This lets players pull off some amazing moves, but (and I have to speak for myself here) it doesn’t always encourage optimal or creative play.Īloy always moves so quickly and easily through the environment and her weapons fire so fast that the easiest way through an encounter is always going to be shooting. Over two games, the ethos in Horizon has been to give the player more and more options for movement and weapons. She uses the environment to give herself an advantage and face the Predator on her terms. She isn’t a weak character, but she has limitations - her weapons, strength, and how fast she can move - that she must work within as she faces off against the Predator. Horizon Zero DawnĪs you watch Prey, your understanding of what Nary can and can’t do is constantly developing. The game took away some control at this moment and forced me to work within its imposed limitations instead of giving me more and more options. There was a moment of panic as I was forced to reorientate and figure out what I was capable of without my weapons. This was the first time I had encountered this machine and I didn’t have my weapons. After hundreds of hours spent playing both Horizon games, I’m left unable to tell any stories of fighting a specific machine in a memorable environment that contributed to the encounter in some way, except for one.Īt a certain point in Zero Dawn, Aloy is stripped of her weapons and dropped into the center of an enclosed arena with a corrupt behemoth. But the cumulative effect of all that control is a flattening of what it feels like to move through or fight in different environments. That was a conscious decision by the designers, whose goal was to give the player as much control as possible.
To try and capture it in one word, Aloy is powerful, and she’s supposed to feel that way. This collection of tools and physical abilities means players don’t have to worry much about surviving an encounter if they’re constantly moving. In the sequel, Aloy gets access to a grappling hook and a glider that adds a vertical dimension to the gameplay and another avenue of evasion, if you happen to be near grapple points or a structure. That combined with the fact that there’s no stamina meter, and Aloy moves equally fast in every environment and it becomes even easier to stay out of the attack pattern of most machines. She jumps, dodges, and rolls with such ease that evading the attacks of all but the highest-level enemies is pretty easy. Part of the reason for this is Aloy’s incredible athleticism. There’s no meaningful difference in feel or approach to fighting some machine in mountains versus in the forest. But the changing environments are mostly attractive set dressing for encounters with the types of machines you find there. In the game, Aloy, the main character of both Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, traverses and fights robot dinosaurs in forests, deserts, mountains, and jungles. But similarities in how Prey and Horizon think about the environment and characters mostly stop there. Like Prey, Horizon is set in the beautiful American West and has a protagonist that uses a bow and arrow against a technologically advanced enemy that is her quest to defeat.
#PREY BOOK SERIES MOVIE#
After watching the movie again (this time in its Comanche language dub, which I highly recommend), I started to get excited when thinking about how it builds tension through challenges presented by the environment and the limitations of certain weapons, and how that could be incorporated into the next Horizon video game. The Predator is still bigger, faster, and has more advanced weapons - her survival isn’t guaranteed. They might give her a greater chance to survive, but the tension of whether or not she can never goes away.
Her preparations don’t reduce the amount of danger she’s in. Prey uses these scenes to brilliantly set up a final confrontation where Naru uses everything she’s learned to attack the Predator as effectively as possible with the weapons she has.
In another, she learns the limits of the Predator’s thermal vision and how it might be vulnerable to distractions and attacks from above. Another occurs in a burned forest where she sees how the Predator moves through the treetops and uses its shield as both a defensive and offensive weapon. There’s one confrontation in an open prairie where Naru learns open space and the Predator’s laser targeting system aren’t a good combination. During Prey, the new Predator prequel out now on Hulu, main character Naru (Amber Midthunder) encounters the Predator multiple times before their final battle.
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