Platform reviewed: PS5
Available on: PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch
Release date: November 14, 2024
Who doesn’t love Lego? From intense building challenges to comedic film and game adaptations, what began as simple clicky bricks has expanded well beyond ABS plastic and into a media genre of its own. Joining the ranks of other block-based game adaptations like Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman, Lego Horizon Adventures adapts the events of Guerrilla’s post-apocalyptic robo-animal kingdom adventure Horizon Zero Dawn for a younger audience, turning its cast of survivors into a handful of quippy Minifigures. Yet despite all the witty exchanges and endearing left-field gags, Lego Horizon Adventures stumbles in the gameplay department, presenting players with a monotonous combat system and a series of repetitive levels lacking the depth and intrigue to help maintain interest beyond its affable opening hours.
Lego Horizon Adventures begins with a young Aloy being cast out from the superstitious Nora Tribe to be raised by her Golden Retriever of an adoptive father, Rost. Players assume control as Aloy enters young adulthood and journeys towards the village of Mother’s Heart to search for answers about their past. Conveniently, this trip doubles as a speedy tutorial that acquaints you with the approachable movement and combat systems you’ll master throughout the campaign. Alongside basic platforming challenges and quirky power-ups, you’ll get to grips with aiming, charging, and shooting arrows in the direction of the meddling machines that block your way.
For toppling the tutorial, Rost also rewards you with Aloy’s trusty Focus, which you can use to highlight weak spots on enemy machines and deal extra damage. It’s a manageable set of verbs that manages to evoke the gameplay of Horizon Zero Dawn without deviating too far from the kid-friendly Lego setting. Plus, if the process begins to feel a little too easy, you can conveniently switch to a more challenging difficulty at any time from the menu.
Soon enough, Aloy arrives at a ravaged Mother’s Heart, which becomes the central hub where much of the game revolves. From here, you’ll access missions that propel the story forward, earning studs and gold bricks to revive the surrounding area between levels, decorating it with all manner of new plots and yards, complete with alternate color schemes and theming from Lego brands like Ninjago and Lego City. The additional decor and costumes earned with studs and bricks also act as collectibles here, as there aren’t any hidden across the levels.
Later, you unlock the ability to purchase upgrades that provide classic XP, defense, and damage boosts for the quartet of playable protagonists — Aloy, Erend, Varl, and Teersa. A Community Jobs Board also rewards you with bonus progression-gating bricks for completing specific tasks. The cosmetic changes you can make to Mother's Heart result in a pretty play space but one that also feels empty. You can build a rocket ship that blasts a minifig into space, but these little sidecars are one-and-done experiences that might’ve worked better in a different part of the game, perhaps peppered through the levels to freshen up the formula.
Rinse and repeat
The first few levels of Lego Horizon Adventures feel stacked with exciting details and beautifully lit exploration opportunities — chests hidden under broken highways and glistening waters flowing from industrial pipes. However, it’s not long before the levels begin feeling familiar. The game is split into four biomes, and upon leaving Mother's Heart, you’ll spend your time platforming around these themed environments, collecting studs, and picking up powerups amid repeating set dressing. Occasionally, the pace will be split by a shop zone where you can pop chests and collect unique gadgets that modify your abilities in battle. Most missions end with an arena encounter leading to a level-ending gold brick and one of the many hilarious cutscenes to send you back home with a smile.
Aside from a few boss battles and refreshing visits to Horizon Zero Dawn’s Cauldrons, this rinse-and-repeat formula follows you throughout the game, all the way until the story’s final moments. While the cutscenes give you the broad strokes of Horizon’s plot among all the gags, the gameplay surrounding them feels noticeably distinct from the narrative. It’s a far cry from Lego Star Wars, where you tend to engage in the beat-to-beat activities of the movie with an aloof Lego veneer layered on top.
Across Lego Horizon Adventures’ runtime, the cast’s commitment to their silly personas feels sincere, adding playful layers to historically stoic characters. This sincerity extends across the game's more emotional moments, which still land despite the cutesy Lego veneer.
