Sometimes Fun But Always Forgettable – WGB

Lego Horizon Adventures is a weird game. The Horizon games are already slightly odd because despite selling millions upon millions of copies, they don’t get talked about much in the gaming space and even have a fairly strong contingent of people who dislike them. But given its commercial success, it’s hardly surprising that Sony is heavily pushing Horizon, with multiple upcoming projects all based around the IP. And that brings us to Lego Horizon Adventures, a cutesy retelling/remake of the first game in Lego form, which is…well, a tad odd considering the first game just got remastered last month. So, who exactly is Lego Horizon Adventures for?

The target audience for this game is hard to figure out. On paper, it seems like the perfect customer for Lego Horizon is a hardcore Horizon fan who wants to play what is essentially a remake that also happens to be Lego-themed, and is willing to pay full triple-A prices to do it. That’s a strange venn diagram. Ultimately, it seems like the target market is actually adults who really love Horizon and want to introduce their children to it via a more light-hearted take on the subject matter and split-screen co-op. But that target market seems rather small.

Price: $60/£60
Available On: PlayStation, Switch, PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: Studio Gobo, Guerilla Games
Published By: PlayStation Studios

So here’s the gist of the plot, and feel free to skip this paragraph if you’ve already played Horizon because the story is damn-near identical in setup. You play as A|oy, an outcast in a post-apocalyptic world in which robot animals roam the land. She must set out to save the world from an evil AI, and in the process discover the secrets of her past. Although since she is made of plastic, I think it is safe to assume her origins began with injection moulding. Does that count as IVF?

Ashly Burch returns to voice Aloy which is absolutely fantastic. I didn’t realise this at first because Lego Aloy sounds almost nothing like her realistic-looking counterpart. It wasn’t until I checked the IMDB page that I discovered Ashly had reprised her role.

The reason for the difference in voice is simple: this Aloy might as well be a completely different character. Over in the main series Aloy has struggled to connect with audiences because of her demeanour. She’s an outcast who has difficulty managing to connect with anyone, and for good reason as she wasn’t treated well by the locals who believed she could not have come from a human mother. It’s a compelling idea for a backstory that should make Aloy a sympathetic character but sadly the battle to form connections ends up including players. She has little in the way of personality outside of being a bit surly, rushing through conversations and rarely ever smiling. The idea that she’s socially inept but trying her best also doesn’t come across very well, and thus to most players, she feels like bit of a dick, to be honest.

The problem is that while the overarching plot on the Horizon games is pretty damn cool, the charter writing and dialogue are very weak, thus the heroine we should be rooting for and feeling empathetic toward winds up being blander than unseasoned tofu. The writers have yet to find a way to make her likeable to the audience, or failing that, just memorable in any way.

Lego Aloy goes in the complete opposite direction, bubbling with the bouncy energy that only being made of plastic can imbue. This Aloy seems intent on making up for every time her twin sister didn’t smile by smiling all the time, merrily tackling the potential end of the world with a cheerful grin and a can-do attitude that makes my surly brain want to murder her with a brick. Ashly Burch seems to be having a grand time performing this way, but in the end Lego Aloy faces the same problem as her big sister in that they are both one-note personalities, albeit at very different extremes.

That’s a shame because while the main series’ attempts to tackle Aloy’s struggles to fit in socially are pretty poorly handled, a Lego game might have been a good place to tackle those themes. But in moulding Aloy anew in Lego form, any nuance or attempts at some deeper meaning have been stripped out entirely, leaving behind a wholly forgettable story. Family-friendly games and stories like this are the perfect places for themes of acceptance, learning who you are and how to find your place in the world, but I guess there’s no room for that amongst the lame jokes, so the whole “outcast” things gets tossed out the window in about five minutes.

Right. Yes. The jokes. Look, I’m a 32-year-old dude but I also adore cheerful stories, crazy humour and crassness. I have a huge soft spot for animated kids/family movies, too, so while I’m not the ideal audience I still think I can. talk about this kind of adventure with some degree of authority. So trust me when I tell you that Lego Horizon Adventures falls squarely into the bland, boring and banal category of family-friendly story-telling. There are a few moments that elicited a smile from me, but ultimately this is the kind of kid’s game that feels like it’s speaking down to kids with the most generic jokes and lack of substance.

For a moment, let’s consider this game against The LEGO Movie. It also featured a character who is an outcast, struggling to fit into society. That movie manages to take its main character and deliver a great story about finding a place in the world even when you don’t quite fit in at times, all while delivering joke after joke. In comparison, Lego Horizon Adventures is like one of those weird straight-to-DVD Lego movies that nobody remembers.

