Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Horizon Zero Dawn

• The game that made me buy a PS4 Pro.  
• This is the best looking/performing game that I've ever played.  It's truly amazing and gorgeous at 1080P or 4K.   Sometimes I just sit and look at the beautiful landscape in awe.  
• All of the hype is well warranted and the developers delivered on what they promised.
• The combat is fun and dynamic, you need to survey your surroundings and decide what is the best way to take down some of the coolest beasts in video games.    Your weapon arsenal is large which gives you multiple ways to attack any situation. 
• The story is very good as well and I've read it actually has a satisfying ending.
• The world building is also exceptional as you really want to know what happened to our society that caused this new civilization.  
• The only issue I have is that it came out the same week as Zelda.   

Zelda;  Breath of the Wild  (This could take some time)

• If you told me I would be playing a WiiU game at 720P over a new PS4 game at 4K I would think you were crazy. 
• Apparently I'm crazy.  
• I'm not sure what magic Nintendo has but the developers had something up there sleeves the whole time. 

• This is Nintendo's first open world game and they nailed it, and is probably the best open world game ever made. 
• The subtitle to the game is Breath of the Wild and it's that first word that sums up what makes this world great. 
• In every open world game there are tons of stuff to do, but what if you just sat back and did nothing and just let the world Breathe for a bit.  
• When you do this in Zelda, something about the world just feels alive and like it's a real place.  The way the wind interacts with the grass and trees, the way the insects come and go, the way the animals interact, everything just feel right.  The physics in the world help create this life like environment.  
• Also the sound direction is great as well.  It's not noisy or boisterous but has subtle sounds that make the world come alive.  I was talking to a person with bells around their neck and as they moved you could barely hear them ring just like I would expect in real life.  Once again it's hard to explain but it just feels right. 

• The game runs at 720P so it's not a graphical powerhouse, but at times it looks amazing.  Some of the sunsets I've seen are incredible. 
• While it does carry over quite a few things from the older Zelda's that make it feel a bit dated, the one thing it doesn't do is give you a long tutorial and explain every detail.  The game starts with a guy showing you 4 places to go and that's about it.  It's up to you to figure out how to get there, which makes the start to the game a bit difficult.  
• You have about 6 abilities that you learn in the first couple of hours and you use them throughout the rest of the game to complete all the puzzles and dungeons.  You have everything at your disposal at the beginning, no more finding certain equipment that lets you access different areas. 
• You can climb anything as long as you have stamina to do so.  There is no pre-set ledges or paths, it's up to you on how you want to get to the top.  If it starts raining though it will make the surface slick so you will have a hard time climbing or be stuck waiting for the rain to subside.  
• The combat can be difficult as the enemies are no slouches and you can easily die with one hit from some enemies, I've died around 10 times in combat. It does have degradable weapons which is divisive.  If you like to have one weapon and use that all the time then you will not like this at all.  The weapons break pretty quickly on enemies so you will have different weapons in your inventory that you will be switching to.  I found it to be cool as each weapon feels different so it keeps combat dynamic.  

• The game has surprised me multiple times. 
• The first time I encountered a lightening storm, I was running around and it showed me that the lightening was getting ready to strike me so I tried to get to somewhere I could hide but I didn't make it and got hit and died.  This happened again and I was wondering what I could do to avoid this.  Well I didn't notice that I had equipped my metal sword and shield which was attracting the lightening, I took that off and I could run without worry. 
•  In combat I was dropping bombs as I was running away from enemies and then blowing them up as they ran by it.  I came across a different enemy and tried the same tactic and he kicked the bomb back at me which caused me to blow my self up. 
• I was paragliding down from a building and saw my horse down below and thought maybe I could land on my horse and sure enough got close to him and I mounted my horse.  
• You can use your shield as a sled and slide down huge mountains.  
• Knock an enemies weapon out of their hand and they react and run around trying to find another one to attack you with. 
• There is just so much little stuff to find, I've heard one guy say after 85 hours he is still finding new things and new ways to interact with the environment. 

• I did have the Switch pre-ordered but cancelled because there was only one game to play on it. 
• The WiiU version runs pretty well, there are some frame-rate issues in some areas but overall it runs fine. I am using a pro controller but some puzzles require the gamepad to use its motion capabilities so that is a bit of a pain to get that out.