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).