I'm about where you are, Botch -- just did the first Longneck and am wandering around looking for quests to do. I have positive and negative thoughts on the game, which so far reminds me most of Shadow of Mordor in everything except setting.

Generally speaking I'm enjoying it, but I see Horizon ending up the same way most other open world games of this nature do: as a trudging icon hunt that lasts much longer than it should. The combat is fun but already becoming sort of redundant; I like that it rewards care and tactics without forcing them on you. Still, there's only so much tall grass I want to hide in. A little more innovation here would have been nice. Climbing trees, for example. Also the herds of ro-beasts would do better to range around like... er... realistic... ro...beast...herds (you know what I mean) instead of predetermined circular paths.

The Gospel of Xtal is wise as usual. Sidequests that are reduced to the same activity over and over again are far less enjoyable than sidequests with meaning.

And don't give me a customizable HUD I can't actually customize. If I want to turn off your fucking floating GO HERE icons and other hand holding, I should be allowed to. Why not just make the compass the whole game? Point yourself at an icon and push forward until you get there, wash and repeat.

That sounds over-negative; I do like Horizon so far and I'd like to keep liking it. But I was hoping for something a little fresher, and it's clearly a pretty by-the-numbers open world adventure in the Shadow of Mordor vein.

If you're a player who enjoyed any of the generally-accepted-as-best "open world adventures" (eg Shadow of Mordor) in the past few years, you're very likely to enjoy Horizon because Horizon cherrypicks good stuff from all of them, introduces some good stuff of its own, and generally avoids serious mistakes.

While the "worst" I could say about it varies hour to hour depending on my mood, I think the meta-worst is that it's not an innovative game; it's more of a distillation, which isn't a terrible indictment. We see these from time to time: games that take the best of their format and leave the rest out. If you're hoping for something different in a gameplay sense you won't find it here, but if you're looking for a solid, robust, standout example of the style, Horizon is likely to become the standard.

On the character of Aloy there is much to be said, in part because there's so little to be said, at least on the subject most people would have anticipated being the dominant one. Aloy's gender has nothing to do with the adventure, and Horizon gives us a 100% gender-equal, mixed-race world without making any statements to that effect. It's just the way it is.

As to Aloy herself, everything about her from bone structure to fashion sense strikes me as very maturely designed. Unless there's an outfit I haven't seen yet, she doesn't wear stupid revealing shit because she's a cave-person and cave-people would die if they wore stupid revealing shit. Her red hair is I guess kind of well-maintained given cave-person hair product technology but we can overlook that since you're going to be looking at that hair for a lot of hours and it just makes sense for it to look nice.

While it's unclear how much impact her dialogue decisions have on the game as a whole (versus just the immediate conversation) I appreciate the option to play Aloy how you like. She's very badly treated for most of her life, and grows up to be a very justifiably angry young woman, but it's your call if you want to maintain that attitude or become a more traditional white-hat heroine who cheerfully gathers mushrooms for people.

She's played by Ashly Burch doing a dead-on Jennifer Hale impression; if acting in games is a pet peeve of yours it's only fair to warn you that except for Burch the acting is mediocre at best, and the script is... strange. It veers between stilted, formal "Cave-Person" and modern colloquial English from line to line. The result is very dissonant and off-putting. There's at least one character who talks with an affected New Yawk accent which makes me want to kill him, and almost everyone else is either just not very good to begin with (JB Blanc) or clearly struggling with the script's schizophrenia (Crispin Freeman) or both.

Mostly I hope the game ends in a timely manner because I'd be sad if it tried to make itself bigger than it needs to be. I already sense that happening, though. As to your question, xtal, the maps in question are indeed very obvious and readily avoided. They're called, like, "Map to a Bunch of Annoying Icons #4" and stuff.