After a couple of very impressive - if rather overwhelming - E3 demos, Guerrilla Games' Horizon: Zero Dawn

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Every machine type Horizon: Zero Dawn has its own strengths and weaknesses and must be approached with these in mind. With her focus ability (activated with a click of the right thumbstick), protagonist Aloy can assess which ammo type - explosive, fire, etc - is right to use in any given encounter, and see weak spots to target on the machine’s body. She can also use the environment to her advantage - before taking on a particularly tough enemy I was able to use long grass to pop off a few shots in hiding, while it was distracted by a herd of smaller machines.

“One of the things our game director has challenged us to do is be intentional with our level design,” said lead quest designer David Ford. “The use of tall grass to hide in is on purpose. The positioning of resources are very intentional.”

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3:...But The Enemies Hit Hard

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Horizon: Zero Dawn’s controls feels much more intuitive than I’d thought they would be based on the somewhat frantic gameplay I’d seen onscreen. You can flip through your different types of ammo very easily on the fly, and toggle slow-mo for a couple of seconds in order to line up just the right shot before it snaps back to real time. It feels remarkably stylish and smooth.I died a couple of times during the demo in battle with a Corrupter, Horizon: Zero Dawn’s mysterious new enemy that’s turning the machines of the world against humans. It hit hard and fast, and although Aloy has a very useful dodge roll it became quickly clear that I had to change my strategy. Simply firing off arrows at some of these giant beasts won’t work when they can kill you in a couple of good hits.

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The open world of Horizon: Zero Dawn is very big - opening a map reveals a huge, unexplored landscape - and although I only saw one type of environment today, Guerrilla is promising a lot of variation. “The world has many different environments” says Studio Art Director Jan-Bart Van Beek. “There’s lower territory with more snowy mountains, there are desert areas, barren landscapes and jungles”.You can also explore anywhere from the get-go, and enemies don’t scale alongside you, so expect to encounter beasts far above your level if you wander too far away from the earlier environments.Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to travel around it. While fast travel is an option, Aloy can also tame certain beasts using her hacking tool (which has a cooldown, so don’t expect to be hacking machine after machine) and ride them. This is actually really simple to do in practise - a couple of rope arrows saw me taking down a cow-like Broadhead, before I was prompted to hack it. Voila, it was now my pet, and what’s more it attacked other machines - executed using the same button that executes Aloy’s melee - while I was riding it.This one wasn’t something I discovered while playing, but I was able to get some information on quests outside of just ‘defeat this machine’, which has been the primary focus of all the footage we’ve seen to date.“The machines are interesting to fight but they’re not interesting enough to fill a whole game,” said Ford. “Most of the quests are going to be human stories. We’ve got our main quests which is the global mystery - something is corrupting the machines in this world. Below that we have the national quests, which are all about the various tribes, where you’ll work with their leaders. Finally, we have smaller stories that focus on individual people”.Every machine in Horizon: Zero Dawn drops loot, and although it’s randomized, tougher enemies tend to drop rarer stuff. It’s a great incentive to take on the challenge, because rarer loot means you can craft rarer weapons and items, or modify your existing weapons to make them more powerful.“Weapons have mod slots”, explains Ford. “You can find mods in the world and slot them onto your weapons and change how they work. So you can change the effective range, or the amount of damage. And there are rare modifications - put them onto your bow and you can make it massively powerful”.As I played, I started to become aware of the enemies that carried better loot. Shell walkers, giant, crab-like things, literally carry huge loot crates on their back - soon it became my primary ambition to take them down.Although you can colour a character’s mood with your choices in Horizon: Zero Dawn’s conversation wheels, it won’t dramatically change the outcome of the overall story.“You can give someone a good day and a bad day”, said Ford with a laugh. “There are life or death situations in Horizon but you won’t change the outcome with a conversation choice. We see it as a form of exploration - exploring the lore and understanding the weird things going on in the lore.“There are a lot of hidden truths in Horizon: Zero Dawn”.

Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.