Horizon Forbidden West Review

Excellent sequel to an excellent game

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Platform: PS4/5

Reviewed on: PS5

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Guerrilla Games

Release: Feb 18, 2022

Time Played: 40 hours

Genre: Action RPG

ESRB: T

Horizon Forbidden West is an excellent, beautiful game, and a very well done sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn. If you haven’t played the first one I would strongly recommend you do, it was a great game, and your going to want to experience that story in preparation for this one. I’m going to assume you’re familiar with Zero Dawn here so if you haven’t, go ahead, go knock Zero Dawn out right now, I’ll wait… Got it done? I was right, right? Awesome game, now it’s time to talk about the sequel. I spent a lot longer on this than I normally do, putting in around 40 hours to finish it, if you want to see some gameplay check out the livestream. Here shortly I’m going to be talking a little bit about the story, whether the kids can watch, and the various mechanics introduced ultimately rating this game and placing it on a shelf.

Where it begins:

Taking place six months after the exciting conclusion of Zero Dawn, the world has started to die, vicious storms tearing up the land, noxious weeds taking over the greenery, and Aloy has taken it upon herself to try and stop the chaos and save earth. Along with some help from old friends and new, Aloy follows a promising lead taking her far away from home, deep into the Forbidden West to hopefully find a solution.

Can the kids watch?:

It’s a very fascinating games, with the sounds and the bright lights, and some very dinosaur like machines you have to hunt and fight. My kids really enjoyed it, but there were some places where combat involves fighting to the death with other humans, not terribly graphic, no blood or anything, but with the proper sneak attack Aloy will snap a few necks. And there were a couple curse words, nothing too colorful, but it’s there.

Gameplay:

Just like the first game Aloy will have access to quite a few different weapons and clothes, along with coils and weaves to install, increasing stats like attack power, defense, or some abilities. Starting out Aloy will only be equipped with a spear and a hunter bow. Shortly in the plethora of different weapons will be introduced and added to the inventory with a fun little tutorial window explaining the weapons. Some gained for specific quests while others are just bought from a vendor. Aloy can equip six weapons on her weapon wheel at once for a quick change in the middle of a fight. It was best to have a lot of different elemental attacks depending on the enemies.

Her spear is the only weapon not on the weapon wheel as its always equipped and ready to go. I felt like melee combat was a lot more viable in the sequel. At least I used it a lot more. There is a skill tree dedicated to melee combat, I’ll get into skill trees later, but anyway it adds some different combos that help with mobility and she almost always hits her mark. It also builds up for a resonator blast, after charging up, the spear can leave an energized spot on the enemy. When an arrow hits that spot it explodes for some decent damage. Sometimes even knocking the enemy down for a bit.

The gear in Forbidden West work quite a bit differently than the previous title. Here weapons will have different shots available, but not depending on their rarity, instead it’s predetermined and only obtained after upgrading said weapon so far. The only thing rarity effected was base stats, and how many slots were available for weaves or coils. To upgrade a piece of gear a certain amount of metal shards and a few machine parts were needed to be used at a workbench. Oh and pouches can only be upgraded at a workbench now as well, no more field upgrades.

What I really like about working on upgrades, or even wanting to purchase something specific, I could make it a quest essentially by making it a job. So I would have quest markers taking me to the area most likely to hunt down the parts I need for an upgrade. When using my focus to identify the different parts of a machine an icon shows up next to the pieces I need, and the focus even goes as far as telling whether the part will be destroyed on death or not, so I can knock it off before I even start the fight.

Speaking of the focus that got a nice little quality of life upgrade. Instead of going all in, walking slowly and looking around, there is now a focus flash that quickly scans the surrounding area. It doesn’t mark enemies or anything, but it does highlight interactable objects and loot lying around. Even giving the color rarity of the loot within. So it’s pretty hard to miss some good loot as long as you’re in the vicinity.

A few more quality of life changes in the second game was mounted gameplay. I honestly have no idea if they really changed anything or if it’s just a newer platform, but it didn’t feel near as clunky and painful as it used to be. And my absolute favorite thing added, was the option to change pickup animations. I could completely turn them off, I could even turn on auto loot, as long as there was room in the back, Aloy would pick up any stick or flower she walked over.

