Horizon Zero Dawn

When a great game presents itself, all its moving parts sing in harmonious unison. The intriguing and engaging story supports the beautiful visuals, the varied and challenging gameplay sits perfectly within the narrative and the gameworld feels full of promise and potential. Repetition doesn’t repeat itself, there’s no grind - just the experience of exploration and adventure and at its very best you just can’t get enough of it.

With a hype introduction like that you could expect this PS4-exclusive single player action role playing game to be the next heavyweight champion of the world. A tall ask for Aloy, the game’s slender female protagonist. She’s an outcast child that you watch mature into an agile teenager, growing up in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are an endangered primitive species and the land is overrun by mechanised beasts, a cross between robotic dinosaurs and a droid version of Animal Farm.

This is a hunter-gatherer game where you sneak in tall grass before ambushing a Strider - a cross between the Lloyds Bank horse and a Vauxhall Astra. Or climb the mountain-like backbone of a Tall Neck - the offspring of liaisons between a giraffe and a mechanised brachiosaurus.You’ll spend time sneaking up on bandit camps, exploring subterranean ruins, taming metallic beasts and riding them across vast swathes of an ever changing landscape filled with vistas so beautiful it makes New Zealand look like New Brighton.

This is a game of epic quests and numerous side missions, an open world so richly depicted you’ll not want to leave, populated by gorgeously detailed characters with interesting stories to tell. This is a game filled with items to collect and use, weapons to buy and modify, character skills to unlock, potions to brew and ammunition to craft. This is a game that’s blessed with an intuitive interface so nothing is hard to do, a game where combat is beautiful to look at and fun to execute, where the wild robo-beasts are smart, powerful and often more than enough challenge for a mere human.

This is a game worth buying a PS4 for and losing yourself in the best-looking gameworld to ever grace a console, a game that could well end up as the stand-out title of the year, a game that is greater than the sum of all its moving parts singing in harmonious unison. This is a game worth both your money and time - and you can’t get a higher recommendation than that.

• Horizon Zero Dawn is available now on PS4
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