Horizon Review

Horizon is a game with a split personality. On one side of the coin you have an interesting, well-crafted space strategy game that makes some great advances in a genre that’s becoming rather niche. On the other side, Horizon is a sluggish, boring and almost broken game. There are moments when you can happily play along without those negatives having much of an effect, but it’s difficult to get through much of the game without them rearing their ugly heads. It’s a shame, really, as the elements that make this game good are often impressive and well thought through. Horizon really captures the spirit of classic sci-fi space exploration and also features an enjoyable world and some good micro-management opportunities. However, it’s the horrific combat system and lack of overall strategic choice, among other things, that lets it down.

So yes, for the uninitiated, Horizon is a game focused on the possibilities of inter-galactic travel in the future. It’s a familiar theme, some might say exhausted, but L3O Interactive have managed to create a neat world around the strategy to ensure that players always have something to interest them. The core gameplay follows a classic turn-based style; build structures and ships on your planets and pass through the turns until they’re built. Then once they’re constructed start exploring the stars, colonizing new planets and building up your space empire. Anyone who’s played Sins of a Solar Empire will feel instantly comfortable playing Horizon; just don’t expect the same depth of options and pretty combat sequences.

A game of Horizon begins with the player selecting their race. With 11 to choose from, there’s a brilliant selection of weird and wonderful aliens ranging from the Frankenstein’s monster-esque Tantik to the Barbek, or ‘giant eyeballs with tentacles’. They’re an amusing bunch to choose from and play with/against, at least from a visual perspective. With your race selected and customised (although these options are somewhat limited), you can adapt many of the in-game settings including number of solar systems, whether missions and random events will be active and how the other races act and respond to you. It’s great to know that there’s a lot that can be changed early on, encouraging a sense of replayability even within the first few minutes of play. To begin with though, you’ll just want to stick to the standard mission mode.

If it’s your very first game, then a pretty terrible tutorial will try to help you through your initial steps. The tutorial is all text-based so you have to ensure that you read it thoroughly; Horizon isn’t a particularly complicated game, but missing a few details can be paralysing moving forward. The restricted tutorial is sure to be even more annoying for those who’ve never really dabbled in space strategy (or 4X) before; those accustomed to the familiarity of Earth-based maps in other strategy titles could feel more than a little lost in the big galactic worlds that Horizon churns up. The early game is largely based around scouting out new lands, and this bit is good fun. Sending out your ships amongst the unexplored stars can be genuinely intriguing and exciting, especially for those who’ve long dreamed of inter-planetary exploration.

The exploration element of Horizon is indeed its finest moment. In many ways there’s more fun to be had within the first hour of a playthrough than at any other point, which, to be honest, isn’t particularly great praise. Once you’ve started to get a grasp of the world (or, rather, worlds) around you then it’s time to start building Colonizer ships and making your presence known on nearby uninhabited planets. Colonisation is another fun part of Horizon; you can choose which areas of production each colony will excel in. A planet rich in resources is ideal for an industrial colony, but if it’s lacking then there’s always the option of entertainment, or research or farming if the conditions are right. As a game goes on you’re likely to grow attached to certain planets. Using them as hubs for extra funds, ships, troops and general resources is the key to victory, and it’s generally good fun to develop and maintain these colonies.

Of course, you can’t have an expansive solar empire without a vast fleet to wrestle your way to power with. Horizon provides a good array of options in this regard. Not only are there various ship types to choose from (scouts, cruisers, bombers, motherships), but each ship is also customisable. You can decide the fundamental parts that make up each ship; want more firepower? Then replace the drop pods with lasers. Better troop carrying capabilities? Then you need to swap out those supply bays for more troop pods. You can even start playing around with propulsion methods and super weapons. It’s a great system that you wouldn’t normally find in a large scale strategy game like this, so is a welcome addition. In fact, there’s a decent amount of customisation to be found across the entire game; planets, ships, your race and much more.

The only element that is lacking is the tech tree and although there’s technically a lot of individual technologies available to research, the tech tree system is seriously lacking in player input. All of the technologies are researched consistently throughout a game, the only choice the player has is over which research type or which individual research to focus on. Selecting a specific segment speeds up the progress of that area (armour or construction, for example) but slows down the production of other technologies. It’s a functional system that balances well, but it seems like a missed opportunity. There is a ludicrous amount of individual techs to unlock, but with such a passive system there’s never much reason to be all that interested in the tech aspect of the game.

In many ways, the tech tree is an unintentional metaphor for the whole game; there’s a lot of potential here, it just hasn’t all been executed properly. Despite this, there’s one segment of the game that’s just straight up bad. In a similar fashion to long running strategy series Total War, Horizon features two map modes: the zoomed-out galaxy-wide view that you’ll be spending the majority of your time in, and the zoomed-in combat view. It’s in this combat view that Horizon takes an almighty tumble. Simply put, the fighting mechanic is painfully dull. It follows a turn-based style that’s centred on ordering your individual ships to move and attack the enemy, with advantages being given to correct positioning and use of weaponry. With a few spaceships involved the combat is passable; it gets pretty repetitive but nothing to bring the game down. However, by the time you’ve got hundreds of ships involved it’s just a horrible cycle of move and shoot, move and shoot. All strategy is lost in a cacophony of lasers and ship parts.

As in Total War, you have the option to automatically resolve the combat, although strangely this just places an AI commander in charge of your fleet; you still have to watch the battle. In fights that involve hundreds of spacecraft, these battles can sometimes take a long time to progress. You can speed up time, but often at the loss of any real sense of control over the battlefield. Conflict tends to be a fairly big part of a game of Horizon, so it’s majorly disappointing that the actual battles are tedious affairs. The game does suffer from various other issues; after a few hours of play it can all feel a tad repetitive, for instance. Plus, the diplomacy system is a little out of whack; it’s very difficult to predict what each race will do as it seems as though their individual character traits outweigh any diplomatic history you have with them, making aggressive races frightening even when you’re allied to them.

The bare bones of Horizon are fun and engaging. There’s a great strategy game in here, it’s just lost behind the clutter of poorly designed combat and other smaller elements that drag down the overall quality of the game. Compared to games like Europa Universalis IV and even Total War, Horizon is often a little lacking in tactical complexity, but there’s enough here to keep even the most hardcore of strategy fans intrigued. Sadly, it’ll be the moments of annoyance that you’ll likely remember most after playing; the good half-hour wasted with your combat in auto mode, the questionable motives of the other races and the lack of new things to do past the initial few hours of play. If you’ve got a thing for sci-fi videogames and also happen to be a fan of strategy, then this could be a good game to pick up for the theme alone. Otherwise, there are much better and much more well-rounded games out there.