LEGO® Horizon Adventures™

My first instinct when LEGO Horizon Adventures landed was to check whether it played like something worth my time as a person who usually cares about frame pacing and tight gunplay. The short answer: not really, at least not for long. This is a top-down, arena-based action game built around a four-character roster, Aloy and her companions Varl, Erend, and Teersa, each with a distinct weapon style. Aloy runs the bow, Varl prods with a spear, Erend swings a hammer as a purely melee fighter, and Teersa lobs explosives. Mid-mission you can pick up special weapon variants, like a bouncing boomerang for Varl or an earthquake hammer for Erend, but honest assessment says the characters feel functionally close enough that swapping between them rarely changes your approach. Combat encounters drop you into isolated arenas, you kite machines, take pot shots, and move on. That loop is fine for roughly the first hour. The PC build is where I spent most of my time with this one, and the technical story is a mixed bag. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5, and despite the blocky art style, system requirements are notably heavy on the GPU side: you need an RTX 3070 or RX 6800 equivalent just to hit the recommended spec at higher resolutions. DLSS 3 Super Resolution and Frame Generation are present, but there is no FSR 3.0 or XeSS support, which is a genuine snub for anyone not on an RTX 40-series card. On a high-end rig the experience was mostly smooth, with stutters showing up mainly when lots of brick debris spawned from enemy deaths simultaneously. Not a deal-breaker, but worth knowing if you run a Radeon. The co-op side is probably where this earns its strongest case. Both couch and online co-op are present, and some mission puzzles are specifically built around two-player coordination rather than just dropping a second character in to follow you around. If you have a younger kid who wants to share a screen, this is a genuinely decent option. The camera is locked overhead which causes chaos with two players in busier fights, but that also means you are both laughing at the same mayhem, which counts for something. The Mother's Heart hub lets you customize the village, buy outfits (including some from LEGO City and Ninjago alongside the Horizon sets), and track challenge board objectives between missions. It adds a light progression layer, but it does not add depth. The campaign length sits somewhere between seven and nine hours, and the structure recycles environments heavily. Biomes cover jungle, snow, desert, and cauldrons, but each chapter sends you back to the same chunks of the world rather than opening new areas, which accelerates the sense of repetition. The combat system does not evolve to match that repetition either: what you have at hour two is largely what you have at hour eight. The writing leans on self-aware Marvel-flavored humor, and it misses more than it lands for anyone past primary school age. The visual presentation is a genuine bright spot, easily the best-looking LEGO game made to date, with smooth stop-motion-style animations and particle effects that hold up at 4K, but strong visuals alone cannot carry a shallow game loop at a full AAA price. Bottom line: if you want a LEGO game, LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Harry Potter are still miles deeper. If you want Horizon, the Zero Dawn remaster exists. This one occupies a narrow lane for parents needing a co-op game to share with a young kid who is already a Horizon fan, or very patient completionists hunting every gold brick. Everyone else should wait for a steep discount before clicking anything.

Fred · Scout Team

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