152 hours. 6 days of my life I will never get back.

Fair warning: this is going to be a long one and will cover almost the entirety of Forbidden West, because I am obsessive and detail-orientated.

So, my initial halfway review was pretty critical while concluding sappily. (It's not required reading, don't circle back to it, this is just for context.) Has anything changed upon 100% completion?

I was most wrong about the largest section - combat. Turns out I just sucked, surprising no one. The game scales with you to a respectable degree but I was hesitant to purchase mere rare weapons. Blue ones. Eventually I got my needy little claws on my oh-so-precious purple, second-best weapons and the difficulty sank in a hilarious degree.

Not to say that this game can't be ruthless. Unfair, really. Stunlocking and Aloy's glacial pace are still problems, getting enemies into vulnerable elemental states is no longer a matter of time but of your resources, etc. While the later game ropecaster is certainly respectable, it still lingers far behind its predecessors. Humans love their groups, etc.

The combo system is poorly explained and I hate that I had to turn indicators on for the melee pits. Pretty much everyone is in agreement about this. Unfortunately they're required for a trophy!

Add in a little bugginess and you have a great recipe for player irritation. The unfinished nature of Forbidden West was something I skipped over in my first review because, oh, games release janky nowadays. At least it's playable!

My almost endless sea of forgiveness dried quickly. My god. Simply, it's probably one of the most unpolished games I've ever played?

Look. I love the Horizon franchise. Zero Dawn is my favorite game, what-have-you. I spent the months prior to release days in an excited, feverish state.

I would not have minded if Forbidden West was a 2023 game. Still would've been pitifully drooling over myself for this game with the benefit of enjoying it more!

My significant other reported very little bugs in his playthrough. For him they were these charmful things, NPCs rendered to floating heads, loading akin to PS2 graphics. All occasional. Amusing.

He could not fathom how I kept getting myself into these awful situations.

I clipped through underwater sections two or three times and had to fast-travel my way out. The amount of times I got temporarily stuck in a wall during combat is immeasurable. Or even worse, I got quest-relevant and therefore important machines stuck in the wall and was forced to leave and return to them at full health. Near-invisible enemies (the ones that don't cloak) and quests that could not be completed and, and, and -

Games like these are why people are waiting two or three years to buy them. I'm not deranged enough to implement a critique of the video game industry, Triple A studios, day one double-digit patches in this review. You know it, you hate it, there's nothing unique about it.

Forbidden West deserves your money... just not right now. Give it a couple months and wait for the price to drip. PEGI's pretty much all but confirmed DLC, try it then?

If you swear by Horizon or Sony you've already bought this game. If you're on the fence grab a chair, couple of drinks and watch the patch notes release for the next couple months. Although I'm... not sure why you're reading this spoiler warning review. Thanks?

So, the combat isn't bad by my opinion. The game released unfinished. What else?

Upon reaching the ending, SO asked for my opinion. I will endlessly say it as - "I think, if this is the story they wanted to tell this was the best possible ending they could've wrung out of it."

What a nonanswer!

Ultimately the overall execution is shaky. I dislike that they went this route on merit, yes, but I do not think it is controversial to say that the story didn't stick the landing.

I found that a lot of my disappointment stemmed from something unexpected. I mistakenly thought my investment in Horizon was because of my love for open-world games.

Nope, my passion for literature and narratives comes back to haunt me. Again. I loved Zero Dawn in its completion but its story was the prime motivator for me. Forbidden West is something completely different by comparison; they needed ZD to be the prologue, the introductory phase of this strange new world before delving into all of its complexities.

My complaints are because I was served a meal I didn't pay for. Whether or not the meal is good is pretty irrelevant.

...it is better than decent. I'm not about to wave a hostess over complaining about receiving the wrong order.

But the rest of Forbidden West had to step up its game to keep me interested. The robotic mimics of animals were cool roadside attractions. A sprawling but cornered open-world. Now, they were promoted, had to reel me back in.

Considering my playtime and my completion of this game, do I need to answer whether or not it worked?

I still cannot shake off this feeling of: smaller. On paper, there is more, a boost in sidequests and these newfound errands. Machine Strike could be a standalone game. It's irrational but this unease lingers; quantity over quality.

Altogether I think this game needed a few more months at least. If by some time continuum slip I found myself a shareholder in Sony four months to release date, I would demand an indefinite delay and a major overhaul to the plot and its pacing. The Sunwing flying mount, no questions asked, should have been a midgame point.

But it's hard to have an aerial mount in an open-world game!

Hard. Not impossible. Cheese it, slap those impenetrable Zenith shields in the special places, have hostiles relentlessly shoot you from the air, ominous wind - I don't care! It is depressing how little the Sunwing is utilized.

I don't have a witty punchline here. I do really, really like Forbidden West and I am biting my nails anticipating NG+ and the DLC. I would recommend it other fannish people of open-world games who have an ample amount of patience.

It doesn't leave me with a sour taste in my mouth. Melancholy, I suppose.