Hands-On Preview: LEGO Horizon Adventures (PS5)
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You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t given at least one modern LEGO video game a red hot go. Through a simple, pick-up-and-play nature, family-friendly cooperative gameplay and leverage of world-class IP, there’s a particularly broad appeal here. But while the most memorable run of LEGO titles was helmed by developer TT Games and largely based on blockbuster movie franchises, LEGO Horizon Adventures takes a vastly different tack with a LEGO title based on an existing video game franchise and developed, at least in part, by the original games’ creators.
When it was first announced, I’ll admit I was curious about how Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo would either meet or subvert the expectations of seasoned LEGO gamers, and how a comparatively niche (but still hugely popular) franchise like Horizon would go in pivoting to a new audience. Thankfully, after getting my hands on roughly the first hour of the game at PlayStation Australia’s office in Sydney, it seems like this team-up of talented game studios and The LEGO group has produced something that’s poised to please mainline LEGO game fans, Horizon tragics and enthusiast builders in equal measure.
LEGO Horizon Adventures will be released on PS5, PC and Nintendo Switch on 14 November 2024. You can pre-order the game on the PlayStation Store, Steam, Epic Game Store, and the Nintendo eShop, or grab a physical copy from Amazon.com or Amazon Australia.
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LEGO Horizon Adventures starts roughly where the original Horizon Zero Dawn does, introducing us to the mysterious origins of Aloy, found alone as a baby in the heart of All-Mother Mountain and raised as an outcast by the hunter, Rost. Similarly to the game, these early moments are focused around Rost’s training of Aloy to prove herself to the Nora tribe who first found her, before a group of cultists attacks the tribe. As you’d expect, it all plays out like an abridged account of familiar events starring a bunch of hyperactive LEGO minifigures, though it’s not without some stark differences even this early on that change the flow of the story, accommodate new ideas and even introduce characters from Horizon Forbidden West much further in advance.
One of the biggest differences is with how much time you’ll spend in the Nora village, Mother’s Heart, which acts as a kind of “hub” area to come back to between stages. The core story is divided up into smaller, digestible missions that you’ll set out on and then return from to spend your spoils on rebuilding the village post-cultist attack. There’s a heap to do and customise in Mother’s Heart, from erecting and decorating different buildings and facilities to buying new outfits for Aloy and her companions (which, hilariously, retain their voices even when presenting as a completely different character). I didn’t get to see too much of this with limited time, but things like a job board and steadily-introduced villagers with various roles make for a lot of promise in this facet of the game.
Where Horizon Adventures feels most like other LEGO titles though is in the moment-to-moment level gameplay, where you’ll traipse through recognisable environments, fighting enemies, solving light puzzles and collecting thousands of LEGO studs tucked away in breakable objects and hidden objectives. It’s the gameplay ties to the mainline Horizon games that make this feel unique though. Levels are designed with plenty of opportunity for things like climbing, ziplining and the use of gadgets, for example.
And enemy encounters borrow from Horizon’s most iconic mechanics, where you’ll take down robotic creatures by firing off arrows at weak points in their armour, watching pieces fly off and even occasionally turning their dislodged weapons against them.
Unlike other, similar LEGO games where you’ll fight with everything from fists to guns to swords and even superpowers, your earliest means of damage-dealing in Horizon Adventures is (naturally) a bow, and I was surprised at how easy and natural it felt to fire off accurate shots at enemies and breakables with the game’s fixed, isometric camera. Later characters introduced, like Varl, seem to have unique weapons of their own that should mix things up nicely in co-op.
Designed specifically with cooperative play in mind, whether same-screen or online, one of the first things that stood out to me as I shared the experience with a second player was how much fun it is to fight Horizon’s machines with a buddy. It’ll naturally be a great way for younger players to enjoy the game with friends or adults, but it actually makes a great case for the inevitable multiplayer Horizon title, even in this comparatively simplistic format. Perhaps most importantly, you can friendly fire your co-op partner with arrows and it won’t take off health, but it will infuriate them.
I was genuinely delighted to experience how well Horizon’s core ideas translate into the world of LEGO overall, both by their inherent natures as well as the thoughtful details and humour embedded into the game by Guerrilla and Studio Gobo. Before you take aim at a machine, for example, you might find it handy to scan for its weak points with your Focus while hiding in some tall grass – just like in the mainline games. But because this is LEGO, “hiding in tall grass” actually means momentarily turning into a bundle of LEGO grass pieces as you tip-toe through.
At the risk of overdoing the comparison, the sense of humour on show really is reminiscent of The LEGO Movie or LEGO Star Wars games, and for this game it seems to work quite well. While I only got to check out the first handful of stages, my time was chock full of gags that varied from slapstick LEGO humour to some genuinely hilarious Horizon references and parodies. Forbidden West fans will revel in a clumsy and awkward Varl being introduced into the story in new ways, while young players will just enjoy the fact that you can fight machines by summoning a hot dog vendor that throws explosive ‘dogs. Rost, especially, is played far more comedically than you’d expect if you go in with any understanding of his narrative arc, and even if you don’t have the requisite knowledge for the in-jokes you’d be hard pressed not to smile at the way his true-to-life LEGO beard piece animates as he talks.
And it’s little details like the above that speak to the most immediately striking thing about LEGO Horizon Adventures – its visual identity, which has seemingly taken a lot of inspiration from (you guessed it) The LEGO Movie and its follow-ups. Where the LEGO titles most people know and love combine more traditional game environments with cartoonish brick builds and minifigures, this one goes all-in with everything in the game built authentically from LEGO pieces – to the point where the PlayStation representatives in my session suggested that players could take a screenshot at any point while playing and feasibly be able to recreate it out of real-world bricks.
And while that’s impressive enough on its own, the whole idea is taken ten steps further with the visual treatment given to these pieces. Everything is designed to look very convincingly like actual LEGO, with realistic lighting and effects work making it appear as though it’s a highly-detailed stop motion LEGO production, right down to the way everything reflects like actual plastic, water is made from translucent 1×1 tiles and characters animate with a distinctly LEGO Movie-esque energy. It’s superbly convincing, especially played on the PS5 as I did for this preview, and really needs to be seen in action to be understood. If you’ve played the excellent LEGO Builder’s Journey before you can think of this as a similar concept at a much, much larger scale.
What’s not as easy to parse from just the opening hour or so of LEGO Horizon Adventures is how all this is going to play out over the course of a full game. Nearly all of the missions I played in my preview followed the same basic structure and gameplay formula which, while still very fun, I’m hoping gets expanded on more as the game goes on. The difference between this being a fun, very well-presented diversion and a genuine banger will really come down to how the basics of exploration and combat evolve, especially with the glimpses I got at a robust-looking skill tree, so I’m absolutely eager to play more and find out.
LEGO Horizon Adventures launches on 14 November 2024. You can pre-order the game on the PlayStation Store, Steam, Epic Game Store, and the Nintendo eShop, or grab a physical copy from Amazon.com or Amazon Australia.
A PS5 remaster of Horizon Zero Dawn also launches a couple of weeks earlier, in case you want to get a refresh on the original version of the story or experience it for the first time ahead of the LEGO take on events. You can pre-order a physical copy of that on Amazon.com or Amazon Australia.
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