Lego Horizon Adventures Review (PS5) - The Playful Side of a Post-apocalyptic World

If there’s one thing clear about Guerrilla Games’ Horizon series, it’s that Sony sees its potential to capture a wider audience. Lego Horizon Adventures proves this, offering a playful, kid-friendly take on the post-apocalyptic world where humanity faces off against mechanical beasts with little more than spears and arrows. This game stands as a great way to introduce younger players to the Horizon universe in a more approachable, lighthearted format.

In Lego Horizon Adventures, Guerrilla Games follows the traditional Lego game formula, presenting a more compact and cheerful version of the story from Horizon Zero Dawn. While the core story beats remain, they’re told through a humorous, upbeat style that aligns with the Lego brand. With its lighthearted tone and comical dialogue, the game delivers plenty of moments that both kids and adults can enjoy.

A lighter, upbeat take on Horizon Zero Dawn

The original voice actors of Horizon Zero Dawn return, and it’s clear they had fun with the more lighthearted tone of Horizon Adventures. Ashley Burch’s take on Aloy in the original series always felt serious and reserved. Aloy is a character, focused and driven to uncover the mysteries of the old world and understand her connection to it. It takes her a while to open up due to how she was brought up and the mystery that surrounds her. 

Ashley Burch’s portrayal of Aloy here is more vibrant and comedic, a stark contrast to her reserved, serious tone in the original series. This playful Aloy is full of energy, delivering humorous lines that set the tone of the game. Other characters, like Varl (a lovable klutz) and Erend (now a donut fanatic), also adopt exaggerated traits, adding to the cartoonish, comedic atmosphere. Even the antagonist is humorously petty, as if from a classic cartoon, obsessed with eliminating shade to “bask in eternal sunlight”. 

It’s silly, funny, self-aware, and intentional. A narration of the story is being done by Aloy’s mentor and guardian Rost, which Aloy is aware of when he starts narrating what’s going on. It’s funny and not entirely forced as while not all the jokes land, kids will have a kick at how the characters sound and act.

The whole storyline feels rather rushed as all it does is give players the basics of the world of Horizon. This would feel like a summary of events of the first game with various shortcuts made as you’ll eventually find yourself at the final battle with the story abruptly ending on a positive note after roughly eight hours of playtime. This feels intended as the story only provided the broad strokes of Horizon Zero Dawn’s story beats, making it more of an introduction than anything else.

It’s simply another Lego game

Visuals remain true to the classic Lego style, which suits the Horizon theme well. Every piece of the world is constructed from vibrant Lego blocks, and while it doesn’t break new ground in terms of visuals, it’s polished and engaging. Notably, the machine creatures of Horizon—like the Tallneck, Grazer, and Thunderjaw—have been impressively reimagined as Lego models. It’s easy to imagine these designs as real Lego sets, and seeing them fall apart into pieces during battles adds to the fun.

The game’s soundtrack consists of reimagined music from the Horizon series, adapted to suit the kid-friendly, upbeat vibe. The familiar tracks are a nice touch, connecting Lego Horizon Adventures to its source material.

The game is set in an isometric camera angle with almost every piece in the environment breakable when attacked or moved around.  It feels like a Lego piece board ready to be broken down with enemy Lego characters and Lego machine beasts roaming the area. Each section of the game is broken down into various stages that are a mix of a bit of basic platforming and wide open spaces for combat. 

Most Lego games are just a button mash fest, which makes sense as they are catering to a younger audience. In Lego Horizon Adventures, the combat heavily leans towards the unique concepts that make Horizon special. Combat is mainly ranged focused as only one character attacks via melee. 

There’s a lot of aiming involved as you can target certain pieces to deal more damage, giving more thought other than just pressing buttons. Positioning plays an important role as well due to the many hazardous objects in the combat area. Some barrels can be thrown to deal elemental damage and effects, rock pillars that can fall onto allies or foes, and puddles of water that can either freeze or electrify characters with the right ammo type thrown into the mix. Most enemies tend to overwhelm you by charging head-first, so most of the time you’ll find yourself mostly running and gunning, maintaining a good gap between friend and foe. 

