Lego Horizon Adventures review: A gorgeous, family-friendly adventure that lacks depth
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Platform review: PS5
Available for: PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch
release date: November 14, 2024
Who doesn’t love Lego? From intense building challenges to comedic film and game adaptations, the original simple click-and-click brick has evolved far beyond the confines of ABS plastic and become a media genre of its own. Joining the ranks of other block-based game adaptations such as Lego Star Wars and LEGO Batman, LEGO Horizon Adventures Based on Guerrilla’s post-apocalyptic robot Animal Kingdom adventure horizon zero dawn Targeted at a younger audience, the survivor characters are turned into playful minifigures. Yet despite all the witty exchanges and endearing left-field jokes, LEGO Horizon Adventures It’s flawed in terms of gameplay, offering players a monotonous combat system and a series of repetitive levels that lack the depth and appeal to help keep players interested beyond its enjoyable opening hours.
LEGO Horizon Adventures The story begins when young Aloy is expelled from the superstitious Nora tribe and raised by his adoptive father Rost’s golden retriever. Players will take control of Aloy as he enters young adulthood, traveling to the village of Mother’s Heart to find answers about their past. Conveniently, this tour also serves as a quick tutorial to familiarize you with the approachable movement and combat systems you’ll master throughout the campaign. In addition to basic platforming challenges and wacky power-ups, you can aim, charge, and fire arrows in the direction of jamming machines blocking your path.
To topple the tutorial, Rost also rewards you with Aloy’s trusty focus, which you can use to highlight weak spots on enemy machines and deal extra damage. This is a manageable set of verbs that evoke gameplay horizon zero dawn So far away from a kid-friendly Lego set. Plus, if the process starts to feel a little too easy, you can easily switch to a more challenging difficulty at any time from the menu.
Soon, Aloy reaches the ravaged Mother Heart, which serves as the central hub for much of the game. From here, you’ll complete missions to advance the story, earning studs and gold bricks to revive the surrounding area between levels, decorating it with a variety of new plots and courtyards, and using alternative colorways from LEGO brands like Ninjago Schemes and themes and Lego City. Extra decorations and costumes obtained with studs and bricks also serve as collectibles, since there’s nothing hidden in the levels.
Afterwards, you unlock the ability to purchase upgrades that provide classic XP, defense, and damage boosts to the four playable protagonists (Aloy, Erend, Varl, and Teersa). The Community Job Board also rewards you with bonus progress control tiles for completing specific tasks. You can make cosmetic changes to Mother’s Heart, resulting in a beautiful play space, but it can also feel empty. You can build a rocket ship and launch minifigures into space, but these little sidecars are a one-off experience that might work better in different parts of the game, perhaps updating the formula through levels.
Rinse and repeat
first few levels LEGO Horizon Adventures It feels packed with exciting details and beautiful opportunities to explore – from chests hidden under broken highways to glistening water flowing from industrial pipes. However, it’s not long before the levels start to feel familiar. The game is divided into four biomes, and after leaving Mother’s Heart, you’ll spend your time on platforms in these themed environments, collecting studs and picking up power-ups in repeating set pieces. At times, the pace is broken up by shop areas, where you can open chests and collect unique gadgets that alter your abilities in combat. Most missions end with an arena encounter that leads to a gold brick and one of many hilarious cutscenes that will have you going home with a smile on your face.
In addition to some boss battles and refreshing visits horizon zero dawnThe Cauldron, this rinse-and-repeat formula stays with you throughout the game until the final moments of the story. While the cutscene gives you a rough outline horizonFor all the hilarious episodes, the gameplay surrounding them feels markedly different from the narrative. Far from this LEGO Star Warsyou tend to throw an indifferent Lego veneer on top and participate in the beat-’em-up action in the movie.
the best bit
pass through LEGO Horizon AdventuresWhile running, the cast’s commitment to their goofy characters feels genuine, adding interesting layers to the historically stoic characters. This sincerity carries through to the game’s more emotional moments, which hold up despite the lovely LEGO finish.
