Horizon: Zero Dawn
It's easy to see why this was a bestseller on PS4 and I would recommend it for fans of open-world action-adventure games. The game features immersive world building and a gripping background story. At times it is very pretty, with some evocative vistas and excellent facial animation. Combat can be exciting, fast-paced, and also satisfyingly tactical. Shooting-an-arrow-from-a-bow-at-a-robot-dinosaur-to-remove-its-cannon-and-then-shoot-it-with-the-cannon is now officially a thing that video games let you do, and it's awesome.
And yet, it falls short from being a great game. Though released in 2017 it feels dated in many ways. Controls and camera motion come from a previous era: Aloy jumps around cliffs like a clown on a pogo stick and every time you dodge-roll during combat you will be facing the wrong direction. Most of the world is just decorative and you can interact with only a handful of story objects and structures. Travel too far and you get an immersion-breaking "leaving game area" popup. And it's quite bare: towns and even cities are just a few tents on a hill, a design metaphor that was necessary within the limitations of previous-gen hardware, but is very disappointing when compared to, say, Witcher 3 (released 2 years earlier!). Relatedly, you can only climb structures at pre-baked points, which are very hard to see. Expect to run around areas jumping on everything until you find the only acceptable handhold.
The game's weakest aspect is quest design. Side quests are often the funnest part of this genre, but not here, where they are often extremely contrived, tedious, and repetitive. There's even a category of quests called "errands", just in case you made the mistake of assuming you were in for an adventure! And this is not a choices-matter game: narrative structures are hard-coded and you just follow through. There are optional dialog choices on occasion, but they have no effect on the story.
Which leads us to the sad contrast between superb world-building on the one hand and awful characterization, dialog, and voice acting on the other. With the exception of one quest (from the Frozen Wilds expansion), all characters, including Aloy, are dull, one-dimensional, and static. I would literally groan whenever I had to talk to someone new as my expectations were quickly set to very low. Even our protagonist is a tired Mary Sue cliché and a just-so hero. She accepts every silly (and dangerous) errand side-quest with nary a doubt and is wholly unbelievable as a person. And while I can't blame the voice actors for the stilted and forced source material they were given, they often give an over-the-top performance that would put any high-school theater to shame.
And, finally, though combat is cool and there is a satisfying diversity of enemies (well, the robots are cool; humans suck) there is just too much of it and it starts to get repetitive around the mid-game point. The world is crammed with random encounter zones, which all play out pretty much the same. You can tediously skirt around them, but then you're also motivated to farm them for XP and crafting resources. It's lazy design, just "stuff to do" areas copy-pasted into the game with no quest or narrative context. Admittedly, this problem plagues the open-world genre in general, so this game is not an exception.
Small note: Nice to get support for HDR, but it's hard to configure in coordination with the game's general brightness knob. I could never quite get the dark areas to be not-too dark without washing out the bright areas. The game is generally far too dark.
There are much better open-world games. But, if you've played them already or are justifiably intrigued by Horizon: Zero Dawn's world, it's worth playing.