Test - Lego Horizon Adventures: Test: Incredibly beautiful, incredibly flat

Fun for young and old: Wherever it says Lego, there has so far been a lot of, if not outstanding, fun to play with. And a lot of humor. Unfortunately, when the development baton was handed over from TT Games to Studio Gobo, both factors had to give up. While Lego Horizon Adventures captures the mood of the apocalyptic Horizon world well, it rests on its cuteness for too long.

Lego Horizon Adventures is hilarious. About an hour, give or take ten minutes. It depends on how quickly you get through the seven sub-levels of the first biome. After that, you've seen and heard most of what the game has to offer in terms of humorous ideas, and you have to live with a lot of repetition.

There's nothing wrong with the first hour. Lead actress Aloy has never been so excited and behaves as if she had drunk ten coffees and had a clown for breakfast. You can hardly recognize her in her 180-degree turn from serious adventurer to jokey joker.

No saying is too simple, hardly a comment without a spontaneous fourth wall break. Yes, there are some real grenades in there that radiate happiness and tickle a hearty laugh from the pit of your stomach. A big word of honor, we had a great time.

Lego can be so beautiful

The presentation contributes a lot to this. Aloy doesn't run, she jumps around in a good-humored hippety-hoppety way, staying in the air longer than her feet touch the ground. A skillfully implemented style. Over-sweetened, over-the-top and graphically superb on the PS5. Rarely has a Lego game been so atmospheric, decorated with light fog, HDR-filled sunshine and Lego dioramas whose details in real-world models would require weeks of dedication.

No doubt, Lego Horizon Adventures looks fantastic. When the lighting conditions in the village of Mother Heart are realigned after each level is completed, the finely tuned ambience plays ping-pong with your emotions to soften the boundaries between the plug-in building blocks and the Horizon universe, and funny pseudo-stop-motion animations capture your attention, Then the game even leaves a more solid impression than the two Lego movies.

You can't get enough of it. At least not on the PS5, which is where we tested the game. But the humor rarely lasts longer than the first biome because it always hits the same nerve. If Aloy and her three helpers, who you unlock over the course of the game, don't rely on complete over-the-top, then they rely on references that intentionally don't fit into the Horizon universe. Conversations about sandwiches, ham and pickles, for example. In a gradual process, hearty laughs turn into fits of laughter and finally end in slightly annoyed rolling of the eyes. In the long run there should simply have been more variance.

Indestructible?

At this point, fans of previous Lego games are legitimately asking whether the charm, the cuteness, even the childlike innocence of the building block themes can overcome such hang-ups and sustain the game. Isn't the Lego charm indestructible? Yes, it is, and Studio Gobi is counting on it. But he can't carry the entire game.

Part of the reason for this is that the Lego world of Horizon was robbed of one of its most important properties: flexibility. The environment itself has recently become indestructible. With the exception of a very few objects that are always the same, everything is rock solid, as if the building blocks had been fixed with superglue. The wild collecting of studs and hearts, the fun of pure destructiveness, the semi-creative part of building, all of this no longer finds a place in Lego Horizon.

Instead, you wander through biomes in the best roguelike style, whose five to seven levels extend the playing time by expanding the same basic environment by expanding the playing area. The only task: get to the destination alive to pick up a golden Lego brick.

Along the way you'll take down all sorts of machine animals, like those you know from the Horizon series and which - like the surroundings - have been fantastically cast in a Lego dress. They are pretty much the only thing in this world that you are actually allowed to dismantle into individual parts.

With a bow, hammer, spear and... chickens?

The fight against the machines is one of the most fun aspects of Lego Horizon and, despite the isometric three-quarter perspective, is very much based on the main series. Each machine animal has one or more weak points that you have to target with the weapon of the currently selected main character in order to blow the light out of the dangerous creatures as quickly as possible. Sometimes it's the antlers, sometimes it's an armor plate on the side, but often it's a kind of battery on the back.

You can see which area is vulnerable after scanning the area using the tech gadget called Focus. It analyzes the area and points out weak points that you can target. Tactics are always necessary because the machines know how to defend themselves well and, above all, are fast. On top of that, the monstrous and superbly staged bosses have a few tricks up their sleeves that force you to observe and analyze before you attack. With what? Well, with Aloy's arrows, Varl's spear, Erend's hammer or Grandma Teersa's exploding chickens.

Okay, if you didn't at least smile at that remark, go laugh in the basement. But even the comic factor of this weapon only has a half-life of twenty minutes. Especially since Erend's hammer is the most fun anyway, so you take turns chasing Aloy and Erend through the biomes or sending them both off at the same time, provided you have a buddy who can play with a second controller at the same time.

A measure that we recommend if you are Horizon fans and really want to play the Lego episode, because a second player is pretty much the only factor that helps to compensate for the one-sidedness of the game in the long run. Everything else is lost in the shallowness of the game ideas.

Moderate play value

Find hidden treasure chests? No problem thanks to the focus scan, especially since they are often just behind overgrown plants that you burn by shooting an arrow through a blazing fire.

Stealth by hiding in tall grass? Is possible according to the rules of the main series, but completely unnecessary because the entire game is designed for direct confrontation. Flip a switch and solve mini puzzles? Even a matter of seconds. It's the where rather than the how that concerns you at the counters.

Otherwise, you just run through the beautiful but static levels, collect money, which you later use in Mother's Heart to unlock new outfits and small buildings, and slide down a rope and keep an eye out for special weapons that can be used temporarily. Some are actually quite useful. Such as a long-range earthquake hammer or a bow with scattering arrows. Others are as valuable as a hole in a tooth because their efforts force you to behave passively. We can't explain to you why the shield was installed as a special weapon. He just doesn't help you.