You know those absurdly slick E3 gameplay demos - the almost eerily flawless cascades of world-building and tutorialising that accompany new game reveals these days? Perhaps the best thing I can say after playing several hours of Horizon: Zero Dawn

Horizon: Zero Dawn Screens 9 IMAGES

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“ Fighting humans presents new challenges. They’re much easier to take down, but are smaller, more agile targets – and seemingly smarter.

Running after the creature, I turned on my Focus – think Batman’s Detective vision meets Geralt’s Witcher Sense – set it to highlight the Tallneck’s tracks in case I lost it, and then scanned it for weaknesses. It was made abundantly clear that the only way I was getting to its head was by mantling onto the metallic spines running accommodatingly up its neck 20 feet above me, sending me scampering back into the ruined buildings to find a third storey to jump from.On the way up a promising ramp of smashed-up masonry, I bumped into a pack of Watchers – the lizard-like sentry bots that act as the game’s most populous threat – forcing me to craft arrows on the fly, then send them, er, flying through the beasts’ lens-piece weak points before I could continue. Finally on top of a building, I waited for the Tallneck to turn a corner, before jumping for the closest handhold, scaling the creature, and planting my robot-overriding spear into its flat skull.That revealed a miles-wide bubble of map, and a promising icon indicating that a new species of robot lay on the other side of a nearby hill. Descending from the Tallneck using the game’s ludicrous rappel animation (why would you throw the grapnel after jumping?), I scurried off on my next adventure, mostly by sprinting and then crouching, because Aloy’s slide-into-cover move is cool as all heck. It felt amazing, and it was – at least on a surface level – entirely my doing.All of which is to say that this feels like the strength of Horizon’s open world – spectacular vistas (with weather effects to match) are peppered with natural distractions both weird and interesting enough to keep you travelling to a self-set goal almost constantly. It manages – for now at least – to achieve something like the organic nature of those E3 demos, and to avoid the time-honoured tradition of yawningly opening the side-quests journal in the hope of something to do.Ruined, calcified sci-fi installations, bandit camps, challenge trials, or the simple pleasure of “I wonder what’s up there?” provide points of interest within a world that – even in the small, wintry corner we’ve played – cycles through almost exclusively stunning location types at a rate of knots.Performance as a whole is good – particularly given the sheer scale of the environments – although, on a standard PS4 set-up, that Tallneck encounter did suffer some major judders as the game seemingly struggled to render the shambling behemoth in close-up. This could be Day One patch stuff, of course, but if the game’s biggest spectacles lead to its biggest frame rate dips, that’s a fairly major issue.Those robotic beasts wandering along the way are gratifyingly tough to take down, particularly at a low level (Aloy follows the XP -> levels -> skill tree points protagonist progression structure you know from, well, everything else). Particularly excellent is how the varied make-up of robot herds change how you’re forced to approach. Taking down a flame-spewing, house-sized Bellowback is done most easily by laying traps and bursting its soft, petrol-filled weak points to take away its best attacks (a Monster Hunter-esque attention to cosmetic-meets-mechanical detail that the bigger creatures share).There’s also the question of fighting rival humans – often guarding their own caches of hunted-down loot – which presents new challenges. They’re much easier to take down, but are smaller, more agile targets – and seemingly smarter. Humans are warier of traps, skirting around the electrified trip wires that robots will gleefully carom into, preferring to crew up and fire arrows from afar. The game’s action mechanics are already strong and consistently rewarding, but perhaps the best thing about Horizon’s combat is in the way it forces you to think about how you’re going to use them to tackle a specific threat.The loop completes itself through the way the game handles its loot and equipment – certain monsters drop specific parts, and merchants work on a barter system, giving away their better equipment only for rarer drops. Couple that with the fact that no one weapon can perform all the functions you need – one bow may only be able to equip shock arrows, when what you need is an armour-piercing variant, for instance – and the implication is that you might be planning several hunts in advance to gear up for a particularly tough fight – one not even mandated by the game’s storyline.