Recent reviews by Ryokilos

3/10 Total

TLDR; Aloy is a cool character that suffers from a pretty yet empty feeling world, a disinterested story, and unfulfilling gameplay.

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Long version
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I tried my best to give the story a rather generous chance, but it is extremely uninteresting, basicallyeveryone you are to meet dies immediately after the game sets up the tone of a god awful community who gives no ♥♥♥♥♥ about you. The town has a ceremony where you need to pass a test to be a member of the tribe and a weird rule (which feels specifically designed for Aloy) that if you were born as an outsider, you can apply to be a tribe member, but like also the best in the contest gets to ask anything of the town's tribe leaders. Mostly you wanna know who your mom is because... you have no clue who she is, and since a child it's always bugged you. You reasonably don't give a damn about the tribe, even though Rost forces it on you. Eventually you turn up to the event for better or worse, you meet mostly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who don't like you because you are an outsider and... a few nice people, and then

the big ambush

happens, and for whatever reason the game thinks you want to figure out the big mystery of whodunnit and why you need revenge!!!! Beyond the carefully crafted characters in the start, everyone else you meet beyond the intro area is just a total blowhard.

The only actual character that hangs around is Aloy which genuinely felt like a cool protagonist trapped in a bad game, her design, and appears is stellar, as well as her voice acting but her writing demotes her to seem like she is a quirky marvel character as opposed to being a strong, emotionally complex, yet foolhardy woman you would have imagine her to be given her stunted uprising.

The atmosphere of the world isn't even interesting enough to want to continue to explore, it feels like they created 4 really pretty biomes to interact within and just then tried to inject as many points of interests as naturally as they thought would work which frankly wasn't enough. The game is pretty but it feels so vastly empty in a large number of places, that feels magnified whenever you have to walk somewhere.

The gameplay loop is literally walk everywhere (until of course get the ability to unlock mounts that forces you to constantly have to recapture if it dies, you load in from a mission, and/or randomly disappear or lose sight of you?) until you get to X location, while picking up material Y in order to craft arrows so you can kill stuff to... ??? idk? there's no motivation to even get better stuff, all you do is attack everything with bows at their weak point until they die.

The sound design of the game comes off genuine, albeit there are some noises, such as the galloping of your mount, or Aloy loudly and randomly muttering to herself and comes off as peculiar or strange. Music falls under the same category of sounding genuine and pleasant.

All in all, the game struggles to hold any of my attention because my motivations for why to continue at all within the game are just not obvious to me, like Why do I give a ♥♥♥♥ about my mom if she's been gone for so long? Why even stay in that area if people are going to treat me so unkind? Aloy's motivation for not just looting en masse and fleeing makes no sense. . The gameplay isn't fun, sneaking around empty feels, looking for weakspots on enemies to kill them with slightly different variants of a bow to loot enemies so that I can kill enemies faster just does not appeal to me.

If you are absolutely interested in trying this game anyways, I recommend getting it under a $10 price point.

Not for me, looks pretty though.

"aN AnOmaLy"

It does need some polishing in certain places, but it's honestly fun, I can't wait to see what they end up doing with this game further down the road.