LEGO Horizon Adventures Review

LEGO Horizon Adventures is a fun and different way to experience the world, characters, and events of Horizon Zero Dawn. Guerrilla and Studio Gobo collaborate on this unexpected parody that does well to emulate what worked in the TT Games, but in a decidedly different way. It’s not an overly long journey for Aloy, but it is a great one. LEGO Horizon Adventures is a charming and incredibly gorgeous game that captures Horizon Zero Dawn from a different perspective, and is enjoyable for the whole family at any age.

Essentially this is a retelling of Horizon Zero Dawn, but with a twist on the story events, going for a more lighthearted take for the more serious moments. Typically a LEGO game is a parody as it retells a movie’s biggest moments, but with this, it’s another game that it is a parody of. From a gameplay standpoint, it shifts from the open-world nature of that game for a linear structure here. It’s all very much done in the style of the LEGO TT Games. But coming off the recently released Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, this is a tonally different game, and you’ll have to adjust to its quirkiness. You’ll re-meet your favorites like Rost, Aloy, Teersa, and Varl, to name a few. Aloy is not how you’d expect her to be, if you’ve played either game. That said, Ashly Burch gives a great performance that shows a much happier Aloy than we’ve ever seen or heard.

There are five skill modes to pick from: Story, Normal, Adventurer, Machine Hunter, and Hero – essentially Easy to Ultra Hard. On the normal difficulty, you can complete the story in about eight hours. To do see and do everything to 100% complete will take fifteen plus hours to accomplish. It’s a much shorter game than what you might be used to, but it being a much more concise and slimmed experience is what works so well.

As this game forgoes the open-world for level-based, you have a game that’s linear in design with rather unclear objectives. Thankfully this means you just push forward until you reach the next marker. There’s a lot of forward momentum in this game, and it’s impossible to get lost or not find the next objective.

What this game does retain is experience points, XP is earned through combat in defeating enemies. Now, unlike the mainline series, you cannot stealth your way through sections of the game. There are some paths that can help you avoid some combat, but the name of the game here is combat and not engaging in it will mean less XP gains. To keep things fun, you can pick-up flammable objects to throw, or even your enemies and use them as weapons. The controls are simple: move, attack, focus, pick-up, swap, use gadget, and jump. There are ways for Aloy to play with her food, and let her be an apex predator. Campfires are a great tool in which you can charge a shot that will be set ablaze as it goes to hit its target. The robot dinosaurs will be set alight and run for Aloy, or kill themselves by running into a rock. It’s both hilarious and a clever strategy to make it through these encounters.

Aloy gets gadgets to use like blast boosts which act as a double jump and alternative weapon, or even a deployable hot dog stand that fires artillery on nearby enemies. The latter is great in arenas and boss fights with tons of enemies, the limit on deploying only one at a time is not only great from a logistics perspective, but also performance I’d imagine. Aloy can also use ziplines to get around, which she automatically attaches to. There will be new weapons given to Aloy, the more powerful ones will be limited in ammo, whereas her main hunter bow has unlimited ammo.

There is incentive to explore as you make your way from point A to point B. Sometimes you’ll build things in-world, or discover treasures indicated by a silver stud breadcrumb trail to follow. Bronze studs lead the way to your next objective. Now, LEGO Horizon Adventures has a lot less “stuff to do” and things to interact with over the TT Games, and that’s okay, but it does feel a bit shallow in a given level. If Sony does follow this up with a sequel, then there’s room to improve and expand upon, and for a first entry is satisfactory.

After completing each level, you’ll return to Mother’s Heart, the hub area of the game. This is where you can restore it to its former glory by customizing it to your styling and preference. This is where you’ll spend a lot of your time, talking to its citizens and building it back up. Early on you’ll unlock the community board, it’s essentially a challenge board to complete very specific tasks like killing machines with fire, and you’ll get rewards for doing so. Further on in the chain, these challenges get more demanding and you’ll have to work harder to get them. Another big focus of the game is in character customization, from cosmetics to upgrades, you’re in control of it all. While the spread of LEGO properties is limited, you’ll have access to customizations from: Horizon Zero Dawn, LEGO City, LEGO Ninjago, and Adventure sets. With 75 outfits and decorations to choose from, the game is not short on options or palettes. There’s a lot of ways to make it yours, and it’s another neat twist in how this game differs from its contemporaries. There are also over 50 gold bricks to collect, so you’ll be diving into prior levels to grab everything you can.

The game retains cauldrons, Horizon‘s dungeons. They are on a smaller scale here, but offer a nice challenge a different pace from the traditional level-to-level action. And the game would not be complete if you weren’t scaling Tallnecks, the game’s towers for a reward in the name of a gold brick. It’s nearly as satisfying as completing them in the main game, but only just.

Offering something the main series does not, is couch and online co-op. It’s a single-screen co-op game. Meaning, you can’t go far from one another. And if one player gets too far, they get teleported to their location. I would have liked to have seen the split and stitching that the latter TT Games did, but given the playable area, makes sense why it was done this way. Simply being able to play a Horizon game in co-op is going to be a wishlist item for the third entry, for sure.

LEGO Horizon Adventures is just absolutely stunning on PlayStation 5. By default, HDR is enabled and it just gives this already gorgeous game another layer of pretty. Everything looks like a LEGO piece come to life, to include all the micro-scratches that inevitably happen to pieces with use. You do have your choice of playing the game in Fidelity or Performance mode, which has been a standard of the former being resolution focused with a capped framerate at 30fps, and the latter prioritizing framerate over resolution.

On PC it’s a bit of a different and disappointing story. LEGO Horizon Adventures on PC doesn’t have HDR, there’s no support for ultrawide monitors, and even using a DualSense was met with the wrong glyphs in-game. The game does run incredibly well on its own, but has support for DLAA, DLSS, FSR technologies. The PC version is mainly on-par with its console counterpart, but I don’t find it to be superior on PC as other Sony titles have predominately been.

The existence of LEGO Horizon Adventures should do two things: make new fans and get them interested in the mainline Horizon games, and to also create demand for new LEGO sets based on this series. Beyond that, LEGO Horizon Adventures is fantastic, if not a bit weird, especially for fans who know the world and characters really well. It’s a game that has a runtime on the shorter side, but it keeps your attention, and gets to the point. LEGO Horizon Adventures is great entry point to the Horizon or even a compliment to existing fans, even if the gameplay doesn’t translate equally, you’re bound to have a great time for players of all ages.

A PlayStation 5 code was provided in advance by Sony for review purposes