• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Holo Writing

Authors Jacob & H.P. Holo

  • Home
  • Books
    • Gordian Division
    • Monster Punk Horizon
    • Seraphim Revival
    • Monster Girl Tamer
    • Freelancers of Neptune
  • Audiobooks
  • About
  • Blog
  • Shop
  • Contact
  • Appearances
  • Free Book

Game Review

Horizon Zero Dawn – Video Game Review

March 13, 2022 by hpholo 1 Comment

This month in my gaming life was an achievement, as I finally – years behind everyone else – finished Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m not nearly as fast a gamer as Jacob is; if I like a game, I tend to draw out the experience as long as I can, which is easy to do with a game as exploration and side-quest heavy as Horizon Zero Dawn. Thus why I have been playing it for … *checks PS4* … 3 years. 😁

Horizon Zero Dawn Image

Long review short, Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my favorite games. I picked it up largely because of all its accolades and the non-traditional female main character it had in Aloy (at least as typical female designs in video games go), and I was not disappointed by any of it.

(Jacob, meanwhile, didn’t make it very far in. He found the game’s massive to-do lists unengaging and the combat uninteresting. It probably didn’t help matters that the very first side quest he worked on featured annoying repetitive dialogue. He also found the core design direction of primitive humans taking down robots to be too much of a stretch for someone who knows how powerful and dangerous even a modern six-axis industrial robot can be.)

For those who are unfamiliar with the game: In the far future, after some sort of technological apocalypse, the people of earth have descended into tribal existences, sharing the earth with biomechanical monsters that process organic material, including humans, for fuel. Among these humans is Aloy. She’s been cast out from her matriarchal tribe for being mysteriously motherless – but unbeknownst to all of them, she’s also the key to unlocking the secrets about their post-apocalyptic world … and what led to it.

The thing that stood out most to me, at first, was the grand, epic scale not only of the story, but of the world itself. The lands you explore as Aloy are so vivid and well-rendered that every nook and cranny looks meaningful, like they all hide something of value, and I wanted to explore them all. Thus, why it took me so long to finish. 😄

Well, that and hunting all the random biomechanical monsters just for the fun of it. 😁 A combat system can make or break a game for me – I don’t have the patience to wade through games with bad combat systems – and Horizon Zero Dawn hits that sweet spot of being simple to learn but complex enough that you can get really crazy with your strategies if you want to. There’s also more to hunting than just killing monsters; some will drop pieces of armor and other materials as you fight them, which can change the course of a hunt if knocked off at the right time. (I admit another of the reasons it took me so long to finish was because I spent a stupid amount of time figuring out how best to hunt the creatures, Monster Hunter-style.)

Finally, I don’t play most video games for story so much as I do gameplay and role-playing/character interactions, and admittedly, despite its epic, high-stakes premise, there’s no real sense of urgency in Horizon Zero Dawn’s story. (This isn’t because of the story itself, but rather because the player can opt to fill the space between main story beats with as many side quests as their little completionist heart desires. Which I did. 😁)

Viewed as a whole, though, the story is a spectacular one, and in my opinion, stands on its own as a piece of hard sci-fi, video game or not. Even once The Big Reveal about the setting’s mysterious history is made, the player finds that there are dramas within dramas that spiraled behind the scenes in the setting’s past, to contribute to what became the setting’s present, and though we only meet the contributing characters through audio logs and hologram recordings, they’re easily as interesting and well-realized as the more interesting NPCs. I could nitpick some aspects of the plot – namely that the most pivotal, destructive part of the history comes down to one guy being an idiot. But honestly, given the past few years, I’ve learned to never discount the incredible power of One Guy Being an Idiot, so now, in 2022, it doesn’t seem so unrealistic to me.

Overall, though, it still remains one of the best games I’ve played in years, and I look forward to playing it again, even after I’ve played the sequel, Horizon: Forbidden West.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Action RPG, Aloy, Favorite Video Games, Game Review, Horizon Zero Dawn, HZD, RPG, Sci-Fi, Sci-fi RPG, Video Game Review, Video Game Reviews, Video Games

