Let's start with a brief history lesson. This is a PlayStation exclusive game made by Guerrilla studios who are most famous for making the Killzone series, which has been Playstations first party fps series for many years without ever being anywhere near as successful or acclaimed as Halo from the Xbox side but I guess they thought they had to make an attempt. That said, The last Killzone game by Guerrilla was a launch PS4 game and was pretty good. Horizon though is a third person open world action RPG which is quite a step in a completely different direction and it seems to have paid off.
As an overview of a setting you are part of a tribe that exists in some kind of end of the world scenario (I say 'some kind' but actually I know what happened but don't want to spoil the plot so lets stick with that) so you use a mix of bows and arrows, electronic bombs, turrets, spears and other crossed idea weapons that come with a reborn distopian future. These weapons are used to fight off the predictable evil tribes and the lest predictable robot animals which roam around the map. Some are nice and simple like bulls and deer up to giant robot crocodiles and Ligers.
As you get further in to the game and face bigger enemies you learn the areas to hit. The bigger machines have weapons and armour that you can shoot off with certain weapons/ ammo types. If you can get these parts off in a large battle early you can remove many of their abilities and can make them end up as big arrow sponges. You just nead to learn that technique which took me a while. Other useful abilities you gain overtime to help defeat them are stealth kills, critical hits, multishot arrows and the ability to override enemies and get them on your side. Master these techniques (and get the power armours) and the last few missions will be a breeze (if that's what you want, if not, don't do the side missions).
The main story is brilliantly told as you discover the history of how the world got to this situation and Aloys' purpose in it (Aloy being the main character). The pacing of the reveal is fantastically done as you search through different derelict sites and find audio and video logs that tell you the story and get some help from Xbox turncoat Phillip Broyles ('cause this is a PS exclusive and around this time last year he was in Xbox exclusive Quantum break) who brings his signature delivery to the game.
The general RPG elements are simple but all there. Side missions, collectibles, weapon upgrading, trading, levelling up and other little things that you expect are in and all work fine. Unfortunately I was always seemingly running out of wire which is an element used in making both arrows and tripwires (the 2 best weapons) which is a pain in the arse as I never had problems with any other resources. One other issue is that you can't modify the map to show only certain things so it constantly looks like a mad cluster of little icons that can be fiddly if you're looking for locations of collectibles, corruption zones, hunting lodges and other side questy things.
All around this is a truly fantastic game and for a first game of this nature Guerrilla have knocked the distracting rock out of the park. If they carry on in this trajectory the next game could be an all time great, no Joke.
I was going to the return the 'you may also like' section which tells you that if you like this game then another I think you might like, or if you prefer you could see if you like the game I said it's like and judge this game on that but I spend 10 minutes looking through what it's like and although it has lots in common with many games it gathers ideas from a lot of different places so I can't really pinpoint one or two games, so just google 'open world 3rd person action rpg' and figure it out from there.
As one last push in the direction of the game it has a character called Erend and he has this hair combo:
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