"Horizon: Forbidden West" Review - I should write this review

Available for: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

Reviewed for: PlayStation 5

Well, dear reader, big news! If you were paying attention to the availability breakdown above, you might've noticed something different. After years of scalpers ruling the roost, yours truly has secured himself a PlayStation 5! Sheer luck, I tell you! I happened to be looking on the Playstation website and noticed there was a bundle of the physical edition available, and I managed to hop on it before the scalpers could do it, and not a moment too soon, if rumors of a price hike are to be believed. Anyway, the specific bundle I got was the Horizon: Forbidden West bundle, so naturally, that's going to be the inaugural review for this new era of Right Trigger Reviewing! Anyway, I quite liked the original game in this saga: Horizon: Zero Dawn, so much that it earned spot #4 on that year's GOTY list. Critics of the game had valid points, mainly centered around the fact that the open world formula was pretty standard once you looked past the cool primitive people versus robot dinosaurs coat of paint. But a standard open world formula isn't an automatic negative for me, so I really loved the world that the team over at Guerilla Games built. Fastfoward to earlier this year, and we now have a sequel: Horizon: Forbidden West, which launched to pretty much the same criticisms as its predecessor, just with a bit more vitriol from critics. So, where do I stand? This time around it's a bit of a more complicated answer, but I think I liked this sequel better than the original....the jury is still out on that because, once again, it's a bit more complicated than just better or worse. So let's get into it!

In Horizon: Forbidden West, we once again step into the ginger boots of Aloy: a motherless outcast from the matriarchal Nora tribe. At the start of this title, Aloy is investigating what appears to be some kind of sickness in the land, sickening flora and fauna alike. She believes that finding a backup of the GAIA AI that rebooted the Earth could help her stop this corruption in nature, and her search eventually leads her to the titular Forbidden West: a vast expanse covering seemingly the rocky mountains all the way to the coasts of California. From here, the story limps and crawls for several hours until some of the penultimate missions. That's the first of Horizon's issues: the story and characters are extremely flat until the end, when things pick up bigtime. The moment-to-moment plot just isn't interesting for most of the time: you help a guy recruit champions to fight in a tournament, do a full underwater level, and walk through same-y old world ruins...and you know what? That might've been passable were it not for the game's single biggest issue: Aloy herself. Now, a lot of really insecure people seemed to take to social media following the game's release to claim that SJWs changed Aloy's look to make her look like a man because woke or whatever the line from these people is these days. And personally, I don't know why people would spend so much time complaining about Aloy's look when they could be spending that time complaining about her character. Thing is, I seem to remember really liking Aloy as a character in the original title...I don't think I've become an incel since then, but I just couldn't stand her this time around. I remember her being extremely talkey in the original game, but in this game, she just NEVER. SHUTS. UP! You don't ever get to just enjoy the soundscape or the scenery because she has to comment on every little thing. What's worse, Ashley Burch really seemed to phone it in this time, because every one of these inane lines of dialogue is spoken with the exact same breath-y, "well, what are you gonna do?", shrug-y cadence. Hundreds of pointless lines of dialogue spouted at you with the exact same tone every minute, it's enough to drive  you completely insane! I swear to god if I hear one more game protagonist say "I should {blank}" I'm gonna scream. I legitimately turned the voices all the way down a couple of hours into the game because I was starting to get some kind of sensory overload from the constant jibber-jabbering. But it isn't just the fact that Aloy never shuts up: it's that her character is basically a blank slate wet blanket for most of the runtime. There's no development, no real sign of human emotion, no nothing! She had plenty of that in the original game, but there's none to be found here....except towards the end. And you know what? I loved the story experience of the last couple hours. When Aloy gets to be a person and not just a protagonist, the results speak for themselves! I don't want to ramble on about this for too long, but there's one more thing I have to say on this point, and I know that some people are going to disagree. I agree with Yahtzee Croshaw's suggestion for how Aloy's character could be improved. Rather than come out and say it, I'd like to set the stage. One of the main quests sees Aloy journey to the ruins of Las Vegas, whereupon she comes across a group of delvers trying to enter this now-flooded city to see what kinds of salvage they can find. Among these delvers is a man named Morlund, who is an inventor and a dweeb. Morlund invented a way to breathe indefinitely underwater but for some reason it didn't quite work all the way. So, Aloy theorizes out loud about the kinds of machine parts that could be used to improve the design, and pretty soon, the two are finishing each other's sentences (Aloy matter-of-factly and Morlund with dweebish enthusiasm). After this main quest, there's a side quest in which Morlund is attempting to test his "miraculous flying orb." This orb is a hot air balloon. The first half of this side quest is going up in a hot air balloon with this guy and just enjoying the scenery together. In his review of this game, Yahtzee stated that Aloy could've done with a love interest or something to give her character somewhere to go in the leadup to the end, and as I played through these quests, I couldn't help but agree, especially given how easy it would've been to do with all the setup with Morlund. A stoic, badass woman and a puppy-like man who share interests for incredibly different reasons? Come on, it writes itself, and it would've meant we didn't have to wait until the end to see Aloy act like a person with feelings and emotions. But I said I didn't want to ramble on too much about that, so let's move on to the other characters before we move on to gameplay.

