Beaten on: 3/6/22
Hours Played: 48
Rating: 9/10

A little self promotion before I jump in, I unboxed the Collector's Edition of the game on YouTube if you’re interested.

 

Horizon Forbidden West is the sequel to Guerilla Games’ 2017 Horizon Zero Dawn. There will be major spoilers for both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West in this review, but I’ll do my best to call them out.

The story of Forbidden West picks up a few months after Aloy defeated Hades in Meridian. She’s searching for a backup of Gaia and a way to trace the signal Hades sent. She meets up with Varl and we get our first experience with having a companion, one of my favorite additions to the game. There’s some filler about why Aloy doesn’t have her gear and we learn all hope is lost before the story opens up a bit more and we learn that there might be hope out w e s t.

After our intro/tutorial mission we close up a few more loose ends in Meridian and head to the Carja controlled gate to the west where we get a relatively large intro area. Here we’re introduced to a handful of new enemies as well as being reunited with Erend . We also get to play the new in-game game, Strike, which is kind of like chess but with terrain modifiers and not set pieces. We also get to experience the temporary buff item in the game, which are locally cooked stews, available in pretty much every settlement in the game. This whole intro area is a really fun introduction to the game. It’s large and there’s a lot of exploration to be done, but it’s not overwhelming which is a problem I have with a lot of open world games.

We also get to see the new skill trees for the first time, and it’s one of the areas of the game I’m a bit luke warm on. I do like the concept, and I think their execution is okay, but I wish they had more useful upgrades across all trees. For example, there’s an entire machine tree but I rarely use machines. I usually fast travel or just run rather than using a mount, and I almost never use overrides for combat, so the entire tree is pretty useless to me.

The only other note I want to make about this section, just because it demonstrates a trend throughout the game, is Aloy can’t keep her mouth shut when questing. I don’t need to know there’s a vent nearby, if you want to tell me, that’s fine, but maybe wait until after I’ve had a chance to look around? The way she is in the game, as soon as you walk into a room, if your camera pans over the thing you’re supposed to do/see, she comments on it. Like, “Oh, there’s a vent there, I wonder where that leads”, and she says it maybe 5 seconds after I walked into a room.

 
 
 
 
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Major Spoilers Ahead~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
 
 
 
 

After we complete our quest in the opening area, we get to meet one of the main antagonists for the game, Regalla, a Tenakth (the clan that controls most of the West) rebel leader who aims to overthrow the current ruler, the one that’s trying to bring unity and peace to the tribes in the West. And her and her people ride machines, which is something I noticed in my unboxing of the special edition.

The meeting we’re attending, of course goes wrong, and we get introduced to shielded enemies as we have to fight a boss after fighting off a handful of machine riders. After defeating him, we take his (now broken) shield and adapt it to be used as a glider, which is one of the best additions to the game. It makes exploring way more forgiving, because you can now just jump off the cliff if there’s nothing up top. It’s a, probably intended, side effect of having the paraglider in the game and it’s great.

The map opens up about half way after this point and you’re only limited by how much you want to throw yourself against the higher level enemies and I’ll take this time to comment on just how gorgeous the game is. Keep in mind, this game was developed to work on last gen consoles and while I am playing this on PS5, it’s a serious feat when you remember they had to keep a similar fidelity on PS4.

I also don’t have a better place to mention this, but they introduced an improvement to the climbing where you can use your focus to mark climbable paths which makes the climbing and platforming segments a lot more bearable and less frustrating.

But yeah, moving on with the story, more spoilers ahead, eventually we find a viable Gaia backup with Sylen’s help (yeah, he’s back and still mostly evil) and we meet the other antagonist of the game, and this is where things take a great sci-fi story turn. The group that built the space Ark that we learned about in the first game, Far Zenith, is actually still alive and they’ve come to earth for reasons unknown, but they’re the ones that sent the kill signal 20 years ago. The pacing of this in game is really well done and I think it’s a really great sci-fi story beat. Gameplay wise, not much changes for the rest of the game, except that we meet various main side characters and they end up going back to our home base where they’ll offer dialogue and companion side quests to do.

We get some weapon variants as we play doing side quests, but there isn’t a whole lot that changes throughout the rest of the game. I will mention the overrides in this game, while not different mechanically, are handled a bit different as far as what you can override and how to unlock said overrides. You still visit cauldrons like in the first game, but now you can unlock what are called corrupted overrides, which, in the game, are override codes that were partially corrupted at the cauldron you got them from. You can use Gaia to rebuild the data in them if you can provide her certain parts from each machine.

I’m going to gloss over most of the story, because while it’s interesting, there isn’t much that really impacted my gaming experience beyond it being engaging and drawing me in. I will mention a couple bits, though. The first is that you discover the Zenith’s have their own close of Elisabet Sobeck they call Beta who was trained using the Apollo database that the Zeniths had on their ship. At one point we get a secret message from a facility and we find Beta has squirreled herself away among a bunch of inventory and we rescue her and take her back to our base.

