Pop CultureFebruary 21, 2017

Imitation is the finest flattery: a Horizon Zero Dawn review

Guest writer

Launching on March 1, Horizon: Zero Dawn is the next big AAA IP for the PS4. Josh Drummond has a hoon and finds a game that pulls from everywhere, but transcends its magpie tendencies.

A girl, in a world very different to our own, is taken in by a strange tribe and raised as an outcast. She knows she is different, and is marked as such by her intelligence and strange affinity with mysterious artifacts. She’s driven to be accepted by her tribe, but also longs to know her origins and true parentage.

That, in case you were wondering, is the premise of Clan of the Cave Bear, the bestselling 1980 histronic and historical novel by Jean M. Auel. It’s also the premise of Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Horizon is a game that doesn’t so much wear its influences on its sleeve as tattoos them to its face. It would be easy to dismiss it as a derivative game of cribbage, but for the fact that it’s so gobsmackingly goddamn good.

We’ll get the obvious out of the way. Horizon is a kleptomaniac of an IP. As well as its tribal and post-apocalyptic-fic ancestry (heroine Aloy’s name even sounds a lot like Ayla, from Clan of the Cave Bear!), Horizon steals from other games, nakedly and without shame. Do you like the Metal Gears from Metal Gear Solid? This game is full of them! Like (or loathe) the tower-based map-unlocking system from Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry? Then you’ll love or hate the tower-based map-unlocking system in Horizon: Zero Dawn! Also from Ubisoft games (and, to be fair, others) comes the “all climbable bits are one colour”, and “tall grass hides everything”, tropes. The Witcher? That’s here too, right down to Aloy’s constant sotto-voce commentary on the weather. Then there’s all the stuff nicked from the last two Tomb Raider games, which is damn near everything from the titular tomb-raiding on downwards.

Fortunately, everything Horizon nicks is high quality. It’s an assortment of other games’ paraphernalia and Priceless Ming Vases in a beautifully arranged collage. And developer Guerilla Games has polished everything in Horizon‘s showroom to a brilliant sheen. We should thank them for their thievery – in taking all the best bits from its antecedents, Horizon becomes not just a pale imitator but unquestionably one of the finest games in living memory.

It’s just so fucking pretty. Really, it is. The world is stunning. The art direction and the creature dynamics are breathtaking. The animation is yet another synonym for “really good”. The story is… well, most video games that attempt even a semblance of serious narrative usually trip over their own earnest desire to please. If you’re looking for an example, take Naughty Dog’s gorgeous but fundamentally dull Uncharted series. All the elements that would take Horizon down the same road are there – there are many clunky bits, and more than a few toe-curling lines of dialogue – but somehow it rises above the awkward necessities and tropes of video game stories to tell something special. There are two particular reasons for this; lead writer John Gonzalez, who penned the highly-praised Fallout: New Vegas, and Horizon‘s unabashed, matter-of-fact feminism.

Horizon: Zero Dawn lead writer John Gonzalez

If you’ve reached that bit and have suddenly decided Horizon is not for you, then you’re the one missing out. Also, fuck you. You don’t deserve this game. Horizon‘s embrace of a straight-up feminist narrative (set in a matriarchal society, with a well-drawn female protagonist searching for her mother) is one of the best things about it. It’s what lifts it above a host of similar video game stories, and sets it in the sun to shine.

The gameplay is what matters most, though, or Horizon might as well be a movie or book. Here, too, we are blessed, because the gameplay is savagely good. It’s the first single-player game in a very long time to regularly make me, and spectators, yell “whoa” at what’s happening on screen. I only reluctantly put down my controller to write this review, and I’ll be spending plenty more time on it to come. I’m here to assure you the game is more than hard and deep enough, if you’ve seen the trailers and were worried it would just be pretty (and it’s prettier than a console game has any right to be). The difficulty scales flawlessly with the player’s skill, and discovering new creatures as the game goes on presents a fascinating challenge.

The creature design is well worth singling out for attention. It’s in this element where Horizon is most innovative and dynamic. In this game, you will spend much time fighting animalistic robots, and they form a brilliantly realised ecosystem that fully informs the rest of the world around you. Grazing-type creatures will scatter when alarmed, but can be dangerous in numbers. Predators are an omnipresent danger. It engenders careful behaviour from players – I spent as much time avoiding battles as I did provoking them. It is, like all games, completely possible to cheese and spam creature encounters for quick progress and resource-grinding, but if you do that you’re only letting yourself down. Play Horizon the way it wants and deserves to be played, and it will reward you with some of the finest open-world gameplay in living memory.

