Horizon Forbidden West ist just absolutely fucking obnoxious.
The story is flimsy as all hell, a fact that is not surprising since the first games (far better) story barely justified a continuation.
So where the story of the first game offered an interesting coming of age story with a life, death and rebirth theme in a new world, laced with some great ludonarrative synchronicity with Aloy and the world, the second game has a hard time even managing to keep everthing cohesive and have the events make sense.
The premise of the world is also just braindead, it's like: Oh, there is this new "west", that we've never checked out because of the violent people that we've never mentioned before, let's go look there.. like... what? I hate this.
Also: Unlike the first game, Aloy is a bad main character here. Her personality just doesn't work. She is overly confident and capable in cutscenes, which does not translate to gameplay, like, at ALL!
So there is no ludonarrative synchronicity and we have ludonarrative dissonance instead.
The combat sucks major ass, it drops loads of uninteresting, awkward, underdeveloped and uncomfortable systems and mechanics on your head that makes the scrambling of the combat nearly unbearable and far worse than in the first game.
The open world overall is tiresome and outdated at this point with all its icons and logs and prompts and god knows what and about the manipulative crafting: Whatever. That was to be expected. It's still infuriating.
On top of all that, the game is faulty on a technical level. The audio is constantly cutting out and Aloy gets stuck on geometry all the time. The other glitches are miniscule.
Now the game is not without merits: The game world is colorful and vibrant, the lore is still interesting and the characters (with the exception of Aloy) are interesting, unique and work well in the story. The exploration is fun and worthwhile and the side quests are surprisingly well made and memorable.
But even so, this game is so aggressively mediocre that the mediocrity takes a noisedive into below average, because it is just so fucking infuriating how utterly dull and inoffensive this porridge of boredom is.
I liked the first game. But this ended up being everything I feared it would be. It really is a pity.
4/10
The story is flimsy as all hell, a fact that is not surprising since the first games (far better) story barely justified a continuation.
So where the story of the first game offered an interesting coming of age story with a life, death and rebirth theme in a new world, laced with some great ludonarrative synchronicity with Aloy and the world, the second game has a hard time even managing to keep everthing cohesive and have the events make sense.
The premise of the world is also just braindead, it's like: Oh, there is this new "west", that we've never checked out because of the violent people that we've never mentioned before, let's go look there.. like... what? I hate this.
Also: Unlike the first game, Aloy is a bad main character here. Her personality just doesn't work. She is overly confident and capable in cutscenes, which does not translate to gameplay, like, at ALL!
So there is no ludonarrative synchronicity and we have ludonarrative dissonance instead.
The combat sucks major ass, it drops loads of uninteresting, awkward, underdeveloped and uncomfortable systems and mechanics on your head that makes the scrambling of the combat nearly unbearable and far worse than in the first game.
The open world overall is tiresome and outdated at this point with all its icons and logs and prompts and god knows what and about the manipulative crafting: Whatever. That was to be expected. It's still infuriating.
On top of all that, the game is faulty on a technical level. The audio is constantly cutting out and Aloy gets stuck on geometry all the time. The other glitches are miniscule.
Now the game is not without merits: The game world is colorful and vibrant, the lore is still interesting and the characters (with the exception of Aloy) are interesting, unique and work well in the story. The exploration is fun and worthwhile and the side quests are surprisingly well made and memorable.
But even so, this game is so aggressively mediocre that the mediocrity takes a noisedive into below average, because it is just so fucking infuriating how utterly dull and inoffensive this porridge of boredom is.
I liked the first game. But this ended up being everything I feared it would be. It really is a pity.
4/10