Lego Horizon Adventures review: imperfect mash-up still charms

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Lego Horizon Adventures review: imperfect mash-up still charms

Lego Horizon Adventures review: imperfect mash-up still charms

Lego Horizon Adventures

MSRP $60.00

“Lego Horizon Adventures isn’t a perfect fit, but Sony’s charmer snaps together where it counts.”

Pros

• Horizon world looks great as bricks
• Infectious energy
• Combat is easy to pick up and play
• Fun Lego collectibles

Cons

• Some eye-rolling humor
• Very repetitive missions
• Not so well designed for co-op

As I bashed bricks and groaned at goofy puns in Lego Horizon Adventures, I began to wonder if Sony has been targeting the wrong audience all this time.

When the Horizon series debuted in 2017, it was pushed as another cinematic single-player adventure targeting more mature audiences. Looking back at Horizon Zero Dawn now through a Legofied interpretation, the series is much more kid friendly than I remember. At its core, the postapocalyptic open-world game tells a coming-of-age story about a woman searching for her mother. That’s a story custom built for young adults growing up alongside their games. And that’s before even considering that the main enemies in the series are robot dinosaurs. It’s a 12-year-old’s vision of a cool game. After nearly seven years, maybe a Horizon game built for kids is exactly what the series was built for.

Lego Horizon Adventures is a short but sweet charmer made for families. It convincingly turns Aloy’s world into a playground, even if it takes a lot of creative liberties to snap the pieces together. It’s held back by a very limited scope that leans on repetitive missions and thin combat, but that makes for a frictionless gateway into Horizon’s world that’ll be easy for even young players to cross over.

Reconstructing Horizon

Everything you need to know about Lego Horizon Adventures is in its title. Like other Lego games, it’s a playful parody of Sony’s Horizon series filled with light-hearted humor, collectible bricks, and lots of robots to smash. It plays out as a retelling of Aloy’s first adventure, Horizon Zero Dawn, though a fairly loose one. It doesn’t start with a childhood memory or send Aloy through a Proving ritual up in the mountains. The story gets reduced down to a fight against the evil Helios’ cultist brigade and Aloy’s quest to learn where she came from, all told in a brisk six hours that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

What’s more important than capturing every story beat is translating the world of Horizon to Legos. Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo nail that here, re-creating dense jungles and mountain paths with colorful bricks. Horizon has always been a vibrant series, so it’s surprisingly natural to see forest green flora and bright yellow handholds dotting the linear levels. The series’ cast of robot dinosaurs translates especially well to that art style too, which is no surprise considering that Guerrilla first prototyped the creatures using real Lego bricks during Horizon Zero Dawn’s development. I just wanted to pluck the pieces off them and hold them between my fingers.

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Sony Interactive Entertainment

While that’s all a perfect fit, the overall tone of Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t the cleanest match for a kids’ game. After all, it tells a story about the Earth plunging into an apocalypse at the hands of big tech (good luck to whoever has to write the script for a sequel themed around the politically fierce Horizon Forbidden West). The script gets a much friendlier overhaul that’s heavy on the kinds of gags, one-liners, and puns you’d find in The Lego Movie. Sometimes it works like a charm. There’s some legitimately funny self-parody here, like when Aloy questions why the heck she needs to hunt down three doohickeys to build an ultimate weapon, and who the heck hid them in metal flowers. Those moments poke fun at the video game logic of the series in a playful way that always got a rise out of me.

Other gags can range from a little grating (“Amaze-bricks!” Aloy frequently shouts as an eye-rolling bark) to completely overplayed. I don’t know who is still earnestly writing “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” jokes in 2024, but it’s a construction so cliche that you’d think the game came out a decade ago. Lego Horizon Adventures is a game for kids first and foremost that leaves in a few good jokes for moms and dads too, so I’m willing to let some duds pass. It does just make for some dated humor that could have used a punch-up.

I can tell that everyone involved is having fun with it.

The voice cast finds a bit more success turning their characters into bubbly toys. Tim Russ takes up the mantle of Sylens and has a blast turning the late Lance Reddick’s character into a comedically vague guiding voice (to Aloy’s frustration). Other actors have to work a little harder to twist their characters. Ashly Burch trades in Aloy’s cool monotone for a high-pitched squeak that sounds more like Borderlands’ Tiny Tina than anything remotely resembling Aloy.

While it’s not always the most natural adaptation, I can tell that everyone involved is having fun with it. That energy is infectious and makes for a playful adventure that isn’t just great for kids but also for Horizon fans who want to see its world deconstructed in a low-stakes manner.

Keeping it simple

Compared to a game like Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Lego Horizon Adventures keeps its gameplay surprisingly simple. You aren’t exploring any open-ended hubs or free building with bricks, but rather setting out on a set of linear missions threaded through four biomes. Each bite-sized quest has players controlling one of four heroes, from Aloy to Varl, and earning a brick at the end. Those missions have some slight variances, but they’re all largely the same in structure: drop into a stage, poke around for hidden chests, do some light platforming, and blow through a few combat arenas. The last missions aren’t all that different from the very first; even the differing biomes just look like the same spaces made from different-colored bricks.

