I purchased this title some years back in a Steam sale, but life tends to get in the way of things, and it slowed my momentum. Especially after two or three attempts, the very long cutscenes tried my patience. But this past summer I decided to sit down and finally pushed to 98% completion.
My overall verdict: I'm glad I finished it, but I have no desire to try again.
The good: there are many aspects that make this a fun game. The dynamic combat, cybernetic dinosaurs, different behaviors and how they react to the removal of components all make for some interesting gameplay. I never felt like a fight was boring or drawn out. And honestly, the first 40 hours of spectacle worked, I was hooked. The world itself, and the creatures and cultures in it, made it feel lived in and like a vast world to explore.
As I played on, moments would constantly pull me out of the world. The poor attention to detail with the modeling and eye movement made characters feel stiff and inhuman at times, especially noticeable in conversations outside of the main storyline. It's a very strange presence in something like an AAA title, and I found it very jarring at times.
The world itself also falls apart once you give it any scrutiny. It clearly wants to send a political message and make social statements, but it feels like playing pretend.
Starting with the main character, Aloy: I found her to be stiff, and I never truly felt like I was fitting the role of a Nora Brave. There were several moments meant to better develop her and her relation to her tribe. One in particular was a quest involving a man experiencing paranoia and hearing voices, in a world with no framework to recognize or treat it. Knowing he might hurt her, he isolates himself from his sister and eventually moves to jump off a ledge to end things. Even picking the most empathetic dialogue felt shallow and rehearsed, even preachy at times. I think that quest highlights one of the game's biggest weaknesses when it came to writing.
While the first 40 hours offered new experiences, once you've traversed most of the map, the next 40 hours exist mainly to see if the story goes anywhere meaningful. Unfortunately, the reveals are so telegraphed that by the time they land, there's no impact, just confirmation, not a true payoff. The insistence on extra dialogue for flavor wore on me too. So much exposition packed into such a tight space, and none of it felt like it added anything to the world that wasn't already there.
In many ways the quest design is why the back half of the game drags. You begin to understand the structure of how things work: you find something, you trace it, you follow it, rinse and repeat. More than once the indicators were unclear enough that I missed an object entirely and had to double back to find it. There was even a recent quest where a glitch kept me from opening a chest I needed to progress. These kinds of rough edges added to the frustration on top of the repetition.
Then there's the gender commentary, which in my opinion is where the game falls apart. From the start, NPCs mutter lines that are very sexist, added as background flavor since you're a foreigner who doesn't belong. As you progress through the story, they start acknowledging your achievements, but it feels like a checkmark for your accomplishments rather than something that makes the world feel more alive. As you advance with the Sun King of Carja, some of that background dialogue almost starts congratulating you, as if you've earned respect, but nothing in the world actually changes. You're rewarded for morality, not for making any real difference, and the plot itself doesn't help: the Matriarchs name Aloy a Seeker and send her out to deal with a foreign threat, a role any character could have filled regardless of gender. So when the game does stop to make a point of her being a woman, it feels pointless, since the story never actually needed her to be one.
Another point is the Hunter's Lodge questline, where I think this whole pattern comes together cleanly. The War Chief is established as someone afraid of foreigners, judging you simply because you're a woman. While you have opportunities to hunt and earn standing in the lodge, none of it earns you any respect or translates into anything with the Chief himself. The questline ends with his apprentice, a woman, taking his position, while he gets torn apart by a robotic T-Rex. No true confrontation, no reckoning, just a monster mindlessly killing. Even that succession feels procedural rather than earned, there's no real acknowledgment of what her taking over actually means. The death seemed like it was supposed to feel deserved, but it landed more like a consequence and another set piece than any kind of statement.
What bothers me most, though, is that none of the women in the main story are written with anything other than overpowering, almost tone-deaf, masculine-coded strength. It doesn't offer real examples of equality, it feels more like indifference posed as progress. It never interrogates any of the ideas it puts forward, instead treating them as natural consequences of the world we're subject to. The closest any of the commentary gets to a real idea is in moments that seem to say "you don't like it when the roles are reversed," which could have been interesting, but it's never actually developed. Whatever point the game was reaching for, "the system is hopeless" or "you're inadequate no matter what you do," it never resolves into anything that actually moves me. It's ambition without follow-through.
Bottom line: the combat is great, and the monsters genuinely gave me moments of real terror, I never felt fully equipped for a fight, which is a strong hook on its own. But that's undercut by animation that fails its own emotional beats, quest design that wears out its welcome fast, and a world that never earns the ideas it's trying to explore. Worth playing once. Not worth a second run.
