in the stop-motion LEGO movies, even for ‘interactable’ fire that you can shoot through to add damage to your arrows or destroy vines and grass.
Unfortunately, the aesthetics are basically the only meaningful way in which the LEGO theming is incorporated; there’s occasionally a pile of bricks during non-combat sequences that you stand near and press a contextual button to build a piece of set dressing and get some studs, and there’s two points in the story where the characters have to build something (both of which would still work if the game wasn’t LEGO themed), and otherwise it’s solely an aesthetic choice (unless like Ramblingbrick you want to argue that it being a family friendly game with jokes also constitutes part of the LEGO theming). If it were me, I would have maybe tried to incorporate the original games’ machine override mechanic by letting you rebuild defeated machines as friendly NPC support or single-use weapons, or included some kind of puzzle mechanic around having to manually build structures during the puzzle platforming sequences like LEGO Bricktales or LEGO Builder’s Journey did (though admittedly that probably wouldn’t translate well to a co-op focused game designed for controller).
Making the whole game world LEGO does open up a slight issue in that hazards are sometimes not entirely distinct from things that are just background details; like in the snowy mountains section, where on multiple occasions I mistook a bit of freezing water that would turn me into a human popsicle for a regular puddle because the only visual difference is a slight bubbling animation, which is a) not easy to notice in the middle of a heated battle, and b) does not clearly convey to the player what the effect of standing in it will be except through trial and error. Similarly, some LEGO objects scattered around the outskirts of environments can be destroyed and will give you studs for doing so, but others are merely set dressing, and the fastest way to tell them apart is to ask one of the devs at gunpoint.
The other front I have to give it kudos for is that the Switch port holds up pretty well compared alongside the PC version (SONY provided a review code for PC/Steam via the LEGO Ambassadors Network after the game’s release, but we also purchased a copy on Switch, Day 1, ourselves so that we could give the co-op a try). The screenshots don’t quite do justice to the Switch version as the in-built capture system is only in 720p but while there’s definitely a noticeable difference looking at screenshots, particularly with the lighting and reflections, the drawn-out camera helps to hide the lower resolution textures and slight artifacting to the point that I didn’t really notice it during standard gameplay.
Just One More Thing…
I swear I’ll be quick here, but I do feel obliged to say that requiring a PlayStation Network account for the PC version is pretty rubbish. For one thing, did they seriously not learn their lesson from the Helldivers II debacle, which at least had the rice-paper-thin excuse of being an online multiplayer-focused game? Like, at least they’re doing it up-front this time rather than introducing it months down the line after people in regions that can’t sign up to PSN had already bought it and sunk too many hours in to be eligible for refund, but still, come on. It’s not an online multiplayer issue (I know the PC version has online co-op but that doesn’t count here, and is also immaterial since they pulled this with the recent remaster of Zero Dawn as well, which is solely singleplayer), so what is it? Having my Steam account info isn’t enough, do you want my retinal data too, Sony?
Final Verdict
At the end of the day, I did willingly finish LEGO Horizon Adventures and even did some of the optional apex machine hunts to boot, so I’d go so far as to say that overall I enjoyed my time with the game. I won’t call it my game of the year; partly because Another Crab’s Treasure and Tactical Breach Wizards are both already occupying that spot and a three-way tie would just make me look indecisive, but also partly because the stripping back of the pre-apocalypse side of the story remains a sticking point for me as someone who felt that was one of, if not the, strongest aspects of the source material. It is at least the best LEGO game I’ve played this year (the other being LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars for a retrospective article, coming soon to a Rambling Brick near you). It’s pretty fun from a gameplay perspective, and while the narrative and quips might leave you a bit cold if you’re coming in as an adult regardless of your familiarity with the original due to its simplicity, it does a decent job of getting the basics across for the younger audience.
LEGO Horizon Adventures is available on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam & Epic Games Store).
[1] I mean, he’s a gruff but lovable mentor figure in the opening chapter of an epic quest in which you play as his adoptive daughter; what did you think was gonna happen to him?
[2] She also teamed up with Aloy again in the comics, but such things always occupy a dubious position in canon due to being both ancillary media that not as many fans engage with and the nature of the main series being dialogue-choice-driven which means they have to collapse the quantum superposition of what choices are considered ‘canon’
Thanks Harry.
Have you been playing LEGO Horizon Adventures? Thinking about it? Are you just waiting for more epic robot dinosaurs to be released? Leave your Comments below!
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Until Next Time,
Play Well!