Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition Review (G00N3R)
Horizon Forbidden West is an open world, third person action game which continues the story of Horizon Zero Dawn. The world’s biosphere is collapsing which could lead to another extinction event, and Aloy must find an artificial intelligence to heal the world, while some powerful villains have other plans.
Zero Dawn was one of my favourite games from the last few years, and Forbidden West combines good gameplay with an excellent story and high quality technical performance, but unfortunately there are lots of little annoyances that often get in the way of fully enjoying the game.
The Good
• Combat is challenging on normal difficulty, and becomes more enjoyable as you progress further into the game, acquiring better weapons which allow you to take advantage of each machine’s elemental weaknesses.
• There are several new machines to fight against, which have interesting designs based on animals and dinosaurs, including some huge bosses. Something about the animation of Human enemies makes them much easier to headshot, and therefore less annoying to fight, than they were in ZD.
• In addition to the main quest, there are lots of side quests which have unique short stories where you’ll need to help villagers, usually by protecting them from bandits or machine attacks. The open world has several activities, including tallnecks, cauldrons, bandit camps, combat arenas, races, a turn based minigame, and multiple types of collectable items to find.
• Main story is very well written, and features an outstanding voice acting performance from Ashly Burch, while the rest of the cast, including Hollywood stars Lance Reddick, Angela Bassett, and Carrie Ann Moss, also do a great job.
• Cutscenes feature excellent lip syncing and facial animations, which helps you to understand character emotions in each scene.
• Using Digital Foundry’s optimised graphics settings I was able to get a very smooth framerate while playing in 1440p (i7-12700K, RTX 3080, 32GB DDR4). I think the key setting here is texture quality. I started with it on very high and I noticed some frame drops, but after changing to high, performance across the main open world map was stable with no noticeable loss of picture quality.
• In most areas of the world, the environment looks stunning, from snowy mountains to a huge desert, tribal villages, old world ruins covered in plants, and lakes where you can swim underwater.
• It took me 79 hours to complete the main story, burning shores expansion, most of the side quests, and the open world activities which I found most interesting, which is great value at full price.
• The game only crashed twice, which I think is acceptable for such a long playing time.
• Controls are fully rebindable and work great with mouse and keyboard.
The Bad
• Aloy’s dialogue while exploring and questing is extremely annoying, because she constantly tells the player exactly where to go and what to do. This doesn’t just relate to puzzle solving, but also basic world navigation. Climb that ladder. Stand on that crate to reach the ledge above. That gap is too far to jump, I’ll need to glide. She’ll draw our attention to important objects the moment we step into a room, before we even had a chance to find it for ourselves. She’ll constantly remind us about using the focus to look for hidden items, even though that’s a basic gameplay mechanic that we have to use in almost every quest. To be clear, I like Aloy’s personality during the story cutscenes. I just wish she’d be quiet while exploring the open world. I don’t need my hand to be held every step of the journey. Let me figure things out for myself.
• The first major area of the open world (after the tutorial), at the far east of the map, is spoiled by a high volume of dust particles in the air. When running around the open world, these particles fly at the screen like stars zooming past the USS Enterprise at warp speed. During cutscenes, having dozens of huge white dots floating around the whole screen was extremely distracting, and at times I struggled to concentrate on the dialogue. I spent about 10 hours completing quests in that area, and there’s no option to disable or reduce the effect. Thankfully, as you travel further west, the air becomes much clearer in most areas, although the dust particles do come back occasionally (seems to be worse when there are lots of trees nearby).
• Aloy’s focus has a green flashlight, but the player has no manual control and she hardly ever turns it on. There were several occasions, either in caves, or just exploring the open world at night, where I was struggling to see. My brightness settings are perfect during the day. The game really should have had a flashlight button.
• Crafting feels too grindy. Every weapon, armour, and ammo pouch has between 3-5 tiers of upgrades. Even machine overrides, its not enough to explore the cauldrons, you still need to actually craft each override. Every upgrade needs a specific component from a specific machine or animal, and they don’t always drop from each kill, so you’ll need to either spend hours trying to farm the items, or save up thousands of shards and just buy what you need from traders.
• Climbing controls lack precision. There were many occasions where I had to press the jump button 3-4 times to get Aloy to move up to the next hold point. Sometimes she’ll either yeet herself off a ledge in a random direction away from where you want to go, or do a small jump and fall short of the next platform.
• Even using optimised settings, the Burning Shores map had frame drops in some areas.
The Recommendation
Horizon Forbidden West is a good game, and its definitely worth playing if you liked Zero Dawn, but it could have been so much better if not for a few poor design decisions that frequently undermine the fun parts of the game. As this is a direct sequel, you’ll need to play Zero Dawn first to properly understand the story.