![]() ![]() You learn a little more about the world, and possibly about the threat Aloy will face in the sequel, but it’s all a matter of coloring in details around the edges of basic concepts we already knew and understood well enough. Rather than showing us any large-scale Banuk settlements or delving deeper into their culture, the expansion settles for a handful of peripheral camps, a few new characters, and a general rehash of what we already knew.Įven the story, while ostensibly new, doesn’t really expand the scope of Horizon in any meaningful way. They hunt in smaller groups called weraks. They feel a spiritual connection to the machines. They paint massive murals in bright colors. In truth, you don’t really learn much of anything you didn’t already know. The Frozen Wilds, however, sold itself as a chance to interface more directly with the group. Members of the Banuk tribe appeared in the main game, of course, and we learned a lot about their quasi-Inuit, heavily shamanistic culture from those encounters. Part of the problem is the way the game criminally underuses the tribe that was supposed to be its focus, the Banuk. These may not be the right choices from a design standpoint, of course, but I’d rather the game have taken chances to make the region feel meaningfully different in some way, rather than just throwing in some hot springs and a few tougher enemy encounters that could have happened anywhere. Maybe I should need to change my combat tactics when I’m in deep snow. Maybe my choice of clothes should matter, less I takes damage from exposure. I found myself wishing that something, anything in the gameplay might change to justify all of Aloy’s complaints about the extreme cold. Outside of a handful of areas that draw heavily from the setting’s real-world equivalent, Yellowstone National Park, The Cut doesn’t have much of its own identity, either in visuals or in gameplay. But with few exceptions, I’m not sure I could look at a screenshot and tell you with any certainty whether it’s from The Frozen Wilds or the rest of Horizon. Is the snow a little deeper here? Are the mountains a little taller? Sure. ![]() The main game already had plenty of snowy, mountainous regions. The main point of difference between this new region and the rest of the game is ostensibly supposed to be that it’s cold and snowy, but that’s not exactly distinctive in the context of the game. Once you’ve installed The Frozen Wilds, you gain access to The Cut, a region attached to the northeastern corner of the existing game world. The Frozen Wilds has plenty of box-ticking additions: a new area of the map to explore, new weapons, new gear, new collectibles, and new animal-inspired machines to hunt. ![]() Now, it would be unfair of me to say there’s nothing new here. Perhaps that’s why The Frozen Wilds, its first and evidently only expansion, feels so tentative. As is perhaps fitting for a game about the collapse and rebuilding of Earth’s biomes, Horizon felt like an ecosystem, and a remarkably healthy one at that. Guerrilla Games’ first foray into open-world action felt like a remarkably complete experience, with a finely told story, a wonderfully realized world, and tightly interlocked gameplay systems that fed on each other in surprising ways. ![]() Expanding a game like Horizon Zero Dawn was never going to be easy. ![]()
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