Recent reviews by Lavender Gooms

Cowards.

It was a fun game, but tedious. There's better ones out there, and after this last patch there's better developers to give your money to.

It's fun then after 85 hours of playing you go to sleep while having a pawn with you that is acting normally, with normal eyes, normal mannerisms, and no sympoms whatsoever, and then a cutscene happens and now everyone in the capital is dead.

GG making me instantly no longer interested in playing. Great mechanic, there.

I, We, You, He, She, It, They, Me, Us, You, Her, Him, It, Them, All, Another, Any, Both, Each, Everybody, Few, Many, Most, Neither, None, Nothing, One, Other, Several, Some, Someone, Something, That, These, Those, What, Which, Who, Whose, That, Either, Y'All.

Now that we've scared the CHUDs away with the existence of the most useful words in the English language, It's a decent game. Some ups, some downs. If you are inclined to wait for patches and/or mods because it's a Bethesda game, you'll probably benefit from doing so. There are definitely oddities and bugs that I could see annoying people. But on the other hand, if you lost hundreds of hours to Skyrim or Fallout and feel like you're ready for that experience again this has it and then some. To me, this initial period of playing the game as released is just as enjoyable as the many many many more in my future with it modded to hell and back.

It's a good reverse bullet hell vampire survivorslike, with a nice style and fun unlocks and challenges. That's really all you need, and it does a good job at it already. You start the game going 'how tf is this possible' five minutes in, and you end it doing darkness 15 runs flawlessly while everything explodes. Just a good progression curve, there.

Also I like that all the characters are kickass ladies.

It has since released, and only gotten better. Even after unlocking and maxxing out everything progression-wise I still find myself playing again from time to time, just to spend 20+ minutes destroying monsters.

Can you survive the vampires? Or are you actually a vampire who survives? Probably not a lot of the surviving part actually. As of the current build i've unlocked everything and I still can't stop playing it. This game slaps.

E: The game released, and it still slaps. I could zone out and play any time, even if I don't know if we're the vampires or not yet. Add in Stephanie Sterling's perfect lore entries as the cherry on top. Incredible.

Edit: Have to revist this, since the performance issues are mostly fixed I believe. And even if they aren't, well. Still have to say more about it. Having beaten it several more times, with full additional playthroughs.

It's my favorite game of all time, gotta admit it at this point. The devs should be proud of what they made here, it's really something special. It's a shame what it cost them, and that it's fully over with now. But that a game with this many parts, most of them incredibly good, is still greater than the sum of those parts? That doesn't happen often.

Original review below.

I like this game a lot. I enjoy the gameplay, I adore the characters, I absolutely love the story. So I recommend it because I have enjoyed it enough to play through it twice and I probably will again.

But I also can't recommend it because there's no guarantee someone who plays it will get the same relatively bug-free experience I did. It's definitely clear that the PC version is in a better state than the console, but there's just too much variability in performance. It's a real shame.

Ultimately a review is about my experience though. Just keep in mind.

First of all, the game is not a metroidvania. This isn't actually a statement of judgement or quality, just a mislabeling of the tag system. It is more similar to Zelda 2 than anything else.

With that out of the way, this game is just a huge bummer. It's got an amazing look, a fun story, and interesting exploration but none of that can make up for the combat being absolutely terrible. The sluggish movement and extremely short melee range makes engaging with enemies extremely challenging but not in a good way, in a way that makes it feel unfair and unpleasant to deal with. Later on ranged options become available but they aren't much better, with aiming at any distance being hard to judge and also planting the character in place unable to move while doing so, making the always very fast enemies even more likely to hit her and sending her ping-ponging across the ground into multiple unavoidable followup hits.

There are accessibility options available but none of them actually do anything to address the key problems with the game. Yes it will make it easier if food can be eaten while in the menu, if multiple attacks in a row don't decrease in damage, if normal attacks don't consume stamina. But they won't slow the enemies down, they won't make the character actions more responsive, they won't decrease the amount of damage the player takes, it won't stop the player from getting trapped into animations, or make them able to turn in midair. Not that turning in midair would help, since the current air melee attack is shorter range and slower to trigger than the ground one.

Even playing with all of the options on the combat was an unenjoyable slog, and while most enemies can be walked past or avoided there are still mandatory boss encounters that will require the player to engage with it. Combat is a huge part of this game and the way it has been implemented ruins the entire experience.

What can I say about Horizon that hasn't already been said?

This was the game I bought a PS4 for. It was my favorite game the year it came out, and became my favorite game of all time for a few years. So when it came out for PC I jumped on the chance to play it again, and it was just as good as I remembered while looking even better due to the better hardware in my computer.

It is difficult to overstate just how incredible this game is in every regard. I could gush for hours about the jaw-droppingly gorgeous visuals, the brilliant character work with Aloy (one of the best protagonists in video game history), the combat that has an amount of variety to it that most games don't even attempt. Instead here i'll talk about its story. Or rather, the impact of its story. This is the main thing that makes Horizon special.

The story of Aloy is enough on its own to get you interested in things and how they play out, but as the game continues and more and more is revealed about the nature of what happened to the world and how it happened it digs its hooks into you and never lets go. I felt more empathy for these characters who were long dead than I have in most games for characters who are alive and talking to me right now. I felt more hatred and disgust for a character who Aloy has never met, will never meet, and who has been dead for thousands of years than I do most main villains in other games. This game made you feel the impact of these things that happened long ago, it makes you live through the significant events. It makes you want to seek out every last collectable, every vista, every quest on the hopes that it will provide more scraps of information on this long-gone world. A world that influenced everything about the world Aloy lives in and is fighting to save. This is a game that dominated my thoughts while I wasn't playing it, and only made me want to play even more as I was.

Games like Horizon don't come along that often.

The game is pretty fun even considering the bugs and balance issues. The team also seems to be working as hard as they can to fix things, which isn't fast but considering their small size it's just to be expected. I think the game's success greatly exceeded their expectations.

But the main reason I can't recommend it right now is that it isn't finished. The game ends at the end of Act 3, implies further action by the characters then skips ahead several months to the post-game content. Maybe there's an Act 4 planned but it isn't there now.

There's really no reason to get this game right now. It's a lot of fun but wait until it's finished and polished up.

E: Three years, little development, and still no endgame later, I think it's ok to call it. Don't bother.

What a charming, chill, relaxing little game. It's Skyrim without combat. Just walk around a lovely little environment talking to people, doing quests for them, and making paintings. It's a little rough at first since you have no money and it gets very cold at night, but soon enough you'll have the ability to move around as you like and that's when it really becomes a lot of fun.

There are some bugs and polish issues but nothing gamebreaking and easily overlooked by how delightfully the world is put together to experience. Hard to recommend it more.