A GOOD, SHINING DISAPPOINTMENT
Also for: Playstation 4
I've put this review off for far too long. That tends to happen to games that
are far too long; as it starts to drag you lose your initial enthusiasm and
start ticking off in-game tasks like they were items on your grocery list. I
remember for a while thinking how brilliant and enticing Horizon Forbidden West is, but some 60 hours into the experience, those
thoughts gave way to mounting impatience. I was getting nowhere. I hadn't
advanced the main storyline in ages, and it turned out I was only halfway
finished. This game is just chock-full of busywork, and very little of it
feels rewarding.
Horizon Forbidden West once again puts you in the shoes of Aloy, the
bow-wielding ginger from Horizon Zero Dawn. The first game was some
kind of masterpiece, a jack-of-all-trades open world adventure with a deeply
compelling story and surprisingly fun combat. It mixed historical research with character exploration, and added a looming threat that was about to cause a new apocalypse
in an already post-apocalyptic world. Aloy was an intriguing character
with an almost biblical importance tied to the world's fate. That's what made it
so meaningful to explore, because you were not only charting the world - you were uncovering Aloy's past as well.
This sequel is far from that; with the world's history uncovered and
explained, the marvellous and dangerous surroundings lose much of their allure, no matter how much the
designers at Guerrilla Games improves their visual fidelity. Forbidden
West is mostly about the present day and all the things that people do to survive. And with her personal mystery unwrapped, I'm sad to say Aloy
is no longer particularly fun to be around. For a large part of
the story, her trust issues makes her respond arrogantly to both requests
for aid and offers of assistance. She mumbles too much, moping about her responsibilities whilst
solving most puzzles by talking to herself. This takes away the pleasure of
figuring out the solutions for yourself.
Taking place in the lush, varied climates of the Forbidden West, this story
is centered around one of the secrets uncovered in the first game, which was
mentioned but never fully explored. This time it takes center stage, and
it's a great, intriguing revelation - for all the, say, 10% of the running
time you actually pursue it. It appears close to the beginning, and returns
only for the final stretch, with only a few brief glimpses in between. In the large middle-portion of the game it
mostly lies dormant in the background, motivating Aloy to go on offshoot
errands and tasks to help and unite the tribes of the Forbidden West against
the new threat.
It is an amazing-looking, gargantuan sequel, with typical
Sony triple-A production values. Guerrilla has rectified the
slightly off-putting flaws - like stiff dialogue animations and long load
times - from the first one and expanded the experience with an enormous map
brimming with side content. All the different biomes remain, plus an added
tropical setting that looks as beautiful as it is dangerous. You can swim underwater and it looks as good as expected, and it even controls reasonably well.
You eventually get a home base, and it's not a good one. You can do very
little, and the residents are stuck in the same positions throughout, doing
the same stuff on repeat. Erend, who's back from the first game, listens to the same
Riot Grrl-song throughout the game. Other new and old
acquaintances shine their light on world affairs and open up a little about
themselves every now and then. Varl and his romantic partner are stuck around the same counter, bickering like lovers do, and apart from that
there's not much to do.
Aloy's allies aren't well-developed enough to earn such a big place in her
story. The only one I genuinely enjoy is Sylens, who feels like a more
complex and unpredictable character than everyone else combined. All the
other ones are too samey; "lawful good"-archetypes all, with no good
chemistry with neither Aloy nor anyone else. The dialogue is boring, because
there's no flavor to the characters, and their agendas are too obvious. An evil person
talks like an arrogant snob, and a good one talks like a preacher. Also, the dialogue scenes last too damn long; we don't need every character's entire backstory told in such forgettable detail.
The character skills section has improved a bit, but I fail to see the
usefulness of some of them, particularly the melee and override trees. These
skills are so situational you hardly use them at all. In some cases,
learning new machine overrides are a nuiscance - once you clear a Cauldron
to gain the skill to hack them, you then need to harvest them for the right
components, travel back to home base and tinker a little in your laboratory.