Sadly with some quality of life upgrades some things have been taken out of the game. One thing I really missed was the ability to whistle enemies toward me when I was hiding in bushes, but now there doesn’t seem to be a limit to how many rocks Aloy can hold so I could use that to bring them in. Along with a few ability changes. Forbidden West felt like I needed think a little bit more about how to move around and fight instead of giving me some awesome overpowered abilities to take advantage of. Not a bad thing, just a little more involvement in gameplay.

Now, onto the skill tree. There are six different trees to fill out with skill points, each increasing the weapons or skills in them. Looking at the trees it’s pretty easy to figure out what you would like to fill out first depending on playstyle, and there may be a lot of skill points needed for everything, but the points are handed out like crazy in this game, when you level, when you help someone with a quest, sometimes even just finding something on the ground. It didn’t take long before I was throwing points in trees I never used.

Every tree will give access to special weapon attacks and valor surges. All weapons will have a stamina bar used to launch a special attack like notching extra arrows a big explosive arrow, after you unlock the skill. Stamina slowly builds up after use, but also gets taken away as Aloy gets hit. Valor surges are extremely powerful moves that could make the difference in a fight. Each tree has two surges related to the tree. When used the valor bar depletes all the way to empty, that can be refilled in a variety of ways obtained in a skill tree.

I would say it takes in between 20-30 hours to beat the main story of the game, but there is a lot to do besides the main quest. There were so many side quests everywhere, a few collectible quests that span the entire map, even some mini games to pass the time. Aloy can race on a charger in some sort of death race, gaining experience a long the way, there’s even a tactic like game called Machine Strike involving different machine pieces that had different abilities. I would venture to guess this game could easily eat up a hundred hours.

There were quite a few different obstacles Aloy had to overcome along the way, with them came some new equipment she needed to figure out. Like what she dubbed a pull caster, giving her the ability to pull down specific walls, or even pulling herself up to climbing points, like spiderman. But with that did come that annoying deal where a point is found early on, but she can’t get past it yet. I did like how it becomes a point of interest on the map, so I could find those places later after I learned how to open it up.

BURNING SHORES

The Burning Shores DLC was short and sweet. Taking place in a totally different area from the main map I beat the story after about six hours, they only added a couple new machines to deal with, some more side quests, another collectible, and the entire area was kind of small. I would say it’s worth it if just for the story alone. If you beat the first two games you’ll definitely want to see what kind of trouble Aloy finds on the Burning Shores. Not to mention you can’t even access the Burning Shores until the main story is complete.

Outro:

Now onto the section I know you’ve all been waiting for, the final ratings for Horizon Forbidden West. If you’ve seen mine review for the first one, and watched my playthrough you can probably guess how this is gonna go, but I’m still taking you through my whole rigmarole, so let’s get to it.

Visually oh my gosh I can not get over how pretty everything was. I really thought I would get used to it, but it never ceased to amaze me throughout the entire game I am so impressed with the Playstation Five and how this game played, its getting a five

I liked this story more than the first, only because it didn’t really need a beginning to explain the main characters and layout the play area. It’s not to long, not very predictable, and entertaining every step of the way. Another five

Gameplay was great, the only issues I ran into was trying to figure out how the layout of a PS5 controller works… I’m so used to mouse and keyboard or xbox controllers it was a small learning curve for me, but still smooth and easy to figure out were going with five.

Horizon Forbidden West does offer a new game plus, not really my style, I honestly feel like I could enjoy running around the land for a very long time after the main story was done, maybe eventually getting bored enough to start a new game plus so I feel like its worthy of a five.

How much fun did I have? It was awesome. I only lost my cool once, and that ultimately boiled down to a skill issue, I love this game and highly recommend the entire Horizon series, so obviously this is another five.

And that means it’s going right up there in the special reserve. It’s to bad I don’t have anything higher, this game was better than the first, any kind of odd hiccups or weird game mechanics from Zero Dawn were resolved in Forbidden West. As of right now you can only get Forbidden West for Playstation four or five, but I hear word that maybe by 2025 it could be released on PC, so go ahead and hold out… if you can.