Thankfully, environmental hazards like character-freezing pools of ice and impaling flora bring welcome considerations to the game’s encounters and allow for moments of tactical intrigue. You can lure the Herbivore into electrified waters, stopping its progress and targeting weak points. Gadgets (from the game and beyond) also help spice up combat, providing another way to destroy machines and fight cultists. My personal favorite is Tripcaster, which allows you to interact with your inner Kevin McAllister. You can drop two pegs to form a wobbly wire, then lure the machine to its comical death.
As enemy types and numbers increase, leveling up becomes key and helps increase the odds in your favor. As a lifelong min-maxxer, I mostly spend my studs on XP boosting options, so Aloy and Co will do more damage in the long run. But whether you want your enemies to drop more health or start a level with a powerful gadget, there are plenty of defensive and offensive options to suit the way you play. You can choose from the game’s four actors, or have friends play as the troupe in co-op, which can help change the odds against the robots. While I’m rarely satisfied with Aloy’s directional arrow attacks, it’s nice to have the option to switch to the bomb-carrying Teersa or the clumsy spear-throwing Varl – if not just to enjoy their unique quips and animations.
Once you’ve conquered one of the biomes, you can also try your hand at Apex Hunts, which involves jumping into a level you’ve completed to slay mecha monsters without a cutscene. Success here can earn you more cosmetics to fill up Mother’s Heart, and pride in the fact that you defeated the burly beast.
Build it brick by brick
Despite the mediocre framework, LEGO Horizon Adventures Fills in most of the gaps with its lively visual style. Soft lighting bounces off the semi-matte structure, giving the area a playful diorama look—a feeling amplified by the game’s bokeh camera effect. Up close, the pieces look worn and scratched, as if they were torn from an actual playset and scanned into the game. Plus, buildings and bridges look like they’re made from real Lego bricks, rather than being digitally created to fit the scene. What particularly impressed me was how tactile these machines felt in combat, and the way they collapsed when I crushed a weak point.
After thinking about it so much, I’m confused as to why other LEGO products like Entertainment, Ninjago, and LEGO City were shoehorned into the game in addition to the cosmetic options available in Mother’s Heart. Each biome is themed around LEGO properties – for example, in the Jungle Mission you’ll find the Ninjago Pagoda and other assets thrown in. It’s a cute joke, but it assumes a certain level of understanding of Lego and confuses the art direction, especially for a game set in a post-apocalyptic America.
and, LEGO Horizon AdventuresThe biggest sin is switching to cutscenes at some of the most crucial moments. Despite a beautifully animated world and tons of screenshot-worthy dialogue, I longed for a bigger role in something that mattered horizon The legendary events will help ground me in the experience. However, every so often I’ll come across an animated sequence that shows me something I wish I’d done. Ultimately, this lack of interactivity does a disservice to the source material and makes the landing moments feel less meaningful overall.
Should I play LEGO Horizon Adventure?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility
LEGO Horizon Adventures Five difficulty options are available (Story, Recon, Adventurer, Robo Hunter, and Hero), and you can switch between them at any time from the pause menu. You can also turn on invulnerability when using these options. For combat, there are three aim assist options (Precision, Assisted, Auto) and throwing sensitivity levels. Additionally, three color blindness modes (deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia) and color correction intensity levels are available in the Accessibility menu. Additionally, if you need help seeing interactable objects or hazards in a level, you can choose to have them appear when focus scans an area.
You can turn on subtitles for movies, dialogue, and ambient dialogue, choose a font size (small, medium, large), and adjust the background opacity of the text (on a 0-10 scale). If you prefer to move between lines of dialogue manually, there are dedicated dialogue control options.
As far as audio is concerned, you can adjust individual streams, such as sound effects and music, and switch between mono modes. There’s also an option to turn on Midnight Mix, which boosts the volume of quiet sounds while lowering the volume of louder sounds.
How I review LEGO Horizon Adventures
I’m done LEGO Horizon Adventures I played it for about eight hours on PlayStation 5, during which I tried various difficulty settings from story to hero. I also played every character option, including Aloy, Varl, Teersa, and Erend. Throughout the campaign and Apex Hunts, I jumped between single-player and couch co-op modes. I used an AOC CQ27G2 27-inch QHD VA 144Hz gaming monitor with my PS5, and for audio I used external Creative Pebble V2 computer speakers.
