Horizon Call of the Mountain Review

Horizon Call of the Mountain's premise is that you are always chasing somebody. First it is your brother, and then the big baddie, and that premise leads to the assumption that no matter where you go, someone else has already been there. This leads to narrative justification for why all the climbing paths have white or yellow paint, and why supplies are all over the place, but this also leads to a feeling that this has been done all before. It is hard not to then expand this from the literal story to how the game was made for it is trying to stand on the shoulders of giants of other VR games. Games like Half Life Alyx surely influenced development, but the game this is the spiritual successor of is the PSVR1 AAA VR experiment Blood and Truth. Though it is a successor, it feels a little behind that game in some ways.

Perhaps saying the game is "behind" isn't fair, because from a graphical standpoint, other than the occasional flat flower or flat fire texture, it is a beautiful game. It fully takes advantage of the premise of climbing a mountain by constantly barraging you with beautiful vistas. Whether it is majestic waterfalls, or a cool robot frozen on top of a mountain, Horizon has the "cool thing in the distance" on lock. What you are actually doing in these environments is mostly climbing and finding items. Climbing is done in the typical VR way of waving your hands around and alternate triggers, and it can actually give a sweat if you do it fast enough. In between climbs, you investigate various villages, abandoned factories, etc. for items to improve your armor or make arrows. This is where the feeling of "this has been done before" really starts to sink in. You will never run into anyone while climbing for (with the exception one or two scripted moments), or run into anything that is anything other than climbing or use a tool that assists in climbing. You will run into settlements, which are interesting at first, but the cut and paste of assets make these rather rote by the end of the game.

One of the things that breaks the climbing portions apart is the combat, which, due to how they made the combat mechanics, always takes place in either a circle or straight line arena. You primarily have to shoot dozens of arrows at a robot (with different damage depending on where you hit) and then dodge when the enemy attacks you. These combat encounters are pretty fun at first, but by the last boss, having to sling what felt like 300 arrows to a single target while dodging attacks become tiresome. Sure, you can use different types of arrows and status effects to make enemies weaker, but your strategic options are limited by ammo, and I never got a good read on if there was a strategy to make the fights less repetitive.

The other thing that breaks up the gameplay is the story. The protagonist Ryas is always talking to themselves, and they are on a trek to redeem themselves. I haven't played a lot of the other Horizon games, and all the proper nouns made my head spin at some point, but I couldn't help but feel for his quest and his Nick Offerman character-esque personality. It became clear that a lot of dialog was engineered to make you feel sorry for him, and want him to succeed. Despite how transparent it was, it worked on me for the most part.

Which is funny, because that is how I ended up feeling about the game as a whole. I could see the flaws, I can see what they are trying to do and roll my eyes at it, but there would always be one moment when I was standing on a robot tentacle, with rainbow particles in the air, and think, "well, I don't think any other game has done exactly this." It is a game that relies on execution to draw you in, and despite fumbling here and there, it still has some stuff that was great. It is something that if you have not played other FPS games in VR, I would imagine you would have an amazing time, but as it played to me, it was something that I'm glad I played, but probably won't end up on my top 5 games list this year.