Platforms: PlayStation 4 (reviewed) and PlayStation 5
Horizon Forbidden West picks up six months after the events of Horizon Zero Dawn, and once again, you’ll take control of the red-haired warrior, Aloy. After taking down a rampant AI known as HADES, Aloy is in search of a way to reverse the planet’s degrading biosphere. Finding what she needs has been sabotaged, Aloy is contacted by a former ally and informed she’ll need to travel west in order to unravel this new mystery.
The story in Forbidden West was fine, but also not particularly compelling or memorable. I never outright wanted to skip the dialogue and there were a few interesting bits throughout, but there were more than a few times when I was bored out of my mind waiting for the dialogue to wrap up. The best thing I can say about Forbidden West, in the area of narrative, is that the voice acting and facial animations are great. Nearly every character you come across delivers lines in a real and believable manner. It’s just a shame that what they were saying wasn’t all that interesting on most occasions.
While Aloy’s voice work is well done, she comes across as rather unlikeable at times. Nearly all of her lines are delivered very matter of fact and she really doesn’t seem to want to be bothered when talking to most people. This just seems a bit odd considering she has so much branching dialogue and is willing to help just about anyone who needs it.
The gameplay in Forbidden West can basically be separated into two parts, the first of which I’d describe as exploration. Whether you’re following the main quest or venturing off the beaten path, exploration is a big part of the game. It revolves heavily around a device Aloy uses called a Focus. This little gadget enables her to send out a pulse that allows her to see a variety of different things in the environment, such as enemies, treasure, collectibles, points of interest, and more. The Focus is very helpful for figuring out puzzles, knowing what areas in the environment can be climbed, and just generally figuring out how to proceed forward with most quests.
Forbidden West also puts a heavy emphasis on environmental traversal and Aloy ends up equipped with quite a few special tools to help with this. Early on, she’ll find a Pullcaster that lets her open new areas, as well as grapple to certain objects. This adds a little bit of variety to the platforming sections of the game, but if you’ve played the first Horizon game (or pretty much any other third-person action game of the last decade) you’ll know what to expect. It’s standard stuff for the genre at this point. That said, I find that this type of gameplay is getting a little played out and just not all that fun, especially when you have to do it over and over throughout the course of the game.
There are also way too many underwater sections in Forbidden West and, like most other games with this gameplay element, these aren’t much fun to go through either. In the early stages of the game, Aloy can only breathe underwater for a short period of time, so this made some of the longer sections rather tedious. Luckily, later in the game she gets some special gear that allows her to stay submerged indefinitely, but that doesn’t make these sections any less slow paced or boring.
The second major gameplay element in Forbidden West is combat and, thankfully, it offers up a little more fun. As with most games in the genre, Aloy will do battle with humans from time to time, but where the Horizon games really stand out from the pack is with their machine combat. There are a ton of different machines scattered throughout the world. Most of them are designed after animals, ranging from the likes of birds and snakes to crocodiles and even kangaroos. Each machine is covered in armor and other components, which can all be removed in battle, and every machine has various strengths and weaknesses. There are also some machines that you can eventually override, which allows you to take control of them on the battlefield.
In order to do battle, you’ll need weapons and Forbidden West has a decent variety to choose from. There are a number of bows that are each effective from different ranges, tripcasters that create tripwire traps, blastslings that are basically giant slingshots, and more. There are also a number of different ammo types that are specific to certain weapons. These include impact (ranged damage), tear (required to tear off armor and components), and even elemental (fire, frost, shock, etc.) that can be used to exploit enemy weaknesses. All these variables make combat far more strategic and keep it from feeling too repetitive.
While the game clearly seems to want you to focus more on ranged combat, Aloy is outfitted with a spear as well. This is useful for pulling off critical strikes on enemies that you’ve downed with a status effect or for executing stealth kills. There are also a few combos that can be used, but melee combat definitely feels like a secondary option in most combat scenarios.
Aloy can also acquire a number of outfits that will help improve her combat effectiveness. These can offer a variety of buffs (and sometimes debuffs) to her range, melee, and elemental defenses, as well as add on a number of passive skills. While this isn’t all that important, each outfit also has a unique look displayed in game and that’s something I’m always a fan of.
