As an outcast, the red-headed huntress serves as the perfect protagonist: her instinctive curiosity gives the game the perfect excuse to drip-feed you information about the world in which you exist, and you may be surprised by how engaging it all is. The conduit for all of this information is the aforementioned Aloy, an orphan exiled from the matriarchal Nora clan and forced to live in a humble shack many miles away from the embrace of All-Mother, the mythical deity which the tribe believes to be their goddess. And this all runs concurrently alongside the tale of the Old World, the civilization that existed before extinction ended life as we know it today and allowed the Earth to be inhabited by enormous robotic machines.

Indeed, those who chastised Guerrilla Games for failing to flesh out the Helghast's story may be surprised by just how much lore is crammed into this 50 or so hour epic: bickering tribes tussle over differing religious beliefs while splinter factions wage bitter civil wars against monarchs who seek to heal the split between societies. It has everything that you'd expect of the genre: quests, dungeons, dialogue options, merchants, settlements, crafting, skill trees, and more.Д«ut for as good as the title is at ticking boxes, it also has plenty to say for itself. There had been concern that the release may share more in common with Far Cry Primal than The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but on the Western RPG scale, the PlayStation 4 exclusive sits proudly alongside the likes of Fallout 4 and Mass Effect 3. Let's begin by vanquishing the giant Thunderjaw in the room, though: Aloy's inaugural adventure is a role-playing game through and through.

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