At the risk of employing the biggest cliché in game reviewing, Horizon Forbidden West really make me feel like Aloy.
These people. Their problems. Can no one get anything done without me to help them along? It's a wonder humanity survived as long as it did without Aloy. And there's so many of them, constantly popping up to fill in any remaining space on the increasingly crowded map. Don't they know there's a blight threatening to destroy the earth's entire ecosystem?
Well, maybe not. We're told that the threat is urgent right from the jump but the blight affects the game world very little. An occasional cough in one of the sparse blighted zones is all we really get. The blight is ultimately a means to an end, a reason for Aloy to set out into the Forbidden West where she can make the real discoveries. I won't spoil anything here but the story does take an interesting turn, though it still isn't nearly as gripping as uncovering the secrets of the Zero Dawn project. As much as the blight is a means to an end, so is the story being told in Forbidden West. The epic final chapter is ultimately an introduction to the premise of the next game, an interesting one but it leaves this game feeling like a pit stop on the way to something bigger.
The main story moves at a brisk pace at first, but eventually becomes a slog as the weight of side missions left undone grows. I eventually settled on doing only the most convenient and seemingly important, ignoring entire elements of the game altogether. (sorry machine racers, maybe some other time when the fate of the world isn't at risk) Most of the side missions were good at least, so there's plenty to do after rolling credits.
Very little has changed since Zero Dawn gameplay-wise. This is fine for the machine combat, figuring out strengths and weaknesses of each machine is still thrilling. Navigating the world is mostly a chore however. Climbing is somehow worse than the first game, and while the glider helps smooth things a bit I'm in a hurry here. Most of the time I preferred to fast travel everywhere thanks to the PS5's quick SSD load times and the fact that there's a campfire every 100 feet to get me close enough to where I'm going.
Reading back over this review I wonder if I'm really more like (the criminally underused) Sylens. Too focused on the pursuit of knowledge and discovery to appreciate the finer details of a beautifully rendered landscape or an NPC's long and winding tale of how they got to where they were. Maybe it's my own fault that I didn't enjoy Forbidden West as much as its predecessor. There's a good game here, just too much of it for me.
These people. Their problems. Can no one get anything done without me to help them along? It's a wonder humanity survived as long as it did without Aloy. And there's so many of them, constantly popping up to fill in any remaining space on the increasingly crowded map. Don't they know there's a blight threatening to destroy the earth's entire ecosystem?
Well, maybe not. We're told that the threat is urgent right from the jump but the blight affects the game world very little. An occasional cough in one of the sparse blighted zones is all we really get. The blight is ultimately a means to an end, a reason for Aloy to set out into the Forbidden West where she can make the real discoveries. I won't spoil anything here but the story does take an interesting turn, though it still isn't nearly as gripping as uncovering the secrets of the Zero Dawn project. As much as the blight is a means to an end, so is the story being told in Forbidden West. The epic final chapter is ultimately an introduction to the premise of the next game, an interesting one but it leaves this game feeling like a pit stop on the way to something bigger.
The main story moves at a brisk pace at first, but eventually becomes a slog as the weight of side missions left undone grows. I eventually settled on doing only the most convenient and seemingly important, ignoring entire elements of the game altogether. (sorry machine racers, maybe some other time when the fate of the world isn't at risk) Most of the side missions were good at least, so there's plenty to do after rolling credits.
Very little has changed since Zero Dawn gameplay-wise. This is fine for the machine combat, figuring out strengths and weaknesses of each machine is still thrilling. Navigating the world is mostly a chore however. Climbing is somehow worse than the first game, and while the glider helps smooth things a bit I'm in a hurry here. Most of the time I preferred to fast travel everywhere thanks to the PS5's quick SSD load times and the fact that there's a campfire every 100 feet to get me close enough to where I'm going.
Reading back over this review I wonder if I'm really more like (the criminally underused) Sylens. Too focused on the pursuit of knowledge and discovery to appreciate the finer details of a beautifully rendered landscape or an NPC's long and winding tale of how they got to where they were. Maybe it's my own fault that I didn't enjoy Forbidden West as much as its predecessor. There's a good game here, just too much of it for me.