One of the most important tips in Zero Dawn, is when you see something you can harvest do it. The health system is stacked towards nature, so you’ll always have bountiful herbs to heal Aloy but health potions which are quicker, can only be looted from corpses or bought at high prices from merchants.

The green bar which is just below your health bar is your medicine pouch, this shows how much herb you are currently carrying and can use in times of need to replenish missing HP. By pressing up on the D pad you can start to use your medicine pouch to heal and will continue until your back to full health or run out of medicine in your pouch.

The bar can be filled up to three times over, which is signified by the little crosses to tell you how many “bars” you have collected. On your travels look out for red flowers which are health herbs or in icy regions, white flowers have the same effect.

One important tool to always remember to use if your Focus. It will help you gauge your battle before it even starts and will allow you to prepare for the situation ahead. The game will show you any threats that are hiding around the corner and give you a glimpse or how many enemies are in front of you.

In Focus mode, hovering over a specific enemy will tell you their weaknesses, level and other vital information for any combat scenario. Tagging enemies helps you keep a tab on them outside of the Focus state. While showing their pathing info gives you the route a single enemy will take, allowing you time to prepare your silent takedown or trap.

Coming back to an additional feature in Focus and for a short time after, is the components of a machine which are weak spots. If you want to deal the maximum amount of damage from each arrow shot you need to aim for their shiny yellow areas on their body.

They will appear for a short while after you have focused on them and if you can attack these spots, you’ll do much more damage, with a chance of causing them to explode dealing additional damage or staggering the enemy to go in for a critical hit.

Like most RPG games, you’ll have a massive skill tree to put points into as you level but not all are as important in the early stages.

The three types are Prowler, Brave and Forager. In the Prowler(Stealth) you’ll want to get Silent Strike, Low Profile and Dodge Prowess. This will allow you to do instant take downs on small enemies while in stealth mode, be harder to spot and also gain a different type of roll to evade more easily.

On Brave, you will want to grab Concentration that slows down time when you are aiming your arrow (pressing R3) and Precision which increases your critical hit chance. Finally, in Forager you will want to get Gatherer to increase the amount of resources you gain from picking herbs and Healer which speeds up the healing process when using medicine herbs.

Some arrows are only available to certain bows such as the precision arrows only being usable on the Precision Bow. Your standard bow however, can fire three different types of arrows which you can craft but to be able to craft them, you will need to buy the Hardpoint Arrows from a vendor for them to be available from the weapon wheel.

To quickly craft arrows, bring up the weapon wheel and select the arrow of choice, press and hold X and you’ll quickly craft the ammo of choice. An extra piece of advice, early game always make sure you gather lots of wood, arrows are you main ammo type and a stock wood supply will help save you a lot of time.

There will be times where you go into combat or accidently stumble across a group of machines and bite off more than you can chew.

Running away from combat is always a good option and live to fight another day. Machines and other enemies will only pursue you for so long, but you need to make sure to break their line of site. A good tactic is to run around rocks and corners and jump into some tall grass to enter stealth mode and let them lose you.

Not planning your battles will most likely get you overran and killed. Take the time to use your Focus and scope out the situation before you engage, sneak around and lay out some traps in key bottlenecks and popular paths that you can use once combat starts.

You can always craft or buy more traps, don’t be like myself for the first few hours and horde them incase you might need them. In Horizon: Zero Dawn, they are not a scarcity, use them or they will go to waste and combat will be much harder.

Pro tip: If you have the skill points spare, pick up Disarm Traps this will save you from wasting any after your combat is finished.

Although the game concentrates almost completely on the mechanical, you will come across normal wildlife and they do have a purpose.

If you kill these creatures usually boar, rabbits, turkeys etc you can gain meat from their corpse which can be used to create potions.