The other story piece I’ll mention is part of the main quest to retrieve one of Gaia’s subordinate functions, Poseidon, who controls water cleanliness. The quest takes place in what used to be Las Vegas (ironic place for a water AI) where you stumble upon some Oseram explorers as one of them resurfaces from almost drowning in a flooded elevator shaft. You connect with the nearly-drowned Oseram (voiced by TJ Thyne, Hodgins from Bones) over his plans and you help him devise a portable breathing apparatus, a modification to his existing, tethered diving helmet. You retrieve him some parts and then dive into exploring the ruins. You eventually stop the flooding, fight the bbeg of the area, and move on. This is a cool quest, and I love TJ’s performance, but what’s really cool is how things unfold with the Las Vegas settlement after you leave.

After a period of time, Erend will radio you and tell you it sounds like more people have moved into the desert and they could use some help. When you make your way out there, you find TJ and his companions have set up an entertainment town complete with food, gambling, and most importantly, Vegas sized light shows. You have a handful of side quests you can complete, as well as a location to turn in artifacts that you’ve gathered by exploring old world ruins in other parts of the world. The cool part about these artifacts (they’re called Ornaments in game) is that, when used on the NPC you turn them in to, you can actually change the theme of the entire settlement. All the ornaments are holiday themed and my Las Vegas settlement is currently Halloween themed.

I’m going to skip ahead to the ending, so major spoiler warning.

Nearing the last few missions, both Beta, and Gaia get kidnapped in a kind of ambush. Varl dies defending the both of you before Aloy is eventually saved by one of the Zenith’s going rogue and solar flaring the rest of the Zeniths. Think Tien in Dragonball.

After you come to, you naturally have a lot of questions and you find out that the Zenith that rescued you is the one that was kind to Beta during her upbringing and wants to stop her former compatriots and tells you of Regalla’s plans to attack the Far Zenith base (at the behest of Sylens, of course). You convince her there’s another way (besides sneaking in the back when Regalla attacks) that will save the Tenakth from certain doom attacking the Zeniths, stop Regalla for good, and get the weapon that Sylens had used to kill a Zenith much earlier in the game.

Tilda, the rogue Zenith, decides she’ll help you how she can, and lets you know that with your new found ability to fly (by overriding a Sunhawk) you can pick up energy coils from downed Horus machines and use them as EMPs. You take this new found information and use it to stop Regalla’s attack against Hekarro where you end up challenging her to, and beating her, in single combat.

After rescuing the Tenakth, it’s time to storm the Zenith base. You and Erend make your way into the base while the others provide you covering fire from the sidelines. You fight your way through (or optionally sneak past) a plethora of Specters. After you make it to the Far Zenith base, you end up fighting Erik (who attacked you earlier in the game, and who killed Varl) before you, plot-twist, end up fighting Tilda herself. With Beta’s help you discover that the Zeniths were running from something called Nemesis, which Tilda explains as being a collection of Zenith consciousnesses that were part of an experiment where some of the Zeniths tried to digitize themselves. Nemesis’s soul objective is to destroy the remaining Zeniths, and we find out that it’s actually what sent the extermination code to earth. Tilda then offers to take Aloy into space and run away together, revealing she was in love with Elisabet Sobeck back in the day, and Aloy is “all the best parts of her”. Aloy, of course turns her down, and you get the final boss battle of the game.

I know this is random, but I did want to mention the “bosses” or lack there of? There aren’t really bosses per-se, but the challenging enemies are for the most part way too easy. Even on harder difficulties, it just becomes Dark Souls palette swapped and you have to dodge every attack. It’s not bad, if that’s what you’re looking for, but I prefer my difficulty to make the enemies smarter, not just make them hit harder.

But yeah, that’s the ending of the game. There’s a short cutscene after where it implies Sylens is going to join Aloy’s Avengers™ for the next game. Overall, I thought the game was really good (hence the 9/10 score) and for me it’s mostly carried by the story. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the gameplay; the combat is fun, the open-world part of the game is done better than pretty much anything else I’ve played, but the story is what kept me coming back. Someone described the first game as an amazing sci-fi story, and it’s so true, and the second one is everything a sequel should be: a bigger, better story, countless quality of life improvements, refined mechanics everywhere, and new elements like the glider. I’m going to go as far as to say this is probably the first game I’ll ever “100%”, or in this case, platinum on PS5.

I haven’t tested it myself, but I’ve read that the game runs well even on PS4 and PS4 Pro, so if you’ve got any of the recent Sony consoles, I definitely recommend picking the game up.

Also, a couple things I want to mention I didn’t have a good place for:

• During the final mission, HEPHAESTUS is let loose and seeing machines being printed that help you for the first time in like 70 hours (including the first game) is so fucking satisfying.
• The OST is pretty good. Not incredible by any means, but it does the game justice.
• There’s a funeral scene with Aloy and Varl’s girlfriend and it’s one of the more emotional scenes in gaming for me. He grew so much as a character in this game and his death was just meaningless, so seeing him laid to rest hit hard.
• There’s a mission in the game where “Ted Faro Reborn” is exploring Ted Faro’s bunker and at the end of the mission he’s crushed by the head of a giant Ted Faro statue. I called that it was going to happen and I’d have been pissed if the devs didn’t deliver.
• There’s a day/night cycle and it doesn’t impact gameplay much, but it does change the look and feel of the game. The stars are beautifully done.