Burning Shores is a bite sized expansion to Horizon Forbidden West. It is simply more of what you've already played only on a smaller scale so if you don't like the previous games there won't be much here to entice you in. If you are a fan though it's a great epilogue with a tiny build up into Horizon 3 whilst expanding further on the lore of this somewhat crazy storyline.

The key phrase for me in that last paragraph though is 'smaller scale'. To be honest I don't like open world games much and Forbidden West had burnt me out around half way through it with it's insanely huge map and repetitive icons but I pushed through as I love the art, music, characters and world. I mean if you've cleared one bandit camp or one tower then you've kind of seen them all. It's empty bloat and while I appreciate the work that goes into these huge worlds, bigger just isn't better. I much prefer smaller yet denser hubs and maps like Deus Ex. While a long way from that, Burning shores is a better size and Alloy having a much better form of traversal available to her making unlocking the map far less tedious generally. Open World games live and die to me based entirely on their traversal mechanics which was always a Horizon weak point until now.

The story carries straight on from the end of the main game so you need a clear file to play it but it takes Alloy to a new location of Los Angeles on the trail of a very dangerous character. On her journey she bumps into a few new characters with the most prominent being Seyka, a pretty untraditional Quen she teams up with to help find her missing sister making their paths align.

The main quests take about 5-6 hours to beat finishing off with a pretty insane set piece at the end. It's a high quality piece of work throughout and at times is simply stunning and still some of the best looking visuals on PS5. The fact it can run at 60 fps in an open world looking this good is insane and the cutscenes especially are pretty nuts. The skin rendering alone looks close to real life without taking things into uncanny valley thanks to the superb art design on display. That said there is some pretty noticeable pop in and slight graphical glitches when in the air and I had one hard crash losing me a good 30 minutes play time which was pretty irritating. Overall it looks and sounds fantastic though.

Main quests aside there are a few side quests, new enemies, skills, equipment and collectables taking my playtime up to about 10 hours or so doing everything. All in all it's pretty good value for money considering the obvious amount of work here for only £15.99 if you want more Horizon.

On a sidenote it just got announced Sony bought Firewalk studios, they already purchased Firesprite, have been working with Ember Labs and now released Burning Shores. I'm starting to think Sony has a few pyromaniacs.