Horizon: Zero Dawn - Sorry PC mustard race, look away

[DeadwastePrime]

The melee combat is fucking atrocious and kills the fun of the bow and beaing a sneaky hunter. Especially with how the robots just do not stop attacking. It makes fights with 90% of the large monsters, which make up the vast majority of late game and most of the DLC encounters, just a cycle of using the rope tie gun so you can actually shoot the fucking things. It's either that or they throw 20 machines at you which is rough. The game just doesn't have the depth of mechanics to make group fights or melee enjoyable. It really doesn't help that even with an upgraded spear you do so much more damage with your bow that it's pointless to use it outside of sneak attacks or critical attacks.

I really cannot stress how unfun I find the melee. Maybe if all these various tools actually mattered it wouldn't be so bad. As is, there's almost no point in using these stingers, the rattler gun or the trip wires. You very quickly hit a point where, if you actually wanted to use your kit fully, every engagement would end up taking 30+ minutes. I've done it. And that's clearly not how a lot of these encounters were designed. That may have been how the game was intended, at least in the early stages, but that's not where it ended up. And I guess that's my issue. It feels like they wanted this game to be much, much slower but it took a turn into a more action heavy direction at some point.

why are you using melee? thats like last resort or very close range combat against certain enemies. only exception is the second game there they improved upon it somewhat. youd tie down the smaller machines with the ropecaster, then hit them with a tearblaster or other tear damage weapon to remove their armor, and finish them off with a rattler or a sling. bigger ones is similar but you just skip the ropecasting part and go straight to armor damage to make them more vulnerable.
i beat the first game twice (on normal difficulty but it still works on higher ones)

 

[Rick The Stick]

words

Yeah, did that too. Just because I didn't rant about every weapon doesn't mean I didn't use every tool or approach things "optimally". I guess I could have also complained about how much time you spend in the menus because you constantly have to switch weapons, though. Especially before you get to the purple tier weapons that cover all the ammo types.

Actually that's something that was fucking dumb. Why have so many weapon variants? The elemental arrows and bombs are already their own resource that needs crafting. Why do you need a special bow to shoot fire arrows or specific slingshots for regular and elemental bombs? Especially in the early game, it just means you spend a shit ton of time in the menus if you want to actually use all the tools.

Funny enough, I managed to get a freebie of the sequel and many of my complaints stand. Expanding the weapon wheel alleviates some of the menu issues, but the weapons seem even more redundant. I've already got multiple bows that shoot acid arrows and multiple slings for multiple bomb types and two different javelin throwers for exploding and normal ones, for example. This is retarded.
Melee combat was definitely improved, but still feels like it's intended to be last resort at times, while simultaneously nerfing the stealth by getting rid of the whistle and making enemies much more accurate in finding your location, which makes stealth take even longer and encourages a more direct approach.

Overall I think I just don't care for this games combat systems as a whole.

 

[Stains Davidson]

I also played this for free from PSN the last week or so. I used melee frequently though almost the whole game, and actually found that just chaining knockdowns over and over with strong attacks was probably the strongest/most braindead way to fight every single thing 1v1 except the birds, up until the big stuff like the T-rex.

It was kind of funny that handling is the only stat in the game that feels like it counts for anything (except maybe stealth,) but it's lame that what feels like the simply Strictly Most Effective way to fight in general is to spam hardpoint arrows in the rough direction of your target with max handling while barely aiming. Doubly lame is just how early in the game that opens up. I think I had the purple shadow bow at like 2-3 hours or something? About an hour after that I clocked how busted handling was, and the rest of the game felt like a retarded pretty-boring turkey shoot strung together by (((cinematic))) fake gameplay rock clambering.

The open world felt fairly empty and anemic, relying on drawing you around playing connect-the-dots picking up herbs and stuff to make up for the fact that there's not much else to pull you towards anything except map markers, and that there's just not that much in the world in general. The stealth is bad because every enemy's vision cone feels like it's 20 degrees or something, and getting anything for stealth takes it to like 10 and then 5, no tension at all.

What I really liked were the big fights where you engage something and it draws in every other robot within like a mile, definitely the highlights of the game, but I think they highlight the biggest problems with the game's combat at the same time. That's mostly that it is a baby game where it's set up so the enemies are (almost always) going to attack you one at a time, so as soon as circumstances align such that you have two or three thing actively attacking you the game just... doesn't really seem to accommodate that scenario, and it seems real easy to get a bad combo that denies you the ability to heal or any real recourse to the situation you're in.

Also they did the story beat at the end of a quest where someone is "wounded," and does a boring little "agh... tell my [brother/wife/gf/etc]... I... ough [dies]" thing way too many times.