Horizon Forbidden West

I’m a huge fan of Horizon: Zero Dawn, to the point where I would probably place it way up there in my all-time top games list, precariously close to the top. (Not everything can be Mr. Shifty!) I was never very worried about the prospects of a sequel; just give me more Horizon, I said, and I’d be happy. Well, with Forbidden West, that’s pretty much what we got: more weapons, more enemies, more story, and more shootin’. And as it is, that’s enough to make this an easy GOTY candidate for me!

Here are some good and bad things about the game!

Good/Bad: Weapon selection improvements There are a lot more weapons to use here and you can use more of them at any given time, which is nice. Unfortunately a lot of the new weapons just seem kind of clunky and awkward to use. I didn’t find the Shredder Gauntlet, Warrior Bow, or the Boltblaster to be all that useful, and the Tripcaster was changed so that you lose the trap if you don’t fire it at two valid points and you had a lot fewer traps allowed at one time, which reduced its overall utility in a game where you do have to care about resources. Ultimately all of the weapons are kind of overshadowed by the Hunter Bow, which I used almost exclusively. It’s nice that they wanted to expand the arsenal a bit but I wish some of these had a bit more oomph. Where’s my rocket launcher?!?!?!?!

Good: These Goddamn Conversations

It’s been probably years since I actually sat through dialogues and conversations in a game that let me skip individual lines of dialogue; I can read far faster than people can talk and skipping dialogue always felt like it was a good way to get back to shooting things. Not so in HFW! This is one of the best mixtures of exceptional writing, voice acting, and mocap I’ve ever seen. You want to send me on a quest to kill some rats? Sure thing, Grognar of the Wastes; you feel like a real human being and thus I will absolutely listen to your tale of how these rats killed your sister. It’s just an exceptionally well-written game, at least when you get down to the details, and that helps all of these characters feel…real! It’s great and I loved the dialogues. Sitting down with Angela Basset for 20 minutes was a highlight of the late game.

Good: More Monsters.

I really dug the new enemies in the game, even if I found myself kind of just avoiding the big end-game monsters until I could reliably put them on farm. It’s still neat to see things like the TUSKFANG and the TIDESHARK (I do not remember the names) show up well before you can easily kill them in the story, though! There are some pretty epic fights against enemies that feel incredibly powerful as you play, and even when you’re at level 50 some of them can make for a decent challenge. I am kind of curious as to whether they keep adding more robots in H3, as it’s already kind of a chore to remember which enemy is weak to which damage type. I also oddly found myself never really bothering to override enemies, even in the late game; by the time you’re 50 with some decent gear and fully skilled up, most encounters aren’t that difficult if you just go in guns blazing. That’s too bad because I really liked making monsters fight each other in the first game.

(Fuck Clamberjaws though!)

Bad: Gear Madness

There’s just a shitload of weapons and armor pieces in this game; probably too many, if we’re being honest. Trying to keep track of what you need to upgrade your armor, especially, felt like it required a spreadsheet or something. Generally speaking you can probably get by with only doing the simple, first upgrades for most of your gear, until you get to the legendary stuff later in the game (or early on if you cheese the Arena fights by setting the game to Easy difficulty). Then, the problem becomes that upgrading each weapon five or six times just requires an immense amount of grinding for very specific machine parts (trying to get the tails off of Tiderippers was especially annoying) only to see some pretty incremental upgrades. In all honesty, you don’t really need to worry about upgrading the legendary weapons as they’ll be more than enough to beat the game with (at least on Normal difficulty), but it was still annoying to be facing the task of grinding out 10 Fartsniffer Tusks to get an extra +4 impact damage. So I just didn’t do it! But I guess it’s nice to have something to do for the hardcore people.

Good/Bad: Skill Tree Madness

There are just a shit-ton of skills in Forbidden West, something like four times as many as in Zero Dawn, which I guess is great, if a little intimidating. The UI for navigating these is a little rough, but there also just seem to be more than are really needed. I find it difficult to believe that melee needs its own skill tree, but maybe that’s just because I never used it. (I don’t think I ever pulled off a resonator blast after the initial tutorial.) Maybe that’s my issue with the skills in general; it’s good to support a variety of playstyles but a lot of them just didn’t seem relevant to me, but on the flipside that meant that I could concentrate on my shooty-tooty skills and not worry much about, like, mounted combat stuff that I never used. The whole system felt a little overcooked and could probably use some simplification in the next game, but it’s nice that they’re supporting a variety of gameplay styles, I guess?

Good: Shootin’ Stuff

I dunno, I just like the way gameplay feels in this game! It’s a little ridic that you start off by losing most of your gear and abilities from the first game, but the addition of the Valor Surges was a neat one (even if I only ever wound up using two of them). Like I said, I mostly stuck to the Hunter Bow since I got a legendary one halfway through the game at the Arena, but there’s something super satisfying about plinking your opponents to death while popping off their armor and parts. Call me a simple man because I am one, but killin’ stuff in Forbidden West remains real fun!

Mixed: The Story

It was always going to be an uphill battle to try to match the thrills and chills of Zero Dawn’s excellent story. Forbidden West tries its best but some of the plot details range just seem implausible, like that bit with the underground end-of-the-world bunker. The unkillable and immortal Far Zenith enemies are pretty rad, even if they barely show up for most of the game. The plot twist at the end (you knew one was coming) is interesting, if a bit underwhelming; it’ll be interesting to see how they make the challenge overcomeable in Horizon 3. The main attraction here are the side quests and the side characters; each of the people who winds up in your base is distinct and well-written and exceedingly well-acted. I’m PRETTY TIRED of Sylens, though; he’s luckily absent for most of the game but every time he pops up it’s another “Oh, hey, I’m going to say something sarcastically insulting for the millionth time.” He’s lame and I hope he dies early on in the next one. Sorry, Lance Reddick.

Good: The Music

Music was great!

Bad: PS5 Resolution Mode

I played this on my PS5, but MAN was that resolution mode ever ass! It looked like it was running at 15 FPS or something like that. I stuck to Performance mode but I wish they had had an auto-toggle to flip it to Performance when you started talking to someone. Hope the PS5-native Horizon 3 (I assume) does this better!

That’s it! It’s a great game and worthy sequel that I really enjoyed playing. Make four more of these games, please!