Synopsis: Join Aloy as she braves the Forbidden West, a deadly frontier that conceals mysterious new threats.
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Also available for: PlayStation 4
Cast: Ashly Burch, John MacMillan, Lesley Ewen, Lance Reddick, John Hopkins, Salli Saffiotti, Chris Mckenna, Noshi Dalal, Angela Bassett, Carrie-Anne Moss, Daniel Donohue, Marc Kudisch, Erica Luttrell
Developer: Guerrilla Games
Game Director: Mathijs de Jonge
Studio Narrative Director: Ben McCaw
Executive Producer: Angie Smets
Studio Art Director: Jan-Bart van Beek
Technical Director: Michiel van der Leeuw
When Horizon Zero Dawn was released in 2017, it sandwiched itself against The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game that was applauded for its open-world design and featured a paraglider. Well, in Horizon Forbidden West, Aloy has one of those now, but similar to the first game, it’s still a bit of a mixed bag that certainly doesn’t take any giant steps forward in its overall design. The long-short of reviewing Horizon Forbidden West is that if you liked the first game, you’ll certainly like this sequel, but if you didn’t like the first one, you wouldn’t find anything to win you over here other than some genuinely gorgeous graphics.
Picking up shortly after the events of Horizon Zero Dawn, Aloy is on the hunt for GAIA, the AI system that she can use to save the world from a disease that will cause its destruction in under six months. In her way is Sylens, playing in the shadows much as he did in the first game, arming a new group of rebels who are easily the most sinister and interesting group in the game with a leader who doesn’t get half the time she deserved on my TV screen. The big bad this time around is space humans with a background so convoluted that I’d make your screen shake in pain if I attempted to explain everything. You’ve seen them in the trailer; one of them is mo-capped and voiced by The Matrix’s own Carrie-Annie Moss, but they were a huge disappointment. Not Moss; she’s fantastic; I love her, but the characters weren’t at all interesting and introduced so many elements to the franchise I didn’t think I wanted, and now I know I was right.
The same combat that hooked me for hours in the first game had me again in Horizon Forbidden West. Taking on massive monsters like Thunderjaws and new giant machines like the Tremortusks never gets boring. Like the first game, each fight feels like a puzzle as you can scan the machine looking for weak points and cycle through weapons and elemental types to cause the most massive damage you can.
Guerrilla Games introduced a few new elements in Horizon Forbidden West alongside a much more expansive RPG system for Aloy and what seems like more weapons and weapon types than ever before. There are now six skill trees with plenty of skill points to be assigned to them. You have trapper skills and stealth options like the first game, but an entire ‘Warrior’ tree is dedicated to the much improved and not at all necessary hand-to-hand combat. In the first game, it was a button mash to take down human opponents, it was apparent it was an element the game didn’t put much effort into, and it didn’t bother me at all because you barely needed to use melee. However, Horizon Forbidden West puts a ton of time and effort into multiple combos, training pits, and challenges for you to never really need to use these in the game. If you’re taking on any of the game’s bandit camps, you’re most likely in stealth as it’s the best option, and then when you run into humans in the open world, they’re on machines, and when you run into machines in the world, you’ll want to hit them with arrows and traps, not fists and spears.
Stripping back the number of traps you can set unless you upgrade the Trapper skill tree and adding more machines overall to most encounters in the game, I ended up playing Horizon Forbidden West a lot more aggressively than the first game in the franchise. In Zero Dawn, I’d lay traps, watch enemy patterns and stealth in at any possible enemy encounter I could, and although you could do that here, it seemed like this game was designed more around action than stealth. I was playing on Normal difficulty too, but I would expect anyone playing on Hard would almost feel forced to stealth to survive a lot of the more challenging fights in the game. And the easier difficulties are an absolute breeze because I switched to Story mode to wrap up some trophies after rolling credits. I think Normal could have met a little more in the middle and required mixing up tactics more often.
The story in Horizon Zero Dawn was fine, but the world was most interesting — seeing how these humans adapted and used the tech they found, how the voices of AI robots or recording of long-lost humans were viewed as gods. Horizon Forbidden West builds upon this, primarily now in side quests. Meeting the different tribes in the Forbidden West and seeing how they’ve adapted tech they’ve found or viewed the world was always fascinating, even if I didn’t find all the clan leaders as exciting or well written as some others in the game.
My favourite new character in Horizon Forbidden West was Zo, whose gentle nature and her clan, the Utraru’s culture being the most intriguing to me. The Utaru focus on agriculture and use Plowhorns to tend the land, all of which are known as “land gods.” The Utaru also have a unique view on life as they choose seeds when they’re young, which they then carry to the day they die, on which those seeds are planted, and they contribute to the harvest and helping their people. I found all of this fascinating, and Zo to be a well-written character, but I couldn’t say the same for the rest of the tribes.
Given the mission, she’s on and the end of the world approaching, I appreciated the gruff attitude Aloy had adapted to in this game. But I found her to lack an emotional and caring side when needed, especially with her companions, and specifically with one important character, which she does bond with later in the game. Still, it didn’t feel earned given how Aloy had treated them in their previous meetings. Plus, there’s a little ludonarrative dissonance happening here as Aloy speaks as she’s in the utmost rush to get from location to location. At the same time, I can still stop as the player to help some fool who needs ten pelts, skin a few boars, or even become an F1 racing champion by taking on some machine races.
It’s hard not to veer off the golden path while playing Horizon, as there’s simply so much to do and see. Plus, the world is gorgeous with some of the most detailed locations and terrain I’ve ever seen in an open-world game. There’s a decent mix of side activities to do here; for every random errand sending you on a fetch-quest, you can find side quests exploring the backgrounds of the characters you care about or the politics happening in the world. The side quests are certainly better here than the first game, but there’s still a good chunk of fluff to fill the open-world video game quota.
I was disappointed with the biomes and locations in Horizon Forbidden West. It all ends up feeling very similar to the first game and the most unique area in the game; the one shown predominantly in the trailers and marketing is at the back end of the game and a relatively small zone. That location also sadly goes hand-in-hand with the moment the plot takes a deep dive into a direction I didn’t vibe with at all.
Horizon Fodbidden West is stunning to look at, but all the elements don’t come together. From the story and gameplay seemingly fighting against one another to the oddly padded open world to explain the large world and give players “their money’s worth.” The opening hours are a slog and looking back, I have no idea why the prologue area is so extensive given how easily some players will get distracted by mindless tasks only to burn out before finishing the game. Guerrilla Games has gone for the approach of adding much more and much bigger things, rather than doubling down on what worked so well in the first game. I had fun playing Horizon Forbidden West, but a lot of it is mindless and repetitive actions are the same tickbox actions I can find in an open-world game from the past couple of years. Instead of honing in on what made their world so exciting to explore in 2017, they’ve made it prettier but sacrificed the narrative, which takes a deep dive into ridiculous and uninteresting in the last third.
(Horizon Forbidden West code provided for review)