Pokemon Go: Halloween Event – Game Review

November 3, 2016 by hpholo Leave a Comment

I’ve been a Pokemon Go player since day one, but when I first learned of this past weekend’s Halloween event, I was only cautiously excited. After all, for everything Pokemon Go does right, there are ten other features that amount to “could have been awesome but were ruined by stupid problems.”
It was a pleasant surprise, then, when the event turned out to be a rousing amount of fun – with very few problems to speak of! 😀
pogo-halloween
For the uninitiated, Pokemon Go’s Halloween event ran from Wednesday, October 26th through Monday, November 1st.
During it, players could earn twice as much candy for basically everything – catching Pokemon (which earned 6 candies vs. the normal 3), trading Pokemon (2 vs. 1), hatching eggs (variable numbers depending upon the egg distance), etc.
Buddy Pokemon also yielded candy 4x faster than usual, with 1km buddies finding candy at .25km, 3km at .75km, and 5km at 1.25km.
And of course, select Pokemon fitting the Halloween theme appeared in greater numbers.
pogo-add
Oddly, though I imagine the increased Pokemon sightings were meant to be the big draw for the event, they were the least exciting part for me. Plus, I’m not sure why anyone at Niantic looked at Pokemon Go and said, “You know what this game needs? MORE ZUBATS.” 😐 Frankly, it’s not like any of the Pokemon featured were especially rare to begin with, but I went from having one wimpy Gastly and Meowth before the event to a whole army of Haunters and Persians during, so I can’t complain too much.
fullsizerender
The real success of the Pokemon offerings was not in the Pokemon featured, but the sheer number of sightings in general. In my neighborhood and favorite haunts (pun intended), I’m lucky to occasionally see a Pidgey. Heck, it is exciting to see a Pidgey. But for those few days, all those areas had Meowths and Drowzees and Cubones and Gastlies galore, such that I was actually able to play without making a special trip, which is what I usually have to do (a perk of being your own boss: scheduling dedicated Pokemon Go days). That said, thanks, Niantic, for making your game playable in suburbia, if only for a week.
As fun as that was, though, the best part of the event was its candy-related perks.
pogo-candy
Due to the aforementioned suburban lack of Pokemon, I use Pokemon Go as a glorified walking app, more than a game:
Each day I assign myself an egg or a certain number of candies and walk the distance necessary to hatch/find them. I’ve really enjoyed the introduction of the Buddy Pokemon system because it tricks me into walking more. After I hatch a 2km egg, I’ll usually see that I have 1km left to go on a Buddy candy; so I start a new egg, find a candy, see that I now have 1km on my new egg, etc… It is a vicious cycle that has resulted in some sweet leg muscles. Anyway, given the way Pokemon Go updates distances (in .2km-ish chunks rather than by step), the diminished distances introduced in this event led to A LOT of “Oh, just .1km to go” loops and resultant candies. Hooray for app-assisted health!
The candy perks had high strategic value, too (if the word “strategy” can be applied to a game like Pokemon Go). Prior to the Halloween event, I had several uncommon Pokemon that were within 10 or so candies of evolution – not a huge number, but no small amount of walking, either, given that most were egg-hatched Pokemon not common in my geographic area (and that I thus couldn’t evolve with candy from wild Pokemon). After a Halloween of plugging those Pokemon into the Buddy system, though, I evolved nearly all of them on walking alone! Combine those with all the Meowths and Zubats and Cubones and Gastlies (SO MANY GASTLIES) that I was able to evolve from catches, and this event made for an XPpalooza!

img_3947
SOOOOOOO MANY GASTLIES.

I can almost literally say that there was nothing wrong with this event.
Almost. It wouldn’t be Pokemon Go without a random problem.
Early in the week, I encountered a glitch that kept my distances walked from updating, but that was fixed within a day with a quick patch. More significantly, one of Pokemon Go’s new features/issues is that it dampens the sounds of programs running in the background of a device. Which, I guess, is cool if you need the extra quiet to concentrate on flicking Pokeballs at cute little monsters. Not so much if you want to listen to music while you play – or, as I do, listen to audiobooks while you walk. With Pokemon Go’s new sound settings, I have to turn my iPhone’s volume all the way up to even begin to hear my book. (I don’t run with headphones in for safety reasons, so the book has to compete with environmental noise.) It’s not a problem worthy of nerdrage, but it would be nice to have the option to turn it off.
But really, that was the biggest problem I had with this event. Overall, though Pokemon Go’s persistent general problems have gone unaddressed (WHERE IS TRACKING? TRADING? BATTLING YOUR FRIENDS?), the Halloween event was a huge step in the right direction, and I look forward to seeing what other seasonal events Niantic has up its sleeve.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: App Review, Game Review, Halloween, Pokemon, Pokemon Go, Review

Footer

Grab Some Free Books!

Thanks for swinging by our humble corner of the Internet. If this is your first time visiting our site – here, sign up and have some free reads on us!

Sign Up Now!

Copyright © 2025 · Powered by ModFarm · Log in

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Accept