All weapons and outfits can be upgraded with the various components you harvest from destroyed machines. As you might expect, these upgrades increase your damage, defense, and the like as your equipment gets stronger. There are also weapon coils and outfit weaves that can be used on your gear that will further modify their stats.
While the combat is probably the most entertaining part of the game, I do have a couple of gripes with it. The first is that there is no way to lock-on to an enemy. This simple addition would have made some fights far less annoying. A majority of the machines in the game are fast and move in frantic ways when engaged, so keeping track of a specific one can be nearly impossible. The worst are flying enemies that will frequently fly over and behind you and before you even have a chance to adjust, they are dive bombing you for significant damage.
My other issue comes with the power level of weapons. It always felt like no matter how much I upgraded or modified any weapon they never felt significantly different. This led to a feeling of being underpowered throughout most of the game. I mean, maybe this is by design so that strategy plays a larger role, but it’s kind of a bummer when you spend so much time upgrading your gear only to feel like it was mostly a waste of time.
While the main quest of Forbidden West will have you doing plenty of exploring and fighting, there are a plethora of other things to do as well. There are more traditional side quests that you can find throughout the world, but that’s just a small portion of what’s on offer. There are Cauldrons that basically act as self-contained dungeons, enemy outposts that need to be liberated, Hunting Grounds that offer hunting trials, Melee Pits that test your spear skills, and more. Hell, there’s even a tabletop strategy game called Machine Strike that you can play. All told, there are more than a dozen different side activities available. The unfortunate thing is that I only found a handful of them to be things that I actually wanted to bother with. I did some of them while I played through the game, but once I completed the main story, I had little desire to go back and complete the ones I missed.
All of this fighting and questing will also earn you XP and allow Aloy to level up throughout the course of the game. Leveling will give Aloy a boost in HP and a number of skill points. These points can be spent in one of six different skill trees, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the game such as close combat, ranged combat, stealth, and more. Each tree offers up various passive skills that benefit those aspects, as well as offering unique combat mechanics.
As you make your way down a skill tree, you’ll eventually be able to unlock various weapon techniques that can be used for specific weapon types. These let you do things like rain down arrows over a large area, shoot multiple arrows at a time, launch bombs with your blastsling, or penetrate enemies with the tripcaster without fully drawing back, among other things. There’s also an ability known as Valor Surge, which is basically an ultimate move that increases a number of Aloy’s attributes and weapon stats for a short period of time. Both weapon techniques and Valor Surge are great for turning the tide in tough battles.
From an accessibility standpoint, Forbidden West offers up plenty of options to custom tailor your experience. There are five different difficulty levels, ranging from Story to Very Hard. There are also two different options for quest and waypoint pathfinding. The “guided” option will make sure you always know where you’re supposed to go next and show you where points of interest are, while the “explorer” option leaves it up to you to find your way through the world. There are also a number of tweaks you can make to various combat options. So, you really can make the game as easy or as hard as you want, which is always a plus in my book.
It’s also worth noting that I played Forbidden West on a base PS4 that I bought back in 2015. For the most part, I felt like it looked great, as there were plenty of gorgeous vistas throughout. I’d imagine the PS5 version looks a lot better, but without a side-by-side comparison I didn’t feel like I was missing out on much. Unfortunately, I did encounter some performance issues though. There was considerable pop-in in some areas and pretty bad slow down in a couple places as well. There was also this issue where the screen would just suddenly go black when the game was loading a cutscene or saving, which was jarring and had me thinking my game crashed on more than one occasion. These issues were all infrequent enough that it was just a minor inconvenience. Outside of the fan sounding like a jet engine (which is just par for the course with most games now), I’d say the performance on a base PS4 was pretty solid.
Horizon Forbidden West is a bit of a weird one for me. Thinking back on my time with it, I didn’t hate it by any means, but I also can’t say I really enjoyed it all that much either. There’s nothing particularly bad about the game, it just sort of feels very by-the-numbers and formulaic. If you’ve played any of PlayStation’s exclusive third-person action games from the last few years, you’ll know what to expect and I feel like there’s really nothing new or worthwhile here. If you can find a copy for cheap or just really want to see where Aloy’s story goes, it’s decent enough, but otherwise, I wouldn’t feel bad about skipping this one.
