smashed through the zero dawn campaign over the long weekend. s tier popcorn hollywood gaming. funny that this and the new pokemon i finished last week are both riffing on monster hunter structure or combat. really love the combat in this, and the way they ramp you up to taking down the big bois is so satisfying, really looking forward to what new robots they're going to hit us with in the sequel. playing on hard was still fairly easy sticking close to the main questline but deviating for some of the challenges (found the hunting trials really good for collecting consumables eg getting heaps of blaze from rinsing and repeating the grazer trial in the nora hunting grounds getting 50+ blaze per run when needed between missions). getting a grapple and a damn glider is going to be sick. will continue with the DLC this week. i ended up finding the story and characters quite engaging, there's some tommy wiseau tier dialogue and acting at points, and the facial animations can be goofy as fuck especially when the game is so po faced, but i kinda liked that goofiness and the overall plot played out well. really like aloy. some local stores already got great dealz on the physical PS5 version price matching PS4 and significantly cheaper than digital lmao. prob won't bother with deluxe, but i'll def be picking this up at some point. maybe not straight away with elden ring coming out the next week. seems the sort of game i'll want to play for a good while and i don't really want to delay jumping into the latter, but im tempted. sequel looks so good.
