Will Lego Horizon Adventures attract a whole new audience to Aloy’s exploits? Or does Sony’s arrow fall short of the mark?
Sony’s Horizon franchise has always felt like it had the potential to tap into a younger demographic, what with its plucky youthful protagonist, largely-bloodless robot dino combat, and environmental messaging, but Sony never really pitched the games that hard toward kids – until now. This week sees the release of Lego Horizon Adventures, which reassembles 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn into a plastic-y kid-friendly form.
Will Lego Horizon Adventures attract a whole new audience to Aloy’s exploits? Or does Sony’s arrow fall short of the intended target? Time to break this blocky adventure down…
Lego Horizon Adventures sticks to the broad strokes laid down by Horizon Zero Dawn, in the sense that you play as a redhead named Aloy with a mysterious past who has to save a world overrun by aggresive robo dinos and fanatical cultists. Beyond that, most of the original game’s complex backstory involving competing AIs, cloning, and other sci-fi chicanery has been jettisoned, presumable to keep this game approachable for younger players. Hearing Ashly Burch and other original HZD cast members (minus Lance Reddick sadly) doing poppy kid-friendly version of their characters is interesting, and the plot being boiled all the way down to “you have to stop Helis because he hates trees” is amusing in a way, but so much has been sanded down in this retelling that the story becomes rather uninteresting.
While this version of Horizon Zero Dawn’s story isn’t that compelling, the franchise’s world still looks very impressive done up with Lego. The makers of Lego Horizon Adventures went with a fixed isometric camera, which allows them to pack every inch of the screen with a huge amount of detail and plenty of flashy effects, including ray tracing. The game offers the choice of a 30fps Fidelity mode and 60fps Performance mode on PS5, with both running very consistently, even with tons of stuff flying around on screen.
