Horizon Strike

Walk out of Mother's Heart into Horizon Zero Dawn's own world and hunt its machines with Counter-Strike 2's arsenal.

New in 0.3

• Pick your knife: choose any knife model from the Counter-Strike 2 in your own install (22 knives, e.g. Karambit, M9 Bayonet, Butterfly) in Esc → Knife, with a rotating 3D preview. Each one has its own CS2 draw, attack and inspect animations (F) and sounds; damage is the same for every knife, as in CS2. Default finish only.
• XP, levels and upgrades: every machine kill gives XP (more for bigger machines, +20 % for a weak-spot kill, +30 % for a silent strike), each level gives a point. Press K to spend points: +10 % damage per level and +20 max health per level, up to 5 levels each; XP and upgrades stay after death and restart.
• Silent strike: stab an unaware machine from outside its sight with the knife's heavy attack for five times the damage.
• Hit feedback: hitmarkers (stronger on weak spots), damage numbers (can be turned off in Esc), sparks and debris on the machines, a direction indicator and red vignette when you are hit, CS2-style aim punch and CS2 hit sounds.
• Graphics settings (Esc → Graphics): Low / Medium / High presets, picked automatically on the first start from your GPU, plus fps limit, VSync, render scale with FSR, shadows, vegetation distance and density, LOD, SSAO, SSR and volumetric fog. Runs on weaker PCs than before.
• Faster first start: playable in about half a minute instead of 1.5 minutes – only the knife and Glock convert at the start, the other guns convert in the background (the buy wheel shows "Preparing…" until they are ready).

What's in it

• Horizon's world, read from your copy of Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition: the real terrain of all 340 main-world tiles with Horizon's own snow, grass, dirt and rock layers and normal maps, Horizon's sky, sun and fog at a fixed morning hour, rocks, ruins, Nora huts and campfires on their original places, trees and undergrowth placed from the game's own density and snow maps, Horizon's music.
• Six of Horizon's machines: Watcher, Strider, Grazer, Sawtooth, Scrapper and Broadhead, with their real models, skeletons and textures, at their real sites, each with its own procedural animation on its real skeleton and its own behaviour. Hit the weak spots (Watcher eye, blaze canisters, Scrapper power cell and radar) for headshot damage.
• Counter-Strike 2's guns, read from your CS2 install: real first-person models with CS2's own viewmodel animations, sounds, damage, fire rate, recoil, clip sizes and prices: knives, Glock, P250, Desert Eagle, MP9, UMP-45, Galil AR, AK-47, M4A1-S, AWP, Nova, HE grenade, Molotov and Kevlar.
• CS economy: start with knife, Glock and $800; every machine kill pays the CS2 kill award of your weapon class × the machine's bounty (max $16,000). Press B for the buy wheel (not in combat).
• Death: you respawn at the last campfire you visited with knife and Glock; other weapons are lost, money, XP and upgrades stay.

First start: the mashup converts your own game files into a local cache (about half a minute until you can play). The rest of the world converts in the background as you approach it; the cache limit (default 4 GB) can be changed in the Esc menu. Nothing from either game is included in the download.

Needs: Counter-Strike 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition (Steam, original 2020 PC version) installed. If Horizon isn't found, the game tells you on screen. Counter-Strike 2 is never started or modified – only its files are read.

Controls: WASD move, Shift walk, Ctrl crouch, Space jump, mouse aim/fire (right button: knife heavy attack), R reload, 1-4 weapons, B buy wheel, F inspect, K upgrades, Esc menu (knife, graphics, damage numbers, cache limit).

Known issues: Bhop upgrade doesn't work reliably yet – fix coming in 0.4.

Version 0.3 limits: solo only; knives come in their default finish only (CS2 builds finishes in shaders that can't be read); machine motion is our own procedural animation on their real skeletons; no people, quests, loot or day/night cycle; no Frozen Wilds area.

Made by EM. Code MIT. Built with Godot 4.7.2, ValveResourceFormat, LibAtrac9 and other open-source libraries (see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt). Built with the help of AI (Claude).