Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the PlayStation 4's best-received games, which made a sequel inevitable. Five years and a console generation later, we have the $69.99 Horizon Forbidden West. It builds upon everything that made the first game great, with a new and bigger world that features more verticality thanks to superior climbing (and falling) mechanics. Horizon Forbidden West keeps the same open-world, spear-and-bow-wielding, machine-hunting formula, but its greater variety keeps the game interesting even after you sink a few dozen hours into it. The action-adventure game (available for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5) is a few steps better than Horizon Zero Dawn, and for that it easily earns our Editors’ Choice award.
Horizon Forbidden West's Gameplay
The game takes place a few months after Horizon Zero Dawn, and once again stars the lone huntress, Aloy. After the previous game's events, HADES is no longer a world-destroying threat, but there are still numerous problems for Aloy to fix. The land is plagued by a strange, red rot, and environmental disasters and frenzied robot attacks are happening with increased frequency. Aloy’s search for a solution takes her far west of anywhere that she's previously explored, and across an even larger area.
The action takes place from a third-person perspective, and is largely unchanged from Horizon Zero Dawn. The R1 and R2 triggers perform light and heavy spear attacks, while holding the L2 trigger aims your equipped ranged weapon (pulling the R2 fires it). You can crouch and hide in tall grass by pressing square, and pressing circle lets you perform a combat roll with a generous invincibility window. Pressing the right analog stick sends out a pulse to highlight items you can collect and surfaces you can climb, while pressing and holding the stick puts you in a scanning mode to let you tag threats and identify interactive objects.
Aloy has her machine-controlling spear as an always-present melee weapon, and can equip a variety of bows and other ranged weapons like bomb slingshots and javelin launchers. Each weapon type feels unique to use, from the sharpshot bows' slow draws to the tripcasters' tripwire tethers. Weapon variants use different types of elementally enhanced ammunition that exploit the machines' vulnerabilities to particular elements.
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Unlike Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West's elemental ammunition isn’t based solely on a given weapon's tier, and a weapon with a higher rarity in the game’s loot system might have different options from a more common one. Fortunately, you can stay prepared by equipping up to six weapons at once, easily switching between them by pressing and holding the L1 trigger to bring up the weapon wheel.
Your spear can only go so far. Many machines are lethal up close, so you’ll juggle ranged weapons on a regular basis. You’ll also deal with ammo shortages as you fight, crafting shots on the fly whenever your quiver runs out. The weapon wheel lets you make arrow bundles, and anything else your weapons require, simply by selecting the weapon and holding the X button. Within seconds, you’ll magically craft new shots from the resources you carry. The weapon wheel slows time while it’s active, so you’ll often reload right as a robot is charging in for an attack. Healing works similarly, with a medical pouch that holds a limited number of heals that let you rapidly regenerate health—even in the middle of combat.
You also hold a limited amount of resources, such as wood and chemicals, that are necessary for crafting shots. Staying stocked up on arrows is easy, because wood is everywhere and you can carry plenty. Still, you can only make so many explosive shots before you must revisit a shelter or town and fill your bag with the required components.
Inventory management isn’t a problem, though. No matter what you pick up, any item you can’t carry on-hand is automatically sent to your stash, an unlimited storage box accessible at various safe points across the map. Adding to the convenience, pressing and holding the square button when your stash is open automatically fills your inventory with the maximum number of resources necessary for crafting different ammo types, along with refilling your medicinal berry pouch. It’s effectively magic just like ammo crafting, but it prevents the game from having some very frustrating item-juggling.
Most encounters with enemies involve head-on fighting, but you can control the battlefield with stealth and traps. Hiding in tall grass lets you sneak up on machines and aggressive humans for a silent kill, or even tame a machine to fight alongside you once you learn that skill. Setting traps is helpful, and you can place them either by using a tripcaster weapon to set tripwires, or by manually placing different elemental traps that serve as land mines, which you also craft from the resources you collect. With the right planning, you can soften up a machine herd or enemy camp significantly before they even know you’re there.
Moving Up and Down
In addition to weapons and traps, Aloy gets a few new toys to play with in the form of the pullcaster and glider. The pullcaster is a grappling hook that lets Aloy shoot up to special grapple points and pull distant objects towards her. The glider is an energy dome that slows and controls Aloy’s descent from great heights. Those two items are vital, considering how much more climbing Aloy does in this game than in Horizon Zero Dawn, and how much more vertical the landscape is because of it.
Aloy can climb nearly anything, with full Assassin’s Creed-style movement. If there are any handholds on a wall or rock, she can scale it. Pressing the right analog stick highlights any climbable surface with yellow lines and points, showing exactly what she will stick to if she jumps towards it. No matter where you go, you’ll find something to climb, though there are still plenty of cliffs and buildings you can’t scale. This is wise, since setting limits on climbing in certain places establishes solid borders and barriers in the terrain, and enables environmental puzzles in ruins.