Thankfully, environmental hazards like character-freezing ice pools and piercing flora bring welcome considerations to the game’s encounters and allow for moments of tactical intrigue. You can lure a Grazer into an electrified field of water to stop it in its tracks and target weak points. Gadgets (from the games and beyond) also help spice up fights, presenting an alternate means to take out machines and antagonize cultists. My personal favorite, the Tripcaster, lets you engage your inner Kevin McAllister. You can drop two pegs to create a wobbly wire and then lure machines into a comical demise.
As enemy types and numbers add up, upgrades become key and help stack the odds in your favor. As a lifelong min-maxxer, I mainly spent my studs on the XP-boosting options, so Aloy and Co would deal more damage in the long run. But there are plenty of defensive and offensive options to fit how you play, whether you want enemies to drop more health globs or start levels with powerful gadgets. You can pick from the game’s four cast members throughout or have friends embody the troupe in co-op, which helps flip the odds on the robots. While I rarely deviated from the satisfaction of Aloy’s targetted arrow attacks, it was nice to have the option to switch to the bomb-toting Teersa or the clumsy spear-throwing Varl – if not just to enjoy their unique quips and animations.
Once you’ve conquered one of the biomes, you can also try your hand at Apex Hunts, which involves jumping into the levels you’ve completed to destroy mecha-monsters sans cutscenes. Success here earns you more cosmetics to flesh out Mother's Heart as well as the pride of knowing you bested a burly beast.
Built brick by brick
Despite its mediocre framework, Lego Horizon Adventures picks up much of the slack with its spirited visual style. Soft lighting reflects off semi-matte structures, giving areas a playful diorama look—a feeling amplified by the game's bokeh camera effect. Up close, pieces look worn and scratched, as if ripped from real playsets and scanned into the game. Plus, the buildings and bridges look like they’ve been made from actual Lego, as opposed to being digitally created to fit the scene. I was especially impressed by how tactile the machines looked in battle and how convincingly they fell apart when I crumpled a weak spot.
With so much thought put into the world, I was confused about why other Lego properties like Amusement, Ninjago, and Lego City had been shoehorned into the game beyond the cosmetic options available in Mother’s Heart. Each biome is themed around a Lego property — so in the jungle missions, you’ll spot Ninjago pagodas and other assets thrown in, for example. It’s a cute gag, but this assumes a level of Lego understanding from players and confuses the art direction, particularly for a game set in post-post-apocalyptic America.
Moreover, Lego Horizon Adventures’ biggest sin is switching to cutscenes for some of its most pivotal moments. Despite a beautifully animated world and plenty of screenshot-worthy dialogue, I longed to feel more instrumental in significant Horizon lore events that would help to ground me in the experience. Yet, more often than not, I was met with an animated sequence showing me something I wished I was doing instead. Ultimately, this lack of interactivity does a disservice to the source material and makes the moments that do land feel less meaningful overall.
Should I play Lego Horizon Adventures?
Play it if...
Don't play it if...
Accessibility
Lego Horizon Adventures offers five difficulty options (Story, Scout, Adventurer, Machine Hunter, and Hero), and you can toggle them anytime from the pause menu. You can also toggle on invulnerability while playing with these options. For combat, there are three aim assist options (Precise, Assisted, Auto) and a throwing sensitivity scale. Additionally, there are three color blindness modes (Deuteranope, Protanope, and Tritanopia), as well as a Colour Correction Strength scale in the Accessibility menu. Plus, if you want assistance seeing interactable objects or hazards in levels, you can choose to have them appear when you Focus Scan an area.
You can toggle subtitles on for cinematic, conversational, and ambient dialogue, choose the font size (small, medium, large), and tweak the text’s background opacity (0-10 scale). If you prefer to move between lines of dialogue manually, there’s a dedicated option for Conversation Control.
Where audio is concerned, you can tweak individual streams such as sound effects and music and switch between a mono mode. There is also an option to turn on Midnight sound mixing, which raises the volume of quiet sounds while lowering the volume of louder sounds.
How I reviewed Lego Horizon Adventures
I completed Lego Horizon Adventures on PlayStation 5 in around eight hours, across which I tried various difficulty settings, from Story to Hero. I also played each character option, including Aloy, Varl, Teersa, and Erend. I jumped between single and couch co-op across the campaign and in Apex Hunts. I used an AOC CQ27G2 27-inch QHD VA 144Hz gaming monitor with my PS5, and for audio, I used my external Creative Pebble V2 computer speakers.
