LEGO Horizon Adventures Preview: Let’s Do a Silly One

The very pitch of a LEGO Horizon game was always bound to be delightful. LEGO games have been historically well-regarded for their self-referential humor and family-friendly gameplay, and Horizon: Zero Dawn was a game of the year contender when it came out in 2017. With LEGO Horizon Adventures, it’s like someone at Guerrilla called everyone from Zero Dawn into the room, pointed at the game, said, “Hey, let’s do a silly one.” And then, when everyone agreed to this ridiculous idea, they proceeded to treat that silly one with the same level of craft and care with which they treated the other Horizon games.

LEGO in video game form has never looked so gorgeous, or felt so satisfying to tear apart. Aloy kicks up little footprints of LEGO dust as she walks. Barrels she shoots with her trusty bow burst apart into little LEGO bits. Cloth capes on NPCs are patterned with striking detail, while sunlight glitters off brick water and LEGO grass strands go up in translucent LEGO flames when hit with a fire arrow. Sure, it’s cool that we can see the pores of Aloy’s skin in Horizon: Forbidden West, but Horizon Adventures is a great reminder that interesting style choices – like making an entire world out of LEGO – can be visually stunning as well.

LEGO Horizon Adventures loosely – and I do mean loosely – follows the story of Zero Dawn, and lampoons it at every opportunity. For instance, you might remember Zero Dawn’s intro involving a child Aloy finding her Focus in an Old World ruin. In Horizon Adventures, Rost just hands it to her in a cheerful mockery of its supposed rarity. Aloy, played by Ashly Burch in full goblin mode, revels in the self-aware script: she’s obsessed with finding out who her mother is and convinced it will solve all her problems. You know, just like in Zero Dawn. The best part is, this character shift works, perhaps because Aloy never took herself too seriously to begin with. She and JB Blanc (Rost) are clearly having a great time with these lines, and I’m told most of the original voice cast was up for the challenge of reprising their same roles, but with the goofiness dial turned up to 11. And the LEGO humor extends to visual gags, too. I laughed out loud when I realized Aloy in stealth mode hiding in tall grass was simply transforming into the grass bricks themselves.

Horizon’s dino-hunting mechanics translate nicely to LEGO’s simpler, family-friendly style, and it helps that its monsters were already made up of a bunch of breakable components to begin with. Aloy can use her Focus to identify enemy weak points, then fire away at those specific bricks for bigger damage. Her basic attacks all use her bow, but she can find limited-use power-ups as she explores that will let her spice up combat by, for instance, letting Aloy set things on fire. Some of these attacks are practical, but others are goofy, like one ability I found that let me build an enemy-damaging hot dog stand.

Anachronistic, LEGO-themed goofs are rife throughout Horizon Adventures. Like a kid playing with a toy room LEGO set, occasionally I ran into pieces that didn’t quite belong, like some random generic LEGO NPCs that showed up among a group of Nora villagers. Nowhere is the customizable LEGO-ness of it all more evident than in Mother’s Heart, Aloy’s home base where buildings can be customized with everything from Thunderjaw heads to dino-themed roller coasters. Outside of Mother’s Heart, there’s not as much an emphasis on building as I’ve come to expect from other LEGO games, though there are some structures out in the wilderness you can assemble as you pass by for a bit of flavor and in-game currency rewards.

Aloy herself can play dress-up with a wide variety of outfits ranging from Horizon-themed costumes to totally unrelated LEGO cast members. And every member of Mother’s Heart can be chucked into the dress-up room and fashioned up in the same way, too. If you want a Mother’s Heart full of little LEGO cowboys, by golly, you may have it.

While I played the tutorial solo, half of my demo took place in co-op mode, where I played as Aloy’s friend Varl. Almost everything Aloy can do, Varl can too. He wields a spear that functions very similarly to her bow, and while there are some distinctive power-ups for each of them, they’re both just as good at taking down dinos. Co-op can get a touch chaotic with two players in the mix, especially once you start lighting things on fire. But I’m excited to have the option at all, available both in couch co-op (which I played) and online.

With my back-to-back demos at Play Days last weekend covering both LEGO Horizon Adventures and Astro Bot, I briefly felt I had stumbled into a Nintendo appointment by mistake. Sony clearly wants to play, and LEGO Horizon Adventures presents a massive toy box to tinker, fuss around with, and most importantly, laugh about. The Horizon series may be mechanically complex and about (among other things) the very serious and real dangers of humanity destroying itself. But to Guerrilla’s immense credit, Horizon is not above being lovingly dismantled, brick by brick, by its own creators. All the better for us that the result is such a joyful, family-friendly adventure.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.