LEGO Horizon Adventures Review

I’m not really sure what Sony or Guerilla saw in the crossover potential of Lego Horizon Adventures. Lego and PlayStation’s post-apocalyptic dino-hunting series don’t seem opposing, exactly, but before sitting down to play it I didn’t see any multiplicative Big Brand power in combining them either—especially when compared to Lego Harry Potter or Star Wars games.

Now that I’ve finished playing it, I see even less reason to justify Lego Horizon Adventures’ conception. I honestly don’t know why this game exists, and frankly I’m not even sure the people behind it do either.

The Build Up

Lego Horizon Adventures is a very loose adaptation of the plot of 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn (emphasis on loose). The story tackles most of hunter Aloy’s journey, including her battle with cult leader villain Helis and her attempt to understand cryptic tales of the “old world”. A lot of the nuance of Zero Dawn’s story gets lost in the sauce here. Aloy’s outcast status within her tribe, a relatable and meaningful struggle for acceptance that I feel would have fit well in this family-friendly retelling, is a throwaway joke. Perhaps this should have been my first warning sign, as Lego Horizon Adventures would continue to flee from depth at every opportunity past this point.

A lot of the jokes didn’t land for me, but I’ll cut it some slack for failing to make a 30-year-old man laugh. The writing, though, never ventures beyond the tired construction you’ve seen countless times in Dreamworks animated films. Haters of the “they’re right behind me, aren’t they?” style of Marvel-esque humour are in for a rough time. I think even its target audience will grow tired of its lazy writing by the time of the campaign’s conclusion—which is almost impressive, given how incredibly short this game is.

Mental Block

Unlike other Lego games, where characters tend to function more like skins rather than characters, Horizon Adventures’ playable characters all have their own unique attacks and gadgets. For example, Aloy is ranged-focused with her bow whereas her companion Erend gets in close with his big hammer.

The issue is that the levels themselves don’t vary at all. Almost every single five-minute-long mission just tasks you with killing a bunch of enemies and traversing extremely similar maps, which makes all of the levels feel exactly the same mere hours after you’ve started.

It started to get so cut-and-paste that there were times I was convinced I’d somehow accidentally opted to replay a mission. There are some clever ways the game tries to disguise this blatantly short loop, as the tasks you’re given and the settings you complete missions in do change—but these tasks only result in different cutscenes, and the locales are merely visually distinct.

Combat is the videogame equivalent of snapping together 10,000 of the same basic 2×2 Lego brick: you’ll simply be spending most of your time spamming the attack button and dodging the odd projectile. The consumable gadgets you can find add a tiny and brief thrill of variety, letting you cast big AoE attacks or freeze enemies in place, but combat will still begin to feel repetitive early on regardless.

Enemy variety does steadily improve throughout, introducing new types of robot dinos every handful of missions. Tackling them does force you to mix up your offence, as you’ll have to attack some from behind or learn new patterns to dodge. Ultimately they can’t keep the overly simplistic combat interesting for the entirety of Lego Horizon Adventures’ campaign, which is laughable considering its length.

Expand Your Horizons

In the age of 100+ hour RPGs and never-ending live service games, a game that’s short but sweet can certainly have its charm. I’d take a focused, bite-sized adventure over a middling odyssey any day. Unfortunately I think Lego Horizon Adventures is the worst of both worlds in this respect. It’s repetitive, not even trying to do anything creative with the Lego game formula, and you can comfortably complete it in a single day. Usually I don’t care how long a game is relative to its price, but this one’s $60 and won’t even keep a kid’s attention for more than an afternoon.

Even with a casual fondness for the Horizon series, I found myself getting bored after two hours. So, who exactly can I even recommend this game to—12-year-olds who love both Lego and Horizon? Adult Horizon fans who want a co-op game to play with their kids?

Maybe just people who really love looking at virtual Lego bricks instead of real ones. To be fair the game looks incredible on PC: I’m sure this is a benefit of the stop-motion effect that Lego Horizon Adventures is mimicking, but the character animations are all extremely smooth and the flashy particle effects easily make this the best-looking Lego game I’ve ever seen. A low bar perhaps, but one that the game comfortably clears.

Performance on PC was mostly fine too. I had all settings on max at 4K with the framerate uncapped, and it was flawless outside of a handful of stutters. These stutters seem to be directly tied to enemy deaths and only occurred when I defeated multiple machines in a single attack, most likely due to the resulting Lego brick debris that flies about when an enemy dies.

But outside of a blind Horizon obsession or an infatuation with digital bricks, there’s little in Lego Horizon to appreciate – and even then, I don’t think fans of either will come away particularly satisfied. Mildly entertained for an evening perhaps, at best.