My basic feelings about Zero Dawn were: "pretty solid open world game with great combat and some chore-like annoyances", but what really kept me engaged in the first game was the lore. I really, really wanted to find out everything about how the world as we know it ended, and how it then became a land of mecha-beasts.

So on the one hand I'd been looking forward to the sequel since it meant revisiting such a cool setting. On the other hand, I wondered if I would find it as engaging since the big mysteries of the apocalypse and re-making of the world were pretty well answered in the previous game so I wasn't sure where the story would go.

Thankfully, Forbidden West has mostly delivered on the promise of the first game. It looks gorgeous, the art design is as strong as ever, and mechanically it's a mild iteration on the formula but that's all that was really needed since Zero Dawn was mechanically great. Narratively, I was not quite as engaged by the "big plot point" here as I was by the mystery of "how we got here" in the first game, but it's still a great story and they definitely found a good way to build on previous story beats to introduce new conflicts and lore elements.

Among open world games, Horizon's combat stands out. Making robots basically stacks of armored components that force you to focus your attacks not just on specific components but with specific types of damage makes combat way more engaging than standard "hit the enemy 'til they die". It also can make different engagements with even the same enemy type very different: are you after an important upgrade component you need to remove, or just aiming for weak points to take down a mob as quickly as you can? And the design of the robots themselves is wonderful, with the different species feeling very distinct and the gargantuan ones inspiring a certain amount of awe every time I run across them. Fighting human enemies in the game is dull by comparison, but thankfully it's not where the game focuses its time.

It's also worth praising that every side-quest in this game is unique, written by a human being, and fully voiced. They're not all the best mission design ever, of course, and the writing ain't Shakespeare, but in an era when many AAA games have tons of copy-paste or procedurally-generated "another settlement needs your help" mission filler, and many big companies seem to be threatening to lean on LLMs for quest generation in the future, it's gratifying to see a big game very definitively not take that approach.

Which doesn't, unfortunately, mean that Forbidden West completely avoids the kind of chore-like bloat open world games are prone too. The sheer, massive number of resources that exist and that you need on a regular basis inevitably means you'll end up doing "chores" for gear upgrades. It also kind of clouds the sense of the world as a real place: rather than adding detail, having a million similar-sounding resources to collect just turns the crafting elements into a blur of checkboxes and "number go up".

But overall I had a blast and enjoyed revisiting the post-apocalyptic West. Forbidden West takes the strengths of Zero Dawn and successfully builds on them, so I can forgive that it continues to have some of the same annoying weaknesses of both its predecessor and its general genre.

Slightly spoiler-y plot complaint: I was not expecting the third act reveal that Ted Farro turned himself into an immortal Resident Evil-style blob monster, that was cool. But then he was almost immediately killed off-screen and we didn't even get to see the monster he became, that was disappointing. I was looking forward to a wild boss fight!

Lembro de ter jogado o primeiro um pouco antes de jogar Breath of the Wild e ter ficado feliz de ter jogado nessa ordem, porque BotW me encantou por meses, e falta de liberdade no primeiro Horizon em comparação ao Zelda provavelmente me frustraria.
Dessa vez joguei essa sequência depois de jogar Tears of the Kingdom e estou abandonando o jogo antes dos 50% de progresso segundo o marcador do jogo.
É incrível como aqui há visuais espetaculares, dublagem excelente, captura de movimentos linda e mesmo assim esses personagens não conseguem me cativar mais do que o silêncio bizarro do Link enquanto os outros falam com ele o jogo inteiro. Nada desse enredo me faz querer continuar pra saber o que há por vir.
Após o deslumbre visual passar a cada área descoberta, o combate (muito competente) não consegue sustentar o jogo que é afetado por todo o amontoado de objetivos/missões secundárias que afetam a maioria dos jogos de mundo aberto. Talvez se o jogo fosse mais focado na parte dos combates com as diferentes espécies do jogo, me prenderia mais.

This is the kind of game Horizon should have been from the start. Having suddenly forgotten all the skills from the first part, Aloy returned to save the world with her partners in one hub, doesn’t this remind you of Mass Effect 2? The game is good, but this is the most I can say about it; for fans of an open world where you have to collect trash, it will do.

Такой игрой должна была быть изначально Horizon. Внезапно забывшая все скиллы из первой части, Элой, вернулась чтобы спасти мир со своими напарниками в одном хабе, не напоминает ли вам это масс эффект 2? Игра хорошая, но это максимум что я могу про нее сказать, для любителей открытого мира где надо собирать хлам пойдет.