As some of you probably know, I’m a huge fan of the Horizon series. I thoroughly enjoyed both Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, as well as their respective DLC expansions, and I am eagerly awaiting a third, possibly final, installment. But despite my love of Guerrilla Games’ post-apocalyptic, open-world RPGs, a LEGO spin-off game was decidedly not on my bingo card. And yet, here we are: LEGO Horizon Adventures is a brick-filled adaptation of the first Horizon game, with plenty of LEGO zaniness thrown in for good measure. But is it worth the $60 price tag? Let’s find out!
LEGO Horizon Adventures presents an abridged version of Horizon Zero Dawn’s story. Aloy is an outcast of the Nora tribe and hopes tribe leader Teersa might be able to tell her about her mother. However, when Aloy and her mentor Rost approach Mother’s Heart, the tribe’s main settlement, they witness sun-worshipping cultists carting Teersa and other tribe members off in cages, and rush to save them. What follows is a series of bite-sized adventures where Aloy and her friends explore the wilds while battling machines, cultists, and a mysterious red orb that wants to corrupt all living things.
The Old Ones and the apocalypse that destroyed them, the political intrigues of Meridian, and the Banuk lands from The Frozen Wilds are all absent, as are many secondary characters — though you can buy outfits to dress up like some of them. The roster of playable characters maxes out at four, which feels a little small to me, but then again, the story’s simplicity and tight focus on primary villain Helis and his spherical master don’t really allow the rest of the cast a reason to be in the narrative. What LEGO Horizon Adventures has in abundance is humor. Characters are constantly joking, making fourth-wall-breaking references, and generally behaving like caricatures of their counterparts from the main games. And that’s before we get into all the anachronistic LEGO outfits you can wear and wacky stuff you can build in Mother’s Heart, which becomes your home base. Want to make an amusement park — complete with roller coasters, popcorn stands, and balloons — and then stroll around in a chicken suit? You can do that! And it is hilarious.
When you’re not customizing Mother’s Heart into a smorgasbord of random chaos, you’re traveling to one of four distinct zones, like the Sacred Lands or Sunfall Desert. While LEGO Horizon Adventures doesn’t feature the realistic visuals of its inspiration, the LEGO graphics are nonetheless impressive. Unlike other LEGO games, almost everything you see here is made to look like it’s built out of real LEGO bricks. Even effects like fire and flowing water look like LEGO pieces, and the cumulative effect is that you feel like you’re playing in a real LEGO world. This is especially cool when it comes to various machines you get to fight, because if you’re like me, you’ve wanted to see more Horizon LEGO machines ever since they released the LEGO Tallneck set in 2022.
Not only are most of the machines from Zero Dawn represented in all their LEGO glory, but the main mechanic of targeting components to deal extra damage and weaken machines is faithfully recreated. If you remember the weak points from the main game, they’re pretty much the same here, as are the machines’ various attacks. It’s pretty neat that they recreated the combat so well in a LEGO format — even down to human enemies being much too simple and boring compared to their machine counterparts.
My only complaints about the visuals and gameplay in LEGO Horizon Adventures is that they’re a little restrictive, so to speak. The camera is often aimed slightly downward in a semi-isometric style, and you can’t move it around. Not only does this mean you can’t fully take in the beautiful LEGO world around you, but it can also make combat a little more difficult since you can’t pan the camera to see enemies off screen. This is particularly awkward when you first enter a combat area. By default, you land in the familiar Horizon stealth grass, but enemies are often far off screen and you can’t see them without leaving cover and exposing yourself — which makes the stealth kind of superfluous.
On a more macro level, the mission structure of LEGO Horizon Adventures does not lend itself well to longer play sessions, since the gameplay loop starts to feel repetitive as you notice you’re moving through the same areas over and over. Finally, I was a little let down by the lack of replayability once you finish the short 7–10 hour main story. You can certainly spend a lot of extra time unlocking all the character skills and buildables for Mother’s Heart, but once you finish the story missions and apex hunts, you can’t replay them. Instead, you can go on expeditions in each zone, which are basically a selection of random areas and enemies to fight. There are only four zones, though, so you can imagine this gets a little old after a while. Co-op play certainly opens the door for more fun, but for $60, I can see some not finding the amount of content worth the price.
Finally, some words about audio. Several actors reprise their roles from the main series, such as Ashly Burch (Aloy) and JB Blanc (Rost). There’s a delightful level of excitement and exaggeration in their dialogue that fits the much brighter and happier tone of LEGO Horizon Adventures. Those who have new voices do a good job fitting their characters. In particular, Sylens — voiced by the late Lance Reddick in the main series — is now voiced by Tim Russ, of Star Trek: Voyager fame. The music is also quite pleasing and fits both the style of the main games and the Saturday Morning Cartoon feel of this LEGO adventure. In fact, several motifs from the Horizon series appear throughout the game, and there’s even some pretty groovy dance music to bop your head to.
All in all, LEGO Horizon Adventures is a cute and fun experience that I think both LEGO and Horizon fans will enjoy. The story is an amusing adaptation of Zero Dawn’s plot, the characters are often hilarious, the gameplay is entertaining — if a little repetitive — and it definitely nails the feeling of playing in a large Horizon-themed LEGO set. It is fairly short, and there aren’t a ton of things to do once you finish the main content, so your mileage may vary regarding how much you feel it’s worth the $60 price tag. But if you’re really into LEGO or Horizon, you will probably find plenty to like about this unexpected but welcome spin-off.
