1 week Ago By Chris Roling
LEGO Horizon Adventures from developers Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo aims to walk an interesting balance between bringing a powerhouse franchise to younger players while also providing a standard, fun LEGO game experience. The ambitious blend of LEGO hilarity with Aloy's open-world narrative makes for one of the year's most interesting releases. It takes the events of 2017's Horizon Zero Dawn and gives them a colorful LEGO brick pass in feel and visuals while adding a co-op aspect to the familiar-feeling gameplay.
But the results aren't as cut and dry as one might expect from a standard LEGO adaptation, not with Guerrilla Games involved. In fact, Horizon Adventures ends up much deeper than expected in quite a good way. Graphics and Gameplay It's really hard to imagine a better fit for a LEGO game.
The Horizon series is vibrant, colorful, and mostly upbeat, and when it's not, even the darker tones and scary moments have a sense of serenity and beauty to them anyway. Horizon Adventures takes the best aspects there and puts it into LEGO brick form. It's one of the most stunning-looking games of the year in motion, what for the way little pieces define every inch of the game's canvas.
And little in-motion details like bridges clicking together as the player walks are just amazing. It wouldn't work without stellar sound design, which the game boasts. Those clicks of bricks are very real, ambient noise and soundtracks are fitting and the voice acting is about as over the top as one has come to expect here.
Also, as expected, characters move in that stop-animation feel of past LEGO games in a fun way. It's a breeze to control and some of the standard Horizon gameplay trappings here make the cut. Think, the focus mechanic to see things in the environment that are interactable and the weak-point targeting system against all manner of beastly-robotic enemies.
New here is the presence of cooperative multiplayer, which is easy enough to pull off and just downright fun to experiment with. All that aside, this game really, really helps to explain why co-op hasn't come to the mainline Horizon series. The games are designed around one player and plinking down even the biggest of beast's weak points from multiple angles just makes things too easy.
Translated: The co-op is perfect for this game, but don't expect it to start a trend for the series. Story and More Horizon Adventures offers a brief, family-friendly retelling of the first game in the series. That said, don't expect the teeth of the original game's narratives.
There's a big reduction in emphasis on the end-of-the-world aspect of the story and more attention paid to environmental lessons and character relationships. The narrative instead gets a heavy dose of the standard LEGO game and movie humor. We're talking hot dog carts, funny quips and screams and all types of wild costumes.
When we say dressing up Aloy or someone else in a chicken suit doesn't ruin the vibe of the game, well, it really doesn't. Customization is a positive point of the game. It's even a little surprising it lets players change up Aloy in some funny ways, but really fits the tone.
Players can also tweak the game's hub world to their liking, which means adding a welcome personal touch. Overall progression is standard gaming stuff, as leveling up equates to buffs to expected things like health and damage output. Grinding experience also happens via side jobs and tasks, whether it's completing a challenge or something else.
Beyond the expected suite of options in the menus, Horizon Adventures launches with five different difficulty level options, which some LEGO game veterans might know are a rather big number. And that is one of the game's biggest feats. Other LEGO games struggle to scale and provide older audiences with a challenge.
Not here. Horizon Adventures is incredibly difficult on the highest settings, and not unfairly so, asking for precise timing and decision-making in a way that feels really good. Even under the strain of co-op, performance is generally good too, rounding out an impressive package.
Conclusion Horizon Adventures is engrossing to the eyes and just plain fun to play—for all ages. This is one of the first games in a while with a truly impressive difficulty scale. It's casual fun for kids, yet will have adults sitting on the edge of their seats trying to get the proper timing in battle.
Admittedly, it does sort of feel like the Horizon series didn't need help getting the attention of younger players. The world gorgeous, Aloy is awesome and so are dinosaurs and robots. So, while this doesn't necessarily feel like onboarding to Horizon itself, Horizon Adventures does feel like perhaps the best LEGO adaptation to date and one that future attempts should draw closely from in many respects.
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