While there are many good hours of gameplay in the main storyline alone, I don’t really say how long I’ll be kept involved in the game world after I exhaust the possibilities of the narrative. At this point, I don’t much care. The game’s beautiful, derivative, future-past Matrix has me, and all I want to do right now is spend more time in this world. I suspect this will be the case for a long time.

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Pop CultureFebruary 21, 2017

The Project, fumbles and fuck ups and all, is state of the art current affairs TV

Duncan Greive

Founder

Failed presenter Duncan Greive reviews the first episode of The Project, Three’s new 7pm current affairs show.

The lights came on and, after two weeks of as-live rehearsals, they really were speaking to the nation. Even for the show’s guest Rove McManus, who has spent most of his adult life on live television, it was a big moment. He’s the master franchise owner, and therefore as invested as anyone else at the shiny, semi-circular table in the show’s success.

In truth the first ten minutes were a shambles and a shemozzle, with Josh Thomson fumbling his first joke, and, in a botch that will go down in TV launch lore, the same serious story about a meth plague played twice, for an excruciatingly long time, before someone thought to throw back to the studio.

For all that, the debut of The Project NZ was also a quiet landmark. In between the events described above came news headlines – the f***in’ news! – which didn’t assume you’d just sat through an hour of the 6pm bulletins. It seems so simple, but it’s a massive change from the 7pm current affairs status quo.

The idea of the family which came home and ate their dinner off their knees while hanging on Tom Bradley and Angela D’Audney’s every word – that is history, folks. Everything from urbanisation, lengthened work hours and commute times and the changing distribution of work and home life between men and women has contributed to its breakdown.

So the assumption under which both Seven Sharp and Story were operating – that the audience was sick of hard news after an hour of it, and wanted something diverting – seems less likely to be true for younger people. Even the more real-time consumption of news as distributed by social media throughout the day doesn’t mean the audience doesn’t want to see it packaged together and put into some sort of hierarchy.

From the jump The Project NZ feels very different from what has gone before: more pacy and more urgent. But also more playful: “Kim Dotcom may be uploaded to the United States,” we’re told. The news contained writing, not just information transferral. That might take a while to stick and will probably lead to puns appearing in tragedy from time to time – but it also helps distinguish the product from what had immediately preceded it.

Along with the format, the show will live and die on the chemistry between its hosts. Jesse Mulligan is singing a redemption song after his extended torture on Seven Sharp, and the hours of live broadcasting he completes each week at Radio NZ helped him turn the potential disaster of the repeated meth story into a very good gag he called back to later in the piece.

Josh Thomson, early fumble aside, showed what a singular comedic talent he is, sitting for an eternity on “as you know I’m a big fan of chicken”, allowing the moment to go from funny, to weird and back again. How his style will go on harder news remains to be seen, but he’s one of the most naturally gifted performers in the country, so deserves some rope to figure that out.

The show’s emotional core is Kanoa Lloyd, likely the breakout star The Project NZ needs. She’s a generation down from Mulligan and Thomson, and even after a single episode, you saw flashes of how differently she’ll work with news. Her boycott of Cadbury was one thing, but it was the casual way she revealed her own father’s struggle with addiction and use of counselling, in a way which felt very natural rather than cynical, which most impressed. Amongst the quick cuts and onscreen graphics it was a moment of reflection which cut right through.

Two more were provided by the well-cast guests. Regular news rounds guy Ross Bell of the Drug Foundation only had a minute or so, but used it to knife Mark Richardson, who had brainlessly riffed a solution to meth addiction on The AM Show earlier in the day: “find the cook, take him out back and shoot him in the back of the head”. The Duterte approach, one which a certain kind of TV producer would no doubt applaud for being so provocative – but in this era, with the kind of leaders we have rising around the world, that joke just isn’t funny.

Michèle A’Court is, though. She was a sub in for Paula Bennett, who looks like she’s adding The Project to The Hui on her list of blacklisted shows. A’Court was interviewed about a Pharmac’s mulling of a potential tampon subsidy and delivered an electric couple of minutes, highlighted by what she’d buy with the money saved over a lifetime of not having to pay to have a period: “a 2010 Toyota Rav4” in bright red.

The episode was inevitably imperfect. The clips of game show contestants celebrating unconventionally and cooking show fails felt like a very literal approximation of a social media feed. And it was arguably too pacy: so much crammed in that there was no opportunity for the substantive conversation of which they’re no doubt capable. Yet by its close there was a sense of relief – a current affairs show that contained the day’s events, delivered with energy and humour and sometimes emotion. It felt like it was made by and for people under the age of 50 – which isn’t true of much television anymore, and is thus very, very welcome.

The Project airs weeknights on Three at 7pm

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