Horizon Forbidden West

Horizon has enchanted me again. After a slow start, a graphically beautiful, sophisticated sequel comes, polished in every aspect, and underscored by a great soundtrack on top of that. The sequel was simply a success. Everything that worked before works even slightly better now. [Issue#317]

Simply put, this one is special.

If you loved Horizon Zero Dawn, you’ll no doubt love Forbidden West as well. It’s a glorious sequel that improves on the foundations laid by the original in pretty much every way, with an unbelievable amount of content to discover and some of the best visuals I’ve ever seen. It’s a must-play for PS5 owners looking to get the most out of their console.

The main conclusion that we have arrived at after spending hours and hours with Horizon Forbidden West is very simple, the new generation of consoles is finally here. No, this is not Playstation's first exclusive worthy of mention, but it's visually imposing, gigantic in content and production values, very well written and interpreted, and has an entertaining gameplay that sometimes touches what we call excellence. Welcome back, my dear Aloy.

As Zero Dawn's natural evolution, Horizon Forbidden West accomplishes what a sequel should achieve: reaching new heights. Guerrilla Games builds a great world, perfecting every aspect of the first episode.

Horizon Forbidden West is a clear step up from the first game. With the addition of new biomes, extra tools, an extremely compelling story, and a ton of content to keep you busy, this is another single-player action-adventure hit for PlayStation. It’s amazingly fun to play, consistently incredible to look at, and even while writing these words, all I’ve wanted to do is jump back into the Forbidden West.

Horizon Forbidden West fails to live up to its predecessor in just about every way. While the world and its many new machines are stunning, the experience is bogged down with confusing design choices and variation for the sake of variation - making Aloy's newest adventure one to forget.

My opinion is, that this game is the *best* game you can buy. The Story is Great and maybe sometimes a bit complicated to understand. It Was my first game on ps5 and with adaptive triggers a real adventure for every gamer, woh likes open World games. The characters are interesting to and the have a deeper background. All in all a great Game. I hope the 3rd part of this game is so good like the other two.

Devo dire che ci ho messo un po’ a finirlo, perché all’inizio non mi aveva proprio conquistato. Il primo capitolo mi era piaciuto un sacco, ma in questo mi mancava qualcosa. Però, il gameplay è davvero soddisfacente e un’evoluzione rispetto al primo. La trama è stata la parte che mi ha appassionato di più, è davvero bella e coinvolgente. È proprio per questo che non ho mollato e ho deciso di portarlo a termine. Mi sono divertito un mondo a sfidare le nuove macchine. Anche graficamente è stupendo e appagante. E poi, la colonna sonora è semplicemente meravigliosa!

I'm a huge fan of HZD, it's one of the last games I ordered at launch. I even replayed the OG version a year or so ago and it was almost as good as I remembered. Unfortunately the issues that game had have been carried over to this game into the current gen, the facial animations, mediocre repetitive side quests of finding someone's lost relative or tribe member and the less than impressive dialogue which I find a bore. The cauldrons were uninspiring, they were essentially filler and I didn't find that interesting, yet here I am unlocking abilities I already had in the first game. The game has added extra content such as a more in-depth combat system, new machines and new environments. The combat system is still janky and the combat moves are non-intuitive and some of the tutorials you use to practice them are poorly explained. Besides a few I remembered somewhat I would exploit the same basic moves to equal effect, but I mainly stuck to ranged combat against machines and stealth to beat human enemies. I completed the game on Hard and never really struggled anywhere, some of the boss fights were challenging and non-essential extra content. There are more machines, a great catalogue of them, very few of the older ones haven't reappeared but the variety and detail into the new machines is a great improvement. The graphics were always fantastic, and these are truly next gen. One of the few games I would use photo mode fairly frequently. Without the top tier graphics and gameplay I feel the Horizon series would really suffer, especially HFW since the plot is worse and I was less interested to see what happened next than with the original game. Climbing tallnecks doesn't reveal whole areas of the map like the last game either. Lastly, the open world felt too large, bloated and empty. I could say more. Essentially this game is decent but it highly passable, I doubt most people who pick up this are playing to completion like I did.

Game is grindy as hell and none of the bloated, checklist content feels enjoyable. Weapons don't really feel like they matter which you choose and aren't different enough to make me care. Gameplay and enemy design feel very poor and not well thought out. Aloy is the most annoying protag I've encountered in a long time, a very blank slate.

I really wanted to like this game. I played through the first one twice, and Forbidden West isn’t that different. The game just felt overeburdened with its scope. I DNF’d it after about 25 hours because I was bored. My main issue is how big it is. It feels like it’s huge for no reason other than being huge. I think I would have liked it more if it had a lot less content. I also just did not like Aloy or her sidekicks. Aloy was boring and one-dimensional, and no matter what any one said about anything, she sounded so annoyed and exasperated with everyone and everything. Most of the voice acting is very wooden as well. It feels like the voice acting for a AA studio.