Batman, Indiana Jones, Marvel. I've nearly lost count of how many brands have undergone the Lego treatment since my first foray into the various Lego games since Lego Star Wars in 2005. And after a two-hour demo session with Lego Horizon Adventures, based of course on Sony’s two-game open-world robot-dinosaur-hunting action-adventure franchise, I'm happy to report that it's familiar enough for long-term fans of Lego games, but could be just different enough to reignite the interest of fans who have begun to skip over other recent ones.
Now, I can't say precisely what it is yet, but in the best way possible, something felt different when playing Lego Horizon Adventures as opposed to the countless other Lego games I've played. It didn't feel like a Lego game; it felt like a game that just happened to be portrayed through a Lego lens. My only hunch about why it felt so different is that Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo are handling development instead of this being a traditional Travelers Tales Lego game. Whether that will be positive or negative in the long run is still to be seen, but at the very least, it hooked me right out of the gate.
After playing just one or two encounters in our demo, my co-op partner and I came to the consensus of why we haven't gotten a co-op Horizon game yet. Teaming up against machines from the left and right to destroy multiple parts at once felt rewarding; the humorous or heroic moments we created by baiting enemies towards the edge and then simply knocking them off a cliff while reviving each other and both instinctively plopping down hot dog cart man for maximum chaos just felt inherently good. I imagine the main reason we haven't gotten co-op yet is that it would be more challenging to hit the emotional highs and lows in the story.
So, how does Horizon translate into Lego form? Very well, actually, and a lot of what I got to experience early on in my demo was covered in our previous preview, so I'll be mainly focusing on the upgrades and skill tree mechanics as well as a deeper dive into the combat. Lego Horizon Adventures feels like another Horizon game, with the only difference being that everything is made of Legos. Aloy is witty and deadly with her bow, as are the enemies she comes across – especially on the maximum difficulty setting, which I jumped into to test out during our two-hour demo session.
It may be novel, but I've never worried about dying in a Lego game before, yet with Lego Horizon Adventures, I felt compelled to sit up a bit in my chair to make sure I was dodging the fast-flying arrows from cultists and making sure to destroy homing projectiles from watchers that felt like they would chase me forever. It wasn’t difficult in the “Oh man, here goes my fifth or sixth attempt on this boss in Elden Ring” sense, but for once, I could feel a Lego game start to push back in a way that they don't normally do, and that felt great. To put this in perspective, on the maximum difficulty, one hit from a traditionally weaker enemy like a Grazer (the deer-like enemies in Horizon) using its jumping slam attack would remove two and a quarter hearts from our three hearts early on, and the hordes of cultists attacking us would deal one and three-quarters with their spear attacks. This became more forgiving as we leveled up and saw our maximum health increase to five hearts, which only took maybe an hour or so, but it has me wondering: if these basic enemies are dealing that much damage, how hard is Thunderjaw going to hit with its tail swiper or laser attacks? And since health doesn’t automatically recover, we quickly got used to rationing the limited healing items available in each arena we would fight in.
Unfortunately, we didn't get to see if there was a penalty for both players dying, as my co-op partner and I were able to revive each other any time we happened to get knocked out, which is done by simply holding a button while standing next to the ghost of the fallen ally. We did notice that any temporary upgrades like the multi-shot bow or hot dog man cart would be lost on death, so that was at least some incentive to try and not die.
Like Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, Aloy and her friends have access to a focus and can use it to identify things in the environment you can interact with. Here, it will highlight objects or structures you can build or destroy, chests to open for items or currency, and targeting weak points on machines. This is one of my favorite mechanics to transfer to the Lego format, as it added a bit of depth to the combat.
Taking down cultists or machines rewards you with experience to level up Aloy and friends and bestows rewards such as increased health, bonus damage, and more. There are also character-specific upgrades, such as Varl's Piercing Damage Spear that gains bonus damage for each additional enemy he hits on a spear throw, incentivizing us to line foes up to maximize his damage, as well as universal upgrades for things like bonus experience, increasing the duration of status effects on enemies, or bonus damage when attacking from stealth. These can be substantial upgrades when maxed out; having an enemy on fire for six extra seconds can be helpful to chew through their health, especially on the higher difficulties. One of the early upgrades we invested in was Weak Sauce, which granted bonus experience for removing weak points on machines and topped out with a whopping 50% bonus when fully upgraded.
Many of these upgrades are locked until you collect enough gold bricks earned by completing stages for the first time or fulfilling various jobs at the community board in Mother's Heart. This offered additional gold bricks for adding a table with a feast to a house in Mother's Heart and then enjoying the festivities. There were also more combat-oriented ones, such as destroying eight enemies with elemental damage, or removing a specific number of weak points on machines.
Our time in the demo took us across multiple stages in one area that changed after clearing the one before it. One mission had us freeing citizens of Mother's Heart (the main village in Zero Dawn) from cultists and another battling hordes of machines. The final stage of the demo took us inside one of Horizons's usually formidable Cauldrons. Despite all these stages beginning from the same starting point, the areas beyond the initial zone would change drastically, leading us to different areas with different objectives, keeping each level feeling fresh.
After spending a few hours with Lego Horizon Adventures, I now can't wait for its release. Though looking back, I do have a few things that stood out that I'm curious how they are going to handle: bosses or big fights with multiple large machines as you'd expect in Cauldrons; and how they were going to handle Sylens after the passing of Lance Reddick, whose performance played such a prominent part of the first two Horizon games.
We reached out to Guerrilla Games about the role of Sylens in Lego Horizon Adventures and to which Senior World Artist Lucas Bolt responded with: "Lance Reddick tragically passed away in 2023, and he is deeply missed within Guerrilla and our community. He wonderfully portrayed the essential character of Sylens in Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West. The character of Sylens does appear in LEGO Horizon Adventures, and we will introduce the new actor at a later date. Hearing the voices of other original actors including Ashly Burch as Aloy, JB Blanc as Rost, John Macmillan as Varl and John Hopkins as Erend has really brought back the tone of comradery found in the original game."
It will be interesting to see who ends up in the role of Sylens. Could Keith David be filling in again like he did for Commander Zavala in Destiny 2? Certainly there are plenty of talented voices across the industry that could play Sylens but the work of Lance Reddick as Sylens will be one that will be impossible for me to forget.
The early story beats we saw were primarily early game and focused on Helis and Hades as antagonists, which makes sense since this will take place in the Horizon Zero Dawn timeline. And nearly every story bit, from being unable to count enemies because the characters don't have fingers to the Lego hot dog cart showing up, means that they aren't afraid to have fun with the storyline and characters – which could mean that Helis and Hades could be elevated to play a more significant role in the story and help navigate sensitivities involved.
