Horizon Forbidden West Review – An epic but flawed adventure

Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, is a true next step in next-generation gaming. It combines all of the newest technology into a beautifully made game that rewards you for exploring the lands within. While the world is truly magnificent, the game is let down by a story that runs out of steam about halfway through. Here are my thoughts after playing the game for over 60 hours.

Combat

Fighting machines is most times an epic experience, particularly the larger ones that pop up from time-to-time. The music swells and you are immediately trying to survive. This is especially the case early on in the game when you have a smaller health pool and your gear hasn’t been leveled up. Each fight that you take is a risk, and it feels like a legitimate struggle. The sounds that come from the DualSense Controller while battling add a lot to the fight.

Firing your bow and knocking off the various parts of machines is very satisfying. Finding a spawn of a large enemy and considering tactics on where to use cover and lay traps is exciting.

One thing I ran into a fair amount when fighting machines is that they usually took forever to take down. You have a feeling of being underpowered fairly often and while that is understandable to an extent, it does take away from the feeling of growth when you have geared out your character fully.

Combat against humans, however, isn’t particularly exciting. After battling your way through machines that have multiple different attacks, fighting against other people is a fairly bland affair. You either pick them off with your bow, or you engage in a melee fight that just involves you dive dodging attacks and then pummeling them with your spear.

Melee in general is underdeveloped and doesn’t feel particularly useful. Unless you are sneaking up on a target to kill them with a Silent Strike, I generally regretted even attempting a melee move. This is particularly the case against machines, because the damage output of the spear is very low and they would immediately punish me with their own attack.

The addition of a parry system and allowing you to upgrade your spear would be welcome. While you can get new attack combos via the skill system, it ends up not being particularly worth the points.

Exploration & Quests

The map is packed full of things to do, and the detail of the environments is quite impressive. You will rarely find yourself wandering around without finding something interesting to go explore or a new enemy to fight. Heading to small camps will allow you to sell and buy gear, and you can talk to certain NPCs that will alert you about things going on in the area.

One of the standout portions to me in Horizon Forbidden West is its side quests. They are all voiced and when completed feel like you have actually contributed to the world around you. Things will change for the better when they have been completed, and while they sometimes boil down to go to a spot and kill machines, there’s usually enough story around the quest to keep you interested.

A slight issue while attempting to complete a quest, however, is that Aloy will just not stop dropping hints on what your next step is supposed to be. The game lacks all confidence that the player will be able to figure out how to complete almost any quest without obvious tips. At times, you will have just completed a task, and before you even can look around to figure out what’s next, you will be told by Aloy what exactly it is you need to do.

Even when you aren’t being told what to do next, you will be reminded to use your Focus constantly. You can be 40+ hours into the game and still being told that you should use your Focus to discover your next move. It’s just an awful lot of handholding to be giving players that deep into it.

Story & Characters

The first half or so of the game’s story is highly enjoyable. Exploring the map and gathering up the rogue AI to strengthen GAIA was the highlight to me, and in my opinion should have been the entirety of the main game. Far Zenith, with its cartoonishly evil group of barely memorable characters is a complete and utter detraction from everything else going on.

Far Zenith ends up ultimately being the main villains of Horizon Forbidden West, but you are exposed to them so infrequently that when you actually do encounter them it feels disjointed from the rest of the story. They do throw in a moment or two in the game that is supposed to make them villainous, but they just feel a bit hamfisted and don’t resonate as well as it could have.

Aloy is a strong overall character who grows as a person over the course of the game. Unfortunately, this growth is hammered on in the beginning of the game as Aloy attempts to tackle all of the world’s problems by herself. This is a common theme throughout, which made the growth of her character fairly predictable.

Most of the other characters you end up grouping up with are fairly well fleshed out. You can interact with them at your base and learn more about how they are coping with all they are learning. Kotallo in particular struck me as interesting, where he is learning to deal with life after losing an arm in battle. Erend, who returned from last game, was one of the weakest. While you thankfully don’t have to interact with him much, he plays a very dull version of the dumb warrior trope.

Speaking of companions, boy are they next to useless in battle. When they aren’t constantly telling you what elemental to use against an enemy, they are getting knocked down while contributing next to nothing. The machines seemingly understand how useless they are because they very rarely focus on them and only seem to attack one when they happen to get in the way. Companions will, however, frequently ask you if you need ammo and throw you some arrows, which is slightly useful.

Story spoilers below…

I quite enjoyed the relationship between Aloy and Beta. Her expectation that Beta would be very similar to herself only to find that she was very different was interesting. It is an exploration of nature versus nurture, which forced Aloy to find common ground and learn that while her background was difficult it paled in comparison to what Beta had to endure.

The ending, unfortunately, feels anti-climatic. You have the inevitable addition of a new threat that paves the way for a third game in the series. This makes your whole journey feel hollow, as you just merely staved off the destruction of your planet for another threat to take its place. This can be a symptom of the second entry in a trilogy, but it doesn’t make it feel any better.

There is also the pretty predictable turn from a Far Zenith character that had joined with your group to help you. While they aren’t nearly as goofy as the rest of Far Zenith, it still doesn’t feel fully formed or carry much weight. This ends up being the last big fight of the game, and the reasoning for the battle felt very underdeveloped.

Tech

The world is extremely detailed and the game ran wonderfully on the PlayStation 5. For the most part, there were very few instances of problems I encountered throughout the game.

While overall I would say that this game was well-optimized and I didn’t have issues for the most part, there were a couple of things that were common.

One issue was Aloy’s hair, which had a tendency to bug out a bit. While not a big deal, it was a noticeable issue multiple times throughout the game during cutscenes. Speaking of these cutscenes, character’s eyes would sometimes appear like they weren’t looking where they were supposed to, which made for some odd expressions.

For a game of this scale, it was remarkable how few issues I ran into. As I played more, any minor things I did encounter seemed to be patched out.

Conclusion

While I might have had quite a few negative things to say about it, I still enjoyed the majority of my time with Horizon Forbidden West. In particular, the first half of the game was exemplary. Having battles with massive machines where I barely scraped by to survive were thrilling. Traveling around the map to rebuild GAIA was a rewarding experience.

Unfortunately, as the game winded down, we were let down by a story that needed either more detail or to be reworked entirely. The cartoonish nature of the main villains let down the intriguing world that was built in this and the previous game.

Our Horizon Forbidden West review was written based on the PlayStation 5 version of the game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website!