Playtime: 134h 30m.
Wow, how did I play this game for so long? I don’t know, the game loop of hunting and bringing down machines is entertaining enough (but so it was on the first game too), and I hopefully kept on going, looking for that spark of magic that made me fall in love with Zero Dawn.
Plot
Very disappointing. While I was in awe at each step of the way on the original entry, with quite an original plot and interesting twists, I never enjoyed the main plot on this one.
The companions have interesting enough backgrounds and developments, but they just sit at home base, chilling most of the time. So while having a “team” was interesting enough, it didn’t fit with most of the game.
I hope someday the gaming industry gets over trying to replicate the Mass Effect 2 Suicide Mission (which was extremely epic, for sure).
The plot never felt natural, only happening through forcedly extending the lore so we could get another full game out of it. And the ending… so underwhelming.
I was playing while my son watched and I saved the game and told him we’d finish the game together the next day so we could savor it better. As it happens, the moment I saved was the last playable bit, with nothing to do other than walk to the next dialogue piece, which ended up being the last of the game.
It was so poor that I thought it was a a break before bringing in the actual last portion of the game!
I already feel sorry for the 3rd entry, because if this one felt light on story… well, I hope it wasn’t Gerrilla Games’ decision to make it a trilogy, at least not with the terrible excuse used at the end of this game.
Gameplay
That’s gotta be a highlighy. Fighting robot dinosaurs never got old. Which is definitely a blessing, because it does make the game enjoyable, but maybe also a curse, because there’s nothing else to it.
Well, besides how it looks and runs, of course. But more on that later.
Puzzles could have been more interesting if Aloy didn’t blabber the solution to them so quickly that most of the times I didn’t even have the time to assess the situation before trying to solve it. I wish I had installed this mod earlier: Shut up Aloy.
Graphics
If you can ignore the (so dense!) vegetation that moves around so much that seem to be animated using the mocap of some tube man, then this game is a sight for sore eyes.
Quite often I would just stop and nudge my wife: “look! isn’t it beautiful?”.
But, no matter how great the game looked, I couldn’t get over the hero lighting that makes characters glow like there’s a movie set light beaming at them, and only them, at all times. Look how ridiculous it makes this scene look:
Performance
Good amounts of configurability, even combining super sampling techniques (i.e., DLSS & FSR) with Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DSR, which lowers the resolution in graphically intensive scenes to keep to a target FPS), which keeps performance butter smooth for most of the game.
NPC heavy places, like bit towns would always bring the framerate down, though. Sometimes introducing some stuttering/frame pacing. These I never managed to solve.
Conclusion
I’m not sure if the first game set the bar too high or if the second one failed to deliver. Both? Maybe.
But the 1st one was soooo good that it made it a no-brainer for me to me buy the 2nd one.
I don’t think I’ll be playing the 3rd one.
That being said, I can’t say in good conscience that I had a bad time. Specially after playing more that 100 hours of it!