Horizon: Zero Dawn review – a stunning but barely evolved RPG contradiction

Its hunter/gatherer gameplay hasn't moved on from Far Cry and Tomb Raider, but Zero Dawn sets a new visual benchmark

On the face of it, a lavish and original fantasy epic set in a wonderfully realised world sounds like a welcome escape from the very real horrors being played out across the nightly news bulletins.

Then again, given that Horizon: Zero Dawn deals with the consequences of hubristic ambition and sentient robots combining to bring about the near-annihilation of the human race, perhaps you'd be better off with an Enid Blyton book instead. At times Horizon: Zero Dawn, the latest title from Dutch studio Guerrilla Games, those behind the Killzone series, feels uncannily like prophecy rather than escapism. Or perhaps even a survival manual. This is a world where technology has all but defeated the human race, where the most powerful inhabitants are robot monsters, and where the lead character is looking to discover exactly what happened to the grand civilisation of the past. It could be a particularly bleak New Scientist article about 2025.