The pullcaster and glider both support the game world's more vertical design, and make Aloy’s climbing much more convenient than it would be otherwise, though the pullcaster isn’t quite as useful or engaging as it could have been. It can only attach to certain points in the environment, which again lets the game have environmental puzzles to solve in ruins. In the open world, however, the ledges you can zip to, and the ones you can’t, seem to be completely arbitrary. There are fewer grapple points on mountains than what would be ideal, so you’ll mostly rely on climbing for upward movement.
The glider, on the other hand, is fantastic. It’s nothing more than the paraglider from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but there’s a reason it worked so well in that game, and why its mechanics should be standard in any game that has a large amount of climbing. Once you reach a high point and do whatever you need to do there, you want to quickly descend to continue exploring. Without the glider, climbing back down would take just as much effort as climbing up did, and feel frustrating because of it. Aloy could always rappel from certain high points, even in the last game, but the glider means you don’t need to seek out those telltale yellow outcroppings just to safely reach the ground. It also lets you float generous distances, and reach ledges you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to access.
Bigger, Bolder Badlands
The Forbidden West is absolutely massive, spanning multiple environments and holding hundreds of points of interest. You’ll explore forests, swamps, deserts, and frozen mountain ranges, and visit multiple towns with their own unique layouts and architecture. The game world is riddled with ruins, machine gathering grounds, and enemy camps. Most map locations are fairly basic sites for hunting or resting, but the geography is varied enough for most places you visit to feel at least somewhat distinct.
There are also plenty of intricate locations where complicated sidequests take place. These often involve exploring a dungeon-like location, solving puzzles, and finding secrets. They largely feel unique, except for the Cauldrons you can conquer to expand the types of machines you can override. They’re a holdover from the first game, and tend to feel like overly long, repetitive slogs.
The main quests have the biggest and most interesting set pieces. Each big step in the game’s story has its own locations and tasks, usually involving a challenging fight against a massive machine or otherwise dangerous enemy in an interesting battleground. Nearly every major quest takes you to the edge of how far you’ve explored, and then prods you to travel even farther for your next big mission. It acts as a reward for spending an hour or so dealing with the previous important task.
Simply blazing through the main story will take at least a dozen hours, and that assumes you can push through the more difficult enemies later in the game without the equipment, skill points, and experience levels (which increase your maximum health) that sidequests give you. With the numerous sidequests and points of interest, you can easily sink 60 to 80 hours into the game, even if you aren’t a completionist.
Looks Amazing, Again
Horizon Forbidden West generally plays well on the PlayStation 5. It looks good, and provides options between prioritizing the game’s resolution or framerate. The latter choice keeps the game at a fairly stable 60 frames per second, and shows strong detail throughout the action. The characters' facial details and animations are particularly impressive, coming close to realistic (more so with Aloy and major characters than minor questgivers and vendors). Machines are detailed and varied, with their numerous parts moving separately and individually flying off when hit with strong attacks. The landscape is also beautiful, spanning multiple biomes and weather effects, with plenty of clear landmarks visible at a distance. Sunsets, in particular, are gorgeous.
It isn’t a revolutionary, jaw-dropping presentation, and the overall level of detail gives the sense of a game developed for both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. That's hardly a complaint, considering how good Horizon Forbidden Dawn looks. Plus, an open-world game of this scale probably can’t get the visual environmental polish of the Demon’s Souls remake or Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, regardless of the platform. Forbidden West still looks fantastic on the PS5, just not wildly more fantastic than the first game.
Stability is an issue, though a day-one patch has smoothed over some of the rougher edges. Before the patch, I saw characters get locked in their attack animations, and sliding across the map. Texture pop-in was noticeable, too. Those issues appear to be fixed, but the game still occasionally crashes. Thankfully, there are generous automatic checkpoints and numerous campfires for saving your game, so I never lost much progress.
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A New, Improved Horizon
Horizon Forbidden West is a worthy sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn that introduces several cool ideas, and places them into an even larger world. The core mechanics are largely unchanged, but the improved climbing and much more vertical environmental design creates Breath of the Wild-like exploration. In addition, a greater number of interesting, distinct biomes and sidequests prevent the open-world repetitiveness that permeated the first game. As a result, Horizon Forbidden West earns our Editors’ Choice award, and stands as a must-buy PlayStation 5 title.
Horizon Forbidden West takes everything that made Horizon Zero Dawn an excellent action-adventure title, and adds more environmental variety and quest verticality to create an even better game.
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