Horizon Zero Dawn

Guerrilla delivers an ambitious combat system in its sprawling action RPG.

During our demo of Horizon Zero Dawn, protagonist Aloy tackles a towering bipedal Corrupter, which is thought to be the cause of a growing number of corrupted machines encountered in the wild. The fight, though played in realtime, is carefully choreographed for public viewing as Aloy first deploys explosive balloons, fires arrows from the back of a hacked Broadhead, and finally tethers the irritable, ancient machine before going in for the kill.

But although smart stage management neatly compartmentalises the battle, players are free to tether from the off, remain on foot throughout, or even run away and hide. This flexibility ripples throughout the entire game and promises to deliver an uncommonly deep combat system for even the action subset of RPGs. “We wanted to create a lot of tactical options so that you have different ways to approach combat,” Troy Mashburn, lead combat designer, explains. “We built a lot [of aspects] into the machines that work with the variety of weapons and different ammo types that you have along the way.”