The rest of the characters, all of whom, like Aloy, are a generally much happier group than their full-blown Horizon counterparts. Here though, you get to actually play as Aloy’s companions, jumping into the shoes of  Varl, Teersa and Erend. You can’t hot-swap between characters like you do in other Lego games, which is a shame, but as you embark on missions you can choose who to go as. Varl employs a spear for his attacks, whereas Erend is the only melee-focused character, wielding his hammer. Teersa is all about throwing explosives. Each of them get a few unique weapon upgrades mid-mission to, like Erend’s earthquake hammer or Varl’s boomerang, but at the end of the day the game feels pretty much the same no matter who you choose.

In fact, let’s get to the gameplay proper and discuss how a standard mission plays out. The gamer’s world is split into a series of environments ranging from a jungle to a desert to a snowy area.

Weirdly, each environment is actually one big level that’s been split up into multiple areas. This becomes really apparent after you finish the game and open up expeditions where you can freely explore to continue levelling up characters. It’s almost as if Lego Horizon may have been more open-world at one point, much like the main Horizon games. Clearly, that’s not the case though, because now the areas are split up by small loading screens.

Structurally, it’s a little annoying that instead of moving between environments each chapter takes place in the same chunk of the world. Heading back to the same areas, again and again, does not help alleviate the game’s already repetitive and simple gameplay, especially as each area in the environment looks almost exactly like the last, with the exception being the Cauldrons or the occasional Tallneck sequence.

Most of the time, you’ll actually just be ambling around the linear levels doing…well, kind of nothing. There’s the occasional chest to find off the beaten path that rewards you with Studs, and some very simple platforming that involves holding down the left stick. Occasionally you’ll run into a puzzle that typically amounts to finding an explosive barrel and tossing it at something. Considering you spend the majority of your time in the sections, it’s dissapointing how dull they are. Past Lego games always made exploration fun by including interesting secrets, weird stuff to find, cool little events, lots of platforming and heaps of other shenanigans. Lego Horizon has exactly none of those things, and thus the main goal of the non-combat sections is to get through them as quickly as possible to get back to the fighting.

Combat is where the game is best as it attempts to capture some of the fun, frantic magic of the main Horizon games. Stealth is largely pointless and only there as a nod to the main games, and fighting the human cultists is pretty dull. But battling the robotic animals is more entertaining, bringing in the Horizon gameplay loop of attacking weak spots in order to break pieces of the machines off. It basically boils down to spamming your basic attack over and over, but there are a few fun wrinkles such as firing arrows through hazards to imbue them with elemental damage. Plus you can pick up buffs like a flame bow or ice spear with limited uses, as well as extra gadgets to use such as the tripcaster, frostwave or jump boots. My personal favourite is the deployable hotdog vendor who lobs explosive rockets.

Between outings Aloy and her pals hang out at Mother’s Heart, a small hub world that be customised over time. In this little village you can spend Lego Studs to put together fun buildings and decorations, while the community board hosts a bunch of challenges to earn extra Gold Bricks from. These bricks, also earned by completing the story missions, just unlock more customisation options, such as a wide selection of costumes, but are mostly there for the more die-hard players to chase.

Over the years the Lego games have frequently delivered pretty strong visuals, coming closer and closer to replicating the real-world little plastic bricks in digital form. It’s always kind of cool to see franchises brought to life in brick form. However, none of those past Lego titles holds a plastic candle to what Lego Horizon throws onto the screen. This is a seriously gorgeous game

I did find myself disappointed by how little the Lego aspect came into play though. In the other Lego titles you’re constantly building things, either by holding a button or manually placing blocks. But for some reason, Lego Horizon barely makes any use of its construction blocks. Sure, there’s the occasional object you put together with a tap of a button, but that’s about it. The rest of the time, the fact that everything is made of plastic blocks is completely irrelevant.

Lego Horizon is fun in a safe, basic and bland kind of way. The jokes rarely land, the characters aren’t great and all of the gameplay outside of the combat is meh. Fighting is where Lego Horizon Adventures is at its best, but that isn’t saying much as its fairly mundane.

The game never does manage to find its own identity – if you want Horizon, go and play the recent Horizon Zero Dawn remaster, and if you want Lego then the likes of Lego Harry Potter or Lego Star Wars are vastly more enjoyable and make far better use of Lego gimmick.

What’s strange to me is that Lego Horizon kind of sucks at being Lego or Horizon. The Lego aspects are almost non-existent, and story is so stripped-back and the characters so different that it barely even feels like a Horizon game outside of shooting robot dinosaurs.

In the end, Lego Horizon ends up being the worst of the Horizon games, and way down the list of Lego games. And thus we end on the same question I asked at the start of the review: who is this actually for?