Limited heroes

But one thing that stood out was the lack of characters played as Lego games usually feature a crazy amount of characters to play. It’s all about quantity with these types of games, but in Lego Horizon Adventures there are only four playable characters with their unique weapon type and upgrades. Yes, you can change the skins of the characters you play, but no one distinct as the skins can either be from brands like Ninjago, and the Horizon skins are like generic batches of skins not interesting enough to entice you to customize. This isn’t like Lego Avengers or Lego Jurassic Park which features an abundant amount of playable characters with unique properties.

Progression for the four playable characters is straightforward. You can level up each character by defeating human or machine beasts when playing them in a stage as levels earn you passive improvements for that character such as increased damage or higher life. It’s all passive increases for combat with no real choice for the player to the point you can even forget levels even matter. There are also passive upgrades such as having a chance that a healing item will drop when defeating enemies, increasing how long enemies are stunned/burned/frozen, to how much damage throwable barrels will deal against enemies. Simple upgrades that I forgot existed for a couple of hours after unlocking the ability to upgrade them.

Each character has a unique weapon type giving different flavors as Aloy has her trusty bow, Varl with his throwable spear, Erend with his hammer, and Teersa the granny who throws random items that happen to explode on contact.  Each character can pick up one unique weapon with limited ammo that they can switch between their primary. They have several choices as picking up a fire arrow for Aloy allows her to burn vines to gain access to chests or having Freeze spears for Varl to put machines frozen and in a vulnerable state. Each player may also carry one gadget at a time as these items can range from deploying traps like Horizon’s tripwires to absurd ones like summoning a hot dog guy that chugs explosive hotdogs at enemies for a short duration. Some are meant for defense while others give players mobility such as a quick dash or an extra double jump that shoots out fire to those below.

Combat can get chaotic at times, especially when you have an extra player in couch co-op with all the gadgets going off and all the interactable objects in the combat area, ready to be triggered to either explode, freeze, or electrocute any character nearby.  This is where the combat is the most fun as you’ll have to manage all that chaos while trying to aim for the right weak spot in enemies to take them down as fast as possible.

After going through a stage, players return to the game’s player hub, where players can customize Aloy’s village any way they want from adding an observatory to even putting stoplights. Lego Horizon Adventures has a variety of customizable options that have cosmetic pieces from other Lego products, making the hub a place for players to choose how each structure will look. Its customization isn’t deep as it’s simply you picking the structure, its fixed color combination, and the type of landscape the structure will be in.

The game may seem rather short for some but there were attempts to make the game have more replayability. Apex Hunts become available after clearing the story sections of certain locations, which serve as challenging encounters of certain bosses or waves of enemies. After Apex Hunts, you unlock the ability to freely revisit previous levels as some levels have different paths to take and some areas are usually locked during your first run during the story. All that effort and all the studs you gather also contribute to you rebuilding the rest of the player hub and unlocking more ways to customize your characters and certain buildings.

Built for kids

Everything about this game is easy to understand. Simple, approachable, and at times repetitive, but this is all in design for a younger audience. While it doesn’t reinvent the Lego game formula, Lego Horizon Adventures is a commendable adaptation of the Horizon world, showing how well the universe translates into Lego form.

Fans of the series will not get much from this or have added insight to the lore of Horizon, but they will enjoy spending a few hours playing this game with a nephew, their kid, a loved one, or maybe someone who has no idea what Horizon is all about. The hope here is at the end of the day fans of the series and the ones experiencing this world for the first time through Lego Horizon Adventures will find common ground thanks to this game.

---

Verdict: 3.5 / 5 (Great)

PROS

• A fun and accessible take on Horizon Zero Dawn’s story and setting

• Ideal for kids and newcomers unfamiliar with the Horizon series

• Fun gameplay that focuses on range and exploiting weaknesses and effects

CONS

• Only four playable characters, fewer than typical Lego games

• Skins aren’t all that exciting to customize characters

What I’ve Played 

• Completed the story  in roughly eight hours

• Tackled some Apex Hunts and completed some Community Board requests

• Tried all characters with Aloy reaching level 18

*This review is based on a PS5 review copy given by the publisher

---