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Sony Interactive Entertainment

Rather than reminding me of a Lego game, it calls Minecraft Dungeons to mind more than anything. That game shrunk down the concept of Diablo into a very short and simple dungeon crawler that was easy to grasp. Lego Horizon Adventures does the same with the action-adventure genre, reducing it to its foundational bricks. While that’s fine for a game of this scope, it’s a shame that it doesn’t get more creative with its repetitive mission design considering how many memorable set pieces its source material has. The only mission that really stands out from the rest is one where I need to chase down a Tallneck as it walks around the level. It loses its bespoke charm when I end up doing an identical mission in another biome.

Thankfully, actually moving through those missions is a delight. That’s largely due to a simple but satisfying enough combat system that takes advantage of the Horizon formula. When I see a robot, I can use my focus to highlight its weak points. From there, I can fire my weapon toward it to do extra damage until I chip it off. It’s just like the base game, but in a much easier “point and shoot” system that kids can easily grasp. During and between battles, I can find upgraded weapons or secondary tools with limited uses that add just enough extra depth. That’s where some of the Lego charm shines, as I love dropping down a hot dog vendor’s cart and watching it launch exploding beef around the screen. That pairs well with old Horizon favorites like the Tripcaster, which lets me electrify any enemies that walk through them.

It was a perfect weekend game that required little energy …

Still, there are moments where I feel like bringing in more of Horizon’s DNA could have helped mix encounters up. Features like time-slowing or enemy overriding aren’t adapted here. Even odder is that Aloy can’t use her spear as a melee weapon, limiting me to long-range arrow attacks. That decision seems to be tied to the multi-hero design, as each character has their own weapon. Varl can throw a spear that pierces enemies, while Erend gets a chargeable hammer smash. That encourages me to try a new character each mission — all of which get their own perks when leveling up — but I’m left wishing I could smack an opponent’s weak point when it staggers rather than just doing the same attack over and over.

Even with some gripes, I still found myself enjoying the smooth sailing of it all. Even as an adult, I was happy to see it all through to the end. I cleared every extra mission, collected just about every brick, and checked off as many optional tasks as possible. It was a perfect weekend game that required little energy from me at a time where my brain was feeling overloaded. That’s the simple pleasure that a good piece of kids’ media can deliver to viewers or players of any age. In that respect, Lego Horizon Adventures is a success.

Designing for kids

I recognize that many of Lego Horizon Adventures’ design decisions are in service of its youngest players. Repetition and streamlined controls are a necessity. Even then, Guerilla’s inexperience as a family-focused developer does poke through. The shortcomings became most apparent to me when I tried out the “pop-in, pop-out” co-op play. Here, two players can tackle missions together, at least bringing some extra chaos to battles. The adventure’s difficulty seems built around solo play, so two players can blow through arenas in a flash, but that’s understandable considering that the ideal setup is a family member playing with a young kid.

The straightforward and repetitive levels just aren’t very fun playgrounds.

What’s more lacking is that the linear levels don’t exactly feel built with tag teams in mind either. There’s no point where one player can peel off to find a treasure while another does something else. There’s really only one focal puzzle, battle, or platforming challenge on screen at once. When player two gets too far from player one, the former zaps back to the latter. There just isn’t much incentive to explore as a team.

That isn’t just about collectibles or hidden chests. The best kids’ games are built like toys. Just take Sony’s own Astro Bot, which is filled with tiny details for curious kids to discover. An adult wouldn’t think to spin dash into a corkscrew tree, but a kid might and get a little joy because of it. There are no such moments like that in missions; the straightforward and repetitive levels just aren’t very fun playgrounds.

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Sony Interactive Entertainment

There is one area where Lego Horizon Adventures nails that assignment. In between missions, players return to Mother’s Heart, which acts as an expanding hub area. Here, players can spend studs to throw decorations around town, customize houses, recolor the land, and more. It’s not a full building system, but it still captures the tactile joys of snapping Lego pieces from entirely different sets together. Those are the moments where kids will more likely connect with Lego Horizon Adventures, whether it’s seeing what happens when they interact with a rocket ship or mixing and matching different costume parts to turn Aloy into one-part cultist, one-part robber, and one-part hot dog.

While its repetitive design is lacking in some key ways, I admire what Lego Horizon Adventures sets out to do. Parents have always had ways to game with their kids, but usually through kid-focused franchises like Mario. This builds a generational bridge between the kinds of games parents are playing and what their kids like. That will allow families to share their worlds with one another rather than forcing mom and dad into the Roblox mines. Even if it’s all just an elaborate way to sell Tallneck Lego sets, there’s something sincere about it all. You can imagine how happy Guerrilla’s developers-turned-parents must be to finally play one of their own games with their kids. You can’t do that with Killzone.

Lego Horizon Adventures was tested on PS5 Pro with a code provided by the publisher.

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