LEGO Horizon Adventures Hands-on Preview – A new Dawn

If you’ve played a LEGO game before, there are similarities here, but with Guerilla Games at the helm of development, differences are subtle but still noticeable. Given it’s primarily a story-driven experience, you won’t have piles of characters to switch between in order to solve puzzles and find secrets. There are certainly collectibles to be discovered and hidden secrets to encounter, but LEGO Horizon Adventures’ mission structure seems more linear in its execution so that you move through the story beats. It’s a lot of fun, and very comfortable, but don’t worry as there are still things to build and studs to collect from destroying every object in sight, for those who need their fix. In true Horizon fashion, though, Aloy’s main weapon is her bow and arrow, and robots have those satisfying weak point canisters that glow at the press of a button when you activate your Focus. Combat felt slick and satisfying, and a bit more challenging than the destructible villains you’d come across in other LEGO titles.

In my relatively short playtime, I received several new abilities that came into play at different points to switch things up. Rocket boots allow you to shoot upward quickly, the fire beneath you raining down on enemies to cause damage. A multi-shot does what it says on the tin, allowing you to spray arrows. A Hot Dog stand can be placed as a sort of turret, attacking foes that come within its vicinity with flying buns of meat. Yes, things get a bit weird, but it all adds to the light and breezy vibe, and I appreciated seeing a series that has always been somewhat serious in tone let loose with the chaos.

Mother’s Heart, your home base, also expands and changes as you progress through the experience. It’s relatively customisable, with studs used as a currency to pimp out your home and its surroundings. Similarly, you can change your outfit, and even in the early stages of what I saw there were a lot of different outfits referencing Horizon’s key story moments and characters, and we know there will be some irreverent PlayStation-history costumes to come. This kind of customisation feels essential in a co-op experience like this, and my co-op partner and I had fun switching outfits, exploring, shooting each other with arrows, picking up townspeople and throwing them off the bridge… you know, all that goofy stuff.