Horizon Zero Dawn - My Journey Continues

Today, I was devoted to Horizon: Zero Dawn. The game design is starting to fall apart a little.

My opinion remains that Horizon: Zero Dawn is still a remarkable game. I just encountered a pretty broken game mechanic that I decided to take an advantage of. You can throw rocks at the mechanical beasts that roam the land, to distract them. That's fun. But I also learned how to employ stealth (this was after I had planned on focusing on running in screaming, Leeroy Jenkins style, which for what it is worth. doesn't work very well)

Long story short, hide in tall grass (like a Pokemon?) throw rock, await mechanical beast to approach, press R1 to decimate. Move to next patch of grass, remaining stealthy-like, and repeat. It was raining resources. I'm still very early game judging by the size of the map, but I'm having fun roaming; exploring, hunting and killing things (even managed to bag a few turkeys!)

I'm really loving the predator vision you get from Aloy's 'focus', but at times, it makes me think that it makes the game a little too easy. Scan the enemy you want to kill, and it will tell you how to kill it, highlight vulnerable bits, and so on. There's a few early quests that revolve completely around using it to track your quest progress, and it does look really, really cool:

In fact, I haven't really focused on the story at all, I've been put off by many elements of the story since the last time I wrote about the game yesterday... it is becoming increasingly apparent that while the facial animations are great at conveying emotion, not everything that is said is perfectly lip synced. This is a bigger problem than I am making it out to be, because this is where the game starts to enter the uncanny valley.

I really do hope this doesn't start to ruin the story for me, because I am really enjoying the game world. I want to explore ruins, and get more fluid platforming sequences (the controls aren't quite as good as Rise of the Tomb Raider or Uncharted) but more importantly, get more immersed.