Lego Horizon Adventures: The Kotaku Review

I really liked Lego Horizon Adventures, a game that’s exactly what it sounds like. It tells an embellished version of the events of Horizon Zero Dawn, the first game in Guerrilla’s series of post-apocalyptic open-world adventures, with colorful Lego bricks and the slapstick humor you’d expect from a lovingly made YouTube parody, all wrapped up in a simple but sometimes challenging platformer. But it’s also such a strange experiment by Sony and developer Guerrilla Games that I’m curious as to why Horizon was the series the PlayStation gods decreed should get a spin-off built in Legos.

Lego Horizon Adventures’ strangest twist to Horizon’s world concerns its main character, Aloy, as she’s a bit of an odd fit for the otherwise cheery and bright world of Lego adaptations. The bow-wielding protagonist of nearly every piece of Horizon media is often characterized as stoic, stubborn, and maybe even a little curt toward people struggling to make sense of a world that is rapidly changing. The Aloy minifigure of Lego Horizon Adventures, by contrast, is a silly little gal who’s just happy to be here. I get the tone shift from super-serious action RPG to family-friendly platformer, but I was surprised Guerrilla didn’t go the Lego Batman route of playing up Aloy’s seriousness against a more comical backdrop.

Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku

The upshot of losing Aloy’s broody demeanor is that Lego Horizon Adventures is a genuine hoot. The game effectively spoofs the post-apocalyptic, lore-driven story that fans have come to know and love by poking fun at just how silly it all sounds when you try and describe it to someone who doesn’t play these games. I admire just how willing Guerrilla was to strip the story of Horizon Zero Dawn down to its barest parts, taking none of it seriously. There are some good bits, banter, and buffoonery between shooting Aloy’s blocky bow or swinging Erend’s Lego-on-a-stick. I forget how endearing Horizon’s characters can be when I’m not playing one of these games, and even these exaggerated imitations reminded me that I am at least a little bit attached to Aloy and her friends.

Though I have my questions and quibbles about how Lego Horizon Adventures chose to exaggerate the personalities of its characters, when I’m fighting robot dinosaurs made up of Lego blocks, I see the vision behind the whole game. Lego Horizon Adventures adapts Horizon’s concepts into the usual Lego game structure pretty well. Seeing Aloy and friends turn into blocky blades of red grass as they move through different patches to hide from enemies made me chuckle, but striking foes in weak points and watching them break off like they would in any Horizon game is when Lego Horizon Adventures clicked. It’s still got a lot of the collectathon platformer dressings of most Lego games, and most of its platforming is pretty bog standard and unremarkable, but there was care taken here to make it feel like a Horizon game.

Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku

Though the fights don’t feel as dire and overwhelming in scale as those in the main Horizon games do, the same basic principles from Zero Dawn and Forbidden West still apply. Most of Lego Horizon Adventures has you running through blocky recreations of Guerrilla’s world, almost exclusively broken up by encounters with hordes of foes that are easy enough to handle in one-on-one duels, but can become chaotic, and even challenging, when they gang up on you. As they do in other Horizon games, each robot has specific weak points to target and break off for extra damage, but it’s not until you reach some of the higher-ranking foes that this kind of precision feels necessary. Otherwise, it’s just about firing arrows in the general direction of an enemy, but there are enough tools and different playstyles between characters to shake things up. Some of these are ripped right out of Horizon, such as the tripwires that are evocative of the Tripcaster in the main games. However, there are also some weirder inclusions, like a hot dog stand that throws explosives around a small area—which, sure, is nice to have, but also felt out of place in a game that usually feels focused on paying tribute to the source material. And that identity issue doesn’t just begin and end at the lethal hot dog stand.

Though Horizon fingerprints are all over this game as you’d expect, there are also other cross-universe Lego promotions in Lego Horizon Adventures, and those can be pretty jarring. Why is Aloy able to wear Ninjago costumes and engage in other cross-promo silliness? Is that part of the deal of being a Lego game? Is every property set in some kind of multiverse full of other properties spilling buckets of blocks onto each other? It’s a small nitpick in the grand scheme of things, because when Lego Horizon Adventures commits to the bit of parodying Horizon, it’s at its most enjoyable.

Lego Horizon Adventures is a fun little experiment, one that I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sony do again if this takes off. Could it become a trend for Sony, which has gotten so risk-averse with its big franchises, to create more Lego parodies of its biggest names? Maybe. I would be thrilled to see something like Lego God of War poke fun at Kratos and Atreus’ dysfunctional father/son relationship. Horizon feels like such an oddball pick for a Lego game that I can’t imagine this being just a one-off made to fill the gap between 2022’s Forbidden West and whatever’s next.

Sony is leaning harder into franchise development by expanding its games onto other platforms and even into other mediums like film and television these days. The cynic in me could easily call this a play to expand Horizon and other series into additional avenues of revenue. Horizon already has Lego sets to buy, and brand synergy gets money flowing faster than you can say “tie-in toy.” At the very least, Lego Horizon Adventures feels like a game made with a lot of love for the property it’s based on rather than a cynical cash grab. Whatever comes next, I can at least say that.

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