You’ve got to feel for Guerrilla Games. No sooner had it released its fantastic 2017 open-world role-playing game Horizon Zero Dawn than it was overshadowed by Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched a week later and turned out to be an all-time gaming great. Now just as it delivers an excellent sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, another phenomenon arrives on its heels to suck away all the oxygen, Elden Ring. Poor Guerrilla, a team of superb developers with a serious case of bad timing.
Yet being just outside the limelight also makes sense. Horizon games sell well, but aren’t quite scene-stealers. Instead of tearing up the rule book, they offer exercises in refinement, borrowing ideas from other games and synthesising them with immaculate polish. Like its predecessor, Forbidden West is consistently impressive and satisfying but rarely revelatory.
The one-line pitch is that you’re a hunter-gatherer fighting robot dinosaurs across a post-apocalyptic US. With such a fun hook, nobody needed Horizon Zero Dawn to have a good story, yet its narrative proved unexpectedly compelling. The games take place a thousand years after rampaging machines have wiped out most of humanity. Survivors have clustered into tribal communities who view relics of technology as objects of either suspicion or religious reverence. The dramas of warring clans are narrated alongside the tale of how our world came to ruin. Guerrilla struck gold with flame-haired heroine Aloy, who balances grit and tenderness as one of the most memorable new characters of its console generation.
Where the first game stretched across a terraformed Colorado, Forbidden West beckons players to Nevada and California with a new threat to humanity that, naturally, only you can resolve. The previous game revolved around the mysteries of Aloy’s identity, which were neatly wrapped up by its conclusion. The new game’s story is more diffuse, yet it smartly explores themes of climate catastrophe and the hubris of big tech with a nuanced script and brilliant voice acting that includes appearances by actors Angela Bassett and Carrie-Anne Moss. Action junkies be warned: this game contains an enormous amount of dialogue, best suited to those who like their robot-slaying interpolated by lengthy, though rarely dull, disquisitions on sci-fi politics.
Forbidden West is the first truly eye-popping flex of the PS5’s muscles, with graphics so beautiful that I have often found myself halting the adventure just to gawp at the landscape, whether dust clouds careening across the desert or forest leaves quivering in the breeze. The robot enemies are ingenious works of biomechanical clockwork, shaped like snakes, hippos, ferrets, rams and pterodactyls, with electric cables for sinew and gleaming steel for ligaments. Most impressive are the character models. Aloy’s complex hairstyle is a marvel in its own right, and the animation of facial expressions achieves an unprecedented realism — never before have I seen a game character communicate subtext so convincingly by tightening their jaw or subtly shifting their gaze.
Forbidden West’s gameplay offers robust, satisfying combat beneath its good looks. Aloy’s movement feels ultra-fluid as she deftly transitions between sliding, climbing and making use of new tools such as a grappling hook and paraglider. Each fight with a robot enemy is tense and exciting, demanding that players think like a hunter by analysing opponents’ behaviours, deploying traps and elemental attacks to gain the upper hand. Minor irritations from Zero Dawn have been resolved, allowing you to make better use of stealth and melee weapons or manage resources more easily.
Any developer making a follow-up to a successful game has to work out how they can make a sequel worthwhile. Now that the novelty of robot dinosaurs has worn off, how could Guerrilla keep players engaged? The developer’s answer is to expand: in Forbidden West there is more of absolutely everything. Besides the extensive main story, there are underwater caves to plumb, salvage contracts to fulfil, towering giraffe-bots to scale, even an entire board game to master.
While some open-world games feel as if they drown players in pointless busywork, Guerrilla’s smart design and writing ensure that most activities feel consequential. Forbidden West isn’t bloated, it’s just massive. While the quality rarely drops, I admit to occasionally feeling exhausted at how much there was to do in the game, at how long I still had to go. The question for those wondering whether to play this shouldn’t be “Is it good?” It definitely is. Rather, ask yourself: how much game do you really want?
‘Horizon Forbidden West’ is out now on PlayStation 5
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