The other characters are there. That is, without a doubt, a fact. Until the very end, yet again. It's like nobody gets to be good until the last minute...but I've already made this point like a million times.

Gameplay is what ultimately makes Forbidden West's story and character flaws forgivable. The TLDR of this section is essentially going to be "blowing parts off of robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow is, always has been, and always will be a blast!" But to go into a bit more detail, gameplay here is largely the same as it was in the original title, but the slightest bit more polished. You have a spear for melee attacks and a variety of other equipment types that will do the brunt of the heavy lifting. You have different types of bows, explosive spikes, tripwires, bomb slings, bolt blasters, etc, and each of these weapon types can have different configurations of elemental damage (i.e. fire, frost, etc), so you'll go through the game finding new weapons and swapping them out to be best equipped for the threats you're likely to face out in the wilds or in a given quest. Like in the original game, the moment-to-moment gameplay is quite frantic. Machines and people alike attack aggressively, and their attacks cover a lot of ground, so you'll be dodging around battlefields using the brief window of seconds before needing to dodge again to lob an arrow or two at enemies. Depending on the threat you're up against, these battles can take several minutes to finish, so mentally put that frantic gameplay in a multi-minute context and you'll likely know if this game is for you. Anyone who knows me knows I like my gameplay fast-paced, so this is right up my alley with one caveat that carries over from the original game...you get knocked down a lot. Mistime a dodge and you'll be thrown to the ground, the momentum and tempo of the battle will be reset, and you'll take far too long to get up. Whether or not this was a huge deal to me largely depended on my mood or certain contexts. For instance, when I was taking on challenges in this world's arena, I found myself getting red-in-the-face irritated because of how this constant potential for interruption impacted my completion times. So, that's unfortunately an area that Guerilla didn't improve in the years they've had to develop this game. However, there was one aspect of the gameplay I enjoyed more than in the previous game...and I actually have no idea if anything was actually changed or if I'm the one who changed...but I'm going to treat it as an intentional thing. There was a lot of emphasis on setting down traps for machines in the original game, and lots of battles felt like you were expected to do that. It didn't work. Setting traps in games almost never works for me. For instance, why would I set down a proximity mine and hope that the enemy soldier walks on the exact spot I set it down on when I could just wait for him to get close and shoot him, in other words? There are still a loooooot of traps to use in this title, and the game clearly still wants you to use them, but it didn't really feel like I suffered any hardships from not using them. Battles felt doable just using my weapons, and as a result, I enjoyed gameplay a lot more this time around. I don't know if Guerilla re-balanced things to make traps feel less mandatory or if I just got better at games or whatever else, but the result is the same. And ultimately, that last line kind of sums up the gameplay experience as a whole: regardless of what changes have been made or haven't been made, the result is the same: you're getting to blow parts off of giant robot dinosaurs, and if you tell me that isn't fun I'll call you a liar!

