What is this? A kid-friendly adaptation of Horizon: Zero Dawn using the Lego formula
Expect to pay: £59.99/$59.99
Promoter: Guerrilla, Studio Gobo
Editor: PlayStation Publishing LLC
Revised on: Ryzen 7 7700X, RTX 4080, 64 GB RAM
Steam bridge: Checked
Multiplayer? Offline and online cooperation
Link: Official website
I'm not really sure what Sony or Guerilla saw in the crossover potential of Lego Horizon Adventures. Post-apocalyptic dinosaur hunting series from Lego and PlayStation don't appear oppositeexactly, but before I sat down to play it, I also didn't see any multiplicative power of the major brands in combining them, especially compared to the Lego Harry Potter or Star Wars games.
Now that I've finished playing it, I see even less reason to justify the design of Lego Horizon Adventures. I honestly don't know why this game exists, and frankly, I'm not even sure the people behind it do either.
The construction
Lego Horizon Adventures is a very loose adaptation of the plot of 2017's Horizon Zero Dawn (emphasis on the cowardly). The story covers most of Huntress Aloy's journey, including her battle against the evil cult leader Helis and her attempt to understand the enigmatic tales of the “old world.” Much of the nuance of Zero Dawn's story gets lost in the sauce here. Aloy's outcast status within her tribe, a relevant and meaningful struggle for acceptance that I think would have fit well into this family narrative, is a throwaway joke. Perhaps this should have been my first warning sign, as Lego Horizon Adventures would continue to flee the depths at every opportunity beyond this point.
A lot of the jokes didn't sit well with me, but I'll give myself some time for not being able to make a 30 year old man laugh. The writing, however, never ventures beyond the tired construction you've seen countless times in Dreamworks animated films. They hate the “they’re right behind me, aren’t they?” The Marvel-esque style of humor is going through a tough time. I think even its target audience will tire of its lazy writing by the time the campaign concludes, which is almost impressive, considering how incredibly short this game is.
Mental block
Unlike other Lego games, where characters tend to function more like skins than characters, the playable characters in Horizon Adventures all have their own attacks and gadgets. For example, Aloy focuses from a distance with her bow while her companion Erend gets closer with his big hammer.
The levels are exactly the same just a few hours after starting.
The problem is that the levels themselves don't vary at all. Almost every five-minute mission simply tasks you with killing a bunch of enemies and running through extremely similar maps, making every level feel exactly the same just a few hours after starting.
It started to feel so copy-and-pasted that at some points I was convinced I had accidentally chosen to replay a mission. There are clever ways in which the game attempts to disguise this obviously short loop, as the tasks given to you and the settings in which you complete missions change, but these tasks only result in different cutscenes and the locales are just visually distinct.
Combat is the video game equivalent of putting together 10,000 identical basic 2×2 Lego bricks: you'll just spend most of your time spamming the attack button and dodging weird projectiles. The consumable gadgets you can find add a small, brief thrill of variety, allowing you to land big AoE attacks or freeze enemies in place, but combat will still start to feel repetitive at first.
The variety of enemies steadily improves throughout the game, introducing new types of robot dinosaurs with each handful of missions. Facing them forces you to mix up your attack, as you'll need to attack some from behind or learn new patterns to dodge. Ultimately, they can't keep the overly simplistic combat interesting throughout Lego Horizon Adventures' entire campaign, which is laughable given its length.
Broaden your horizons
In the age of 100+ hour RPGs and endless live service games, a short but sweet game can certainly have its charm. I would embark on a small, focused adventure any day over the course of an average odyssey. Unfortunately, I think Lego Horizon Adventures is the worse of both worlds in this regard. It's repetitive, I don't even try to do anything creative with the Lego game formula, and you can comfortably complete it in a single day. Usually I don't care how long a game is relative to its price, but this one costs $60 and won't even hold a child's attention for more than an afternoon.
Even with an occasional fondness for the Horizon series, I found myself bored after two hours. So who exactly can I recommend this game to: 12 year olds who love both Lego and Horizon? Adult Horizon fans who want to play a cooperative game with their kids?
The character animations are all extremely smooth and the flashy particle effects easily make this the best-looking Lego game I've ever seen.
Maybe just people who really like looking at virtual Lego bricks rather than real bricks. To be honest, the game looks amazing on PC: I'm sure that's a benefit of the stop-motion effect that Lego Horizon Adventures imitates, but the character animations are all extremely smooth and the particle effects flashy easily make it the best. I look like a Lego set I've never seen. A low bar perhaps, but one that the game clears comfortably.
Performance on PC was also good. I had all the settings maxed out in 4K with the framerate uncapped, and it was flawless aside from a handful of stutters. These stutters seem to be directly related to enemy deaths and only occurred when I defeated multiple machines in a single attack, likely due to the Lego brick debris flying when an enemy dies.
But outside of a blind obsession with Horizon or an infatuation with digital bricks, there's little to enjoy about Lego Horizon – and even then, I don't think fans of either or the other will leave particularly satisfied. Mildly entertained for an evening perhaps, at best.
