genuinely lots of fun and really challenging

people shit on the visuals but i honestly love them, they make me feel comfy and safe...something about jank 3D visuals that look 10 years behind our generation get me acting that way

has cross play too, which fucking surprised me considering the small scale nature of this game, so if you have any friends without a PC its an option too

This game was previously a 4/5 for me and I looked forward to playing it everyday. But then the New York Times got their grubby little mitts on it. And you know what they fucking did? They got rid of swear words. Yep. Thats right. Now my daily tradition of using whore first and always has been shattered. What's even the point of playing anymore? This is everything thats wrong with capitalism. Big company buy little nice wholesome thing and ruin it and litter it with data trackers to spy on you and advertise you more of Gwenyth Paltrows goop. This is why I am now an anti-economist and will no longer be participating in the world with currency. The New York Times will NOT censor me. LADIES, NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU

The fact that this game is put on a pedestal as not only one of gaming's flagship titles but was nominated for multiple game of the year awards and has a sequel on its way that is one of the most anticipated releases of 2022 is something that I feel sums up everything about modern gaming.

Let's start with the positive - Horizon is a stunning looking videogame. I've gone back to my old save file - one I bailed on back in 2017 - on PS5 and I can't quite believe this is a five year old game and not a native PS5 title. The smooth 60fps upgrade is likely doing a bit of heavy lifting but even in the many screenshots I have taken from my playthrough, it is an undeniably good looking game, right up there at the very top of the pile.

That's it. That's the positive.

Christ, where do we start with the negatives? What Horizon: Zero Dawn offers is little more than a visual treat. As an open world game, it is doing nothing more than the stuff we got bored of on the 360/PS3. As an action game, it feels awkward with all of the attacks feeling far too over-animated and taking far too long to give you a snappy sense of control. The stealth elements are basic, barebones, nothing special but certainly not bad. Most of the sidequests are fetch or kill quests. The characters are all generic tropes, from the father figure who dies to give you a motive to the villain you remember from your childhood - there's not a single original character arc in the entire thing. The overall lore of the world of Horizon comes dangerously close to being actually interesting but then spaffs that up the wall by only revealing itself to you via an insulting amount of audio logs or, in two hilariously bad sections, unskippable exposition dumps.

Open world games are extremely popular and everything about this feels so fucking cynical. Skill trees lock away basic abilities because heaven forbid you have too much freedom from the word go. Yellow fucking objects show where you can climb and you better not get any ideas about climbing on anything other than these obvious climbing markers! From the lead character, sub-Netflix "box set" show storyline and game mechanics that are so well-worn that you basically know exactly how this game plays and feels before you've even started it - and this is all entirely by design. You're supposed to know exactly what you're getting in to and that is one of the main reasons behind its success. It's a game for the lowest common denominator. It's a game that doesn't want any friction whatsoever. It's the gaming equivalent of wall painted in magnolia white with a Live, Laugh, Love framed poster on it.

It is the most basic of basic bitch stuff.

I think it speaks volumes that this - the absolute fucking DEATH of the old style of open world game that Ubisoft and their ilk have been milking since the first Assassin's Creed and has been begging for death for over a decade - came out only a few weeks before Breath of the Wild showed up and instantly made anything that treads the same boards as Horizon look like a relic almost immediately.

Looks great though so you know 10/10 GOTY please tune in to the Game Awards!!!!!!

When i play Forbidden West, I can only think of one game. Ghost of Tsushima. Both, when they boil down to it, are the sort of basic crowdpleasers that there's been a million of over the past decade and that I don't usually tend to like, but made ridiculously pretty.

But I do like Ghost of Tsushima - quite a lot, actually. Whilst a big aspect of that is my love of the samurai cinema it's trying to ape, I do legitimately feel it takes the most generic of formulas and crafts a truly meaningful story and art piece out of it - whilst also being one of the best of it's class gameplay wise - And i've never felt that more than after playing forbidden west.

Because Forbidden west is just a pretty face. That's it. Whilst i will forever appreciate guerilla for crafting the robot dinosaurs that 10 year old me dreamed of, this is a weak as hell open world game. Not just in comparison to Tsushima from an artistic perspective, but also technically and mechanically, it's barely an evolution on it's predecessor.

And maybe that's the main issue. When horizon came out in 2017 I already felt it was a bit behind the curve on the open world adventure stuff, with a lot of bad UI, over reliance on crafting, a very weak core story and quests, and feeling a bit rough round the edges. But the aesthetic was really nice and the combat against the big robot dinosaurs was good.

Forbidden West, 5 years later, feels near identical to Zero Dawn. There's only minimal improvements to the game systems, and the whole thing has a level of polish way below the standard sony first party fare. These games have come to feel so polished over the last few years that even things like the movement, the climbing ribbed straight from uncharted like tsushima, feel notably worse. Doesnt help that at time of writing its full of technical issues and just lots of little quality of life imperfections that really add up like weird controls and overlong animations for picking up items which you do every 5 seconds.

But the real issue is that there's no innovation, no new hook to really make up for all this. Horizon Forbidden West is as about as iterative as a game could possibly be. It looks about the same, the story is the same bullshit as last time with basically the same boring characters and there's not even some really obvious gameplay feature they're trying to sell... it's just more of the same of a pretty open world game which is probably about a notch behind the average ubisoft trash mechanically at this point.

Even if you're really into this stuff, at this point I think you can do a lot better. If you're not, don't make this the one open world game you play a year. You can do better, and frankly, so can Guerilla.