Not necessarily the Robot Dinosaur Zelda game you were looking for.
It took me a surprisingly long time to find my way to Horizon: Zero Dawn, the first of what has become a two-game tentpole franchise for Sony. It was sometime during the COVID years, and Sony had released several games for free, including the “Complete” version of Horizon which included the big DLC expansion, “The Frozen Wilds.” I decided to give it the old college try and fell head over heels for Aloy and her post-apocalyptic, robot-filled world. Because I played Horizon after sinking over 250 hours into Breath of the Wild, I started calling it “Robot Dinosaur Zelda,” because that’s basically what it is: you hunt robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow while exploring a very large open world. The game’s sci-fi setting and insane backstory made me an enthusiastic Aloy stan, and after playing its sequel, Forbidden West, on my PS4, I literally bought a PS5 just so I could play the PS5-exclusive expansion, “The Burning Shores” (worth it).
In summary, I effing love Horizon.
So I thought it was strange when a LEGO adaptation of the first game was announced, and it was even stranger that it’s a Sony-published game on Switch. Having now played it, I still find LEGO Horizon Adventures strange. It’s not really what I look for in my Robot Dinosaur Zelda games and has a somewhat unsatisfying gameplay loop and lacks the combat precision that I so enjoy about the Sony duology. It feels like a game in search of its own identity in more ways than one.
One thing I will say is that much of the principal voice cast has returned, including Ashly Burch (Aloy), JB Blanc (Rost), John Macmillon (Varl), and John Hopkins (Erend). The trick is that everybody is voicing much goofier, self-parody versions of their characters, which I found to be charming and usually quite funny. I was a bit disappointed by Guerilla’s substitute for the late, irreplaceable Lance Reddick (Sylens), only because he sounds completely different, which makes me a little nervous about how they’ll approach the character in Horizon 3.* At any rate, LEGO Horizon Adventures presents an extremely loose adaptation of Zero Dawn’s plot, including completely sidelining the “Zero Dawn” part of the story, which is understandable, but was my favorite part.
Here, your little LEGO Aloy runs around with a bow from an overhead viewpoint with a locked camera. This is fine while hopping and bopping through the lovely, detailed platforming segments, but becomes an issue during combat. Combat encounters are usually isolated affairs, taking place in a large arena, and feature several enemy machines and, sometimes, humans (the Shadow Carja). Aloy can hide in orange grass (during which she turns into orange grass, which is a clever touch) but the second she starts to attack things, her cover is blown. You cannot rotate, move, or zoom the camera, so you never have a full view of the battlefield, which I found annoying.
Holding down the L button activates Aloy’s Focus, which highlights weak points on the machines. In general, these are similar to their canonical counterparts, but the difference here is Aloy’s aiming is imprecise, there is no slow-down when aiming (a key feature of the Playstation games), and you will rarely knock parts off a machine. There are no special arrows in the game which might let you do more damage or knock off parts easier. Instead, Aloy can find “special weapons” with limited ammo and “gadgets” with limited uses to help in combat.
Special weapons include (mostly) elemental bows while Gadgets include boots with flame jets, an energy shield, a Tripcaster, and the melee “Brick Separator” (among others). While these add some variety to the combat, none of them are particularly satisfying to use. There isn’t much planning or strategy in LEGO Horizon Adventures. You usually wind up running away from enemies and taking pot shots whenever possible.
You’ll collect studs from destroying environmental objects, finding chests, and defeating machines. You’ll then use those studs back at your base camp village–the strangest area of this game.
This home base is “Mother’s Heart,” the village where Aloy starts her adventure in Horizon: Zero Dawn. Here, it’s presented as a playground where you can customize buildings, buy costumes, check a quest list, upgrade certain abilities, and build things. As you complete chapters, new areas of Mother’s Heart open up where you can…build more things! I found this largely unsatisfying because I just did not care about customizing Mother’s Heart unless a specific quest required it.
The only practicality is that every building you purchase gives you bonus studs whenever you return to Mother’s Heart, but it takes some time to run through and collect them all. Although you’ll unlock new buildings, statues, and outfits at a reasonable clip, I was disappointed by how few are from Horizon specifically. The majority of customization options (even costumes) are from standard LEGO properties–City, Ninjago, and…theme park rides. Want a Ferris Wheel in Mother’s Heart? I never did, but I guess it’s an option! Want to dress Varl as a hot dog? Go nuts!
You’ll eventually unlock “Apex Missions,” which task you with defeating harder versions of standard machines (from which you earn “Red Bricks”). In general, combat is perfectly doable, although I did die several times during the more harried encounters. Thunderjaws are, as you might expect, the hardest fights in the game but are thankfully quite rare (and involve their own unique but confined arenas). My favorite areas were the few involving Cauldrons–automated subterranean facilities where machines are built. These are a highlight of the Playstation games and are similarly alien here, with more platforming and less-isolated combat areas.
LEGO Horizon Adventures features couch and online co-op with a second player who can choose between Aloy, Varl, Erend, and Teersa (remember her? I sure didn’t!). Each of them play differently: Varl uses a spear but is otherwise pretty similar to Aloy; Teesa uses explosives, which is fun but imprecise; and Erend uses his massive hammer as an all-melee fighter. Solo gamers can swap between them in Mother’s Heart or at the beginning of most missions. All three are fun to experiment with, and they all have their own special weapons (again, mostly elemental variants) and while I did try to keep everybody evenly leveled, I always defaulted to Aloy.
I tried couch co-op with some of my friends’ kids. It performed admirably enough, but combat can be too chaotic on its own, much less with a second player. We often lost track of who we were or even where we were, which led to a lot of dying. If one player dies, their companion can revive them by holding down X. Unfortunately, this takes some time, and you’ll likely be set upon by the very machines who killed your buddy. You’re also tethered to each other by an invisible bungee cord, which is honestly helpful. Thankfully, and this perhaps explains the simplicity of it, combat is easy for a younger gamer (in this case fourteen-year-old) to pick up. And he was briefly distracted from Fortnite, so I consider that a win.
I enjoyed LEGO Horizon Adventures, but it would be inaccurate to say this is a straightforward Horizon game. It’s aimed at the younger set, certainly, but in doing so, ignores a lot of what makes the Playstation series so enjoyable to me. However, if you’re looking for a chill, funny action game or something to play with your kid(s), this is a damn good choice. Now what I’d really like are more LEGO sets for the Horizon series. My Tallneck is lonely–it needs a Thunderjaw or a Slaughterspine to stand next to.
*We just learned, after posting the review, that Tim Russ, best known for his role as Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager, is the new voice of Sylens. Russ is actually a great choice. He doesn’t have Reddick’s distinct timber (who does), but I think he’ll pretty effortlessly move into the role in the main series. Sylens has a particularly Vulcan sense about him, and an acidic wit. Here, the character of Sylens is so abstracted (he’s a DJ, for Pete’s sake) that it’s probably not a fair comparison.