As a melee weapon, the spear has received a power boost, but is
still only viable against human opponents or the smallest machines, and the
story missions mostly pits you against bigger machines. For stealth takedowns it is essential, and I got the most fun out of the combat by hiding in tall grass, baiting machines and taking them out from cover. Some of the
other skill trees, like the hunter or trapper ones, unlock some really
creative and destructive powers that helped me to quickly dwindle down the
health of tough bosses.
A lot of the animal-resembling machines are new, like hippos, monkeys, boars and the really destructive giant turtle-robots. A bunch of the old ones also remain. I played on
hard, because that's how I enjoyed Zero Dawn the most. But in Forbidden West that meant some
of the weapons became useless. The ropecaster I hardly used, and the
tripcaster was not worth the trouble because of new unexplicable trap
limitations. The game doesn't even try to explain the logic of limiting the active tripwires to three at a time. You can only improve this amount by a couple, and only by investing heavily in its skill tree.
Standard inventory traps are way improved, however, and the new javelins are great.
But I mostly relied on the classic assortment of bows and arrows, because of
their straightforward ways. They come in nice, new variations, with added
status effects like adhesive or acid. I like that every weapon and armor
feels unique, and Forbidden West introduces a lot of new ways to tinker with
your equipment. Combat feels more hectic and challenging, but some of the
new skills are so overpowered it makes a lot of the added possibilites
redundant. As a result, even at hard difficulty Forbidden West is rather easy.
The game is still good ol' Horizon, and the strengths of Zero Dawn's
gameplay mechanics still hold up well enough. The exploration, world design
and combat feels good, with some added traversal mechanics like expanded
climbing possibilities and a new Breath of the Wild-inspired glider to easily get down from great
heights. The mounts are still a handful, though, and I hate the flimsy way they
control, particularly in combat.
For the first half of the game, while there still was some mystery to the
central narrative, the game had me entranced. But as the world opened up and
got cluttered by all the bland characters and time-consuming side
activities, my excitement started to wane. Some of the sidequests were
intriguing, but I could've done without most of their shallow sermons and
their interchangeable rewards. Storywise, the first game was a much tighter
and intriguing experience, with a much more holistic sense of awe and
wonder.
As for the other side activities, I skipped most of them. I hardly touched
the Strike board game, finished only a couple of hunting grounds, tried the horse racing once and hated it because of the insane rubber-banding, only won a
few melee challenges, and opted out of the fighting arena altogether after one failed attempt. In
spite of this, Forbidden West felt about 50% too long. I spent too much time
hunting for upgrade materials for my different pouches, weapons and armor;
they can all individually be upgraded three to five tiers, and with all the
different equipment variations this can take its toll on the sense of
progression.
Also; closer to the end I started to encounter some serious glitches,
especially one that forced me to replay the entire end section of the hardest Cauldron several times; I had to restore an earlier checkpoint, because every time
I died at the hands of the cauldron boss, I would respawn underneath the
floor and fall into the void. Some minor glitches included Aloy's movements
freaking out on occasion, and getting caught between two solid objects,
forcing me to back out of the game.
As I approached the ending, I had already reviewed the game dozens of times in
my head, going from a glowing recommendation to a solid, modest recommendation
based on the presentation and good intentions alone. I didn't like the trajectory it was on, so
eventually I started rushing towards the ending, finishing the game in a whopping 120 hours. The thought of summarizing it all in a single text made
it hard to start reviewing. And playing other, more fulfilling games (Elden Ring) made
me postpone the inevitable.
I'm aware that my three-star review score, which classifies the game as good, might not reflect the somewhat acerbic
tone of my review. Don't worry, this is still a good, solid recommendation for fans of the first game. Just make sure you play that one first to get acquainted with the world. I would summarize my experience like this; a good,
impressive disappointment that feeds off the strengths of its predecessor. I
won't repeat here what was so good about it, and instead
refer to
my review of Horizon Zero Dawn.
Horizon Forbidden West makes the classic mistake of being too accomodating towards its fan base. Guerrilla listened to the complaints, saw some of the trends in
the open world genre, and added too much to very little effect. Very few of the
additions enforce the end product, which instead feels overcrowded, and comparatively shallow and
unfocused. This bogs the game down and made me yearn for it to be over.
Writing this review had pretty much the same effect on me.
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