Outside of blowing pieces off of robot dinosaurs being conceptually satisfying, it's also aesthetically satisfying thanks to the overall quality of this game from a technical perspective. The sharp clangs as a bit of metal jaw comes flying off, the crisp blast of electricity that lashes out as you blow up a charged part of the body, it all comes together to create a visual experience and soundscape that takes this over-the-top concept to the max! And for a lot of the tech experience, this is true. The soundscapes everywhere in this open world are mesmerizing and informative, alerting the player to both nearby squabbles between machines and people as well as nearby wildlife that might be needed to craft an upgrade. When you're going out hunting for such wildlife, sure, you can use Aloy's tech-vision to see animals instantly, but even if you didn't have that, you'd be able to determine where most creatures you need are by sound alone. That's extremely impressive, as is the soundtrack that often accompanies these open world ventures. Julie Elven once again has an excellent last name and did an excellent job with the music. It's not the kind of ost that I have pretentious things to say about, but it is just good, straightforwardly beautiful backing for an equally beautiful world. When the original game came out, I said that it was probably the most impressive looking game I'd ever seen. As technology continues to improve, we see diminishing returns, and the same can be said here, but there are returns nonetheless. This game doesn't quite bury its competition in the ground like the original game did, but it's still one of the most gorgeous graphical experiences out there! To add to that, I never experienced any texture pop-in, framerate drops, hard/soft crashes...basically I experienced nothing that would've taken away from the visual aspect. However, the game isn't perfect from a technical standpoint. I did run into more than a few bugs during my time with Forbidden West. Most of them are minor (automatically having a certain weapon equipped when I load the game up that I didn't want equipped, for example), but some of them do require that I bring them to your attention. There were a couple quests that were bugged and required me to restart the game to progress. Climbing quite frequently is unresponsive, with Aloy just hanging there unable to hoist herself up and onto a roof from the ledge hanging right below it, or just refusing to move in the direction you try to move her. The same can be said for what platforming this game has: it isn't as polished as I would hope for it to be. Sometimes Aloy will automatically jumpacross a bunch of beams like you want her to, sometimes she'll stop and you'll have to make her jump again, and sometimes she'll just treat the jump like a regular jump, miss the beam, and fall to her death. I had this happen twice at the last jump of one of the game's "tallneck" missions, meaning I did the convoluted climb up to that point, waited patiently for the tallneck to come around again, then leapt for it three times in a row before I finally did what should've been done the first time. So, a lot of the stuff that people typically report in technical reports is just fine: precious little in the way of aesthetic glitches. But some of the non-combat gameplay was woefully unpolished for what I'd expect from a AAA game with this kind of a budget. 

Folks, Horizon: Forbidden West isn't likely to surprise you if you played the original game, and even if you didn't, chances are good you've played something like this without that robot dinosaur coat of paint. As someone who doesn't mind a pretty standard open world formula so long as the gameplay is solid, this wasn't a problem for me, but I believe that for a lot of people it might be the thing that makes them pass. And that, dear reader, is fair. People are burned out on open worlds these days, and for good reason. Forbidden West isn't likely to win people back to the formula. It's a flawed game that doesn't evolve either the open world formula or even the Horizon formula that much, after all. But if you're like me and you can appreciate a game like this, you might enjoy it! And you might especially enjoy it if, like me, you're a brand spanking new PS5 owner and you want to see what your new toy can do. 

Let us review:

-lame, boring story until the end - 1.0

-Aloy is insufferable until the end - 1.0

-technical woes - 0.5 

The final score for Horizon: Forbidden West is...

7.5/10 - Pretty Good

Decent work, Guerilla Games, decent work