Horizon Zero Dawn Vs. Zelda: Breath Of The Wild - Which Game Is Better?

5. Difficulty & Fairness

When it wants to, Horizon can have your expectations for breakfast, cutting Aloy down mid dodge-leap, just as you think you've gotten away with that well-placed trap. Such moments are very few and far between though, and overall, Horizon is not built to be a hard game.

There are many fast-moving enemies with liberal damage-dealing specials, sure, but health restoring plants are plentiful, and once you've got a decent set of clothing, you can take a good handful of hits before going down. Point being: If you ever die in Horizon, it almost always feels like a mistake on your part:

You either didn't plan enough in advance, or zigged when you should've zagged.

Over to Zelda, and you're likely to get one-shotted before you can say, "Is that a Moblin?"

Nintendo have built Breath of the Wild's enemies to be easier the closer you are to the starting area. This means the more you venture into the outer radius' of the map, the more easily you'll get torn down. You can mitigate this by completing more puzzle Shrines, acquiring Spirit Orbs and using them to unlock more Heart Canisters (or eating a meal to tag them onto your standard allowance), but the fact remains: Zelda's difficulty curve can be an occasional brick wall, and if the game wants to remind you that you shouldn't be somewhere, it'll do it in the most '80s gaming' way possible: By instantly wiping you out.

In the end, it all comes down to mechanics. Zelda's combat doesn't feel as though it was built to handle group encounters thanks to a finicky lock-on, and when you're up against a number of foes all swinging their instant death-bringing weapons, chances are they'll break through your defence and kick you back to the 'Game Over' screen in seconds.

Winner: Horizon Zero Dawn