Horizon Forbidden West

Aloy and her allies have defeated the malevolent HADES AI and apparently saved Earth from destruction. But it's clear that their actions may have only delayed Earth's demise, not prevented it. Aloy sets out to track down and eradicate all trace of HADES, aided once more - if only for his own inscrutable purposes - by the redoubtable Sylens. Word of a new threat leads Aloy to the Forbidden West, the lands beyond the mountains, where she discovers the possibility of restoring the terraforming AI GAIA to full function, and with it, Earth itself. But naturally, there are numerous complications standing in the way.

Horizon Forbidden West is the sequel to the excellent Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), a post-apocalyptic open world action-adventure game which posited the crucial question, wouldn't it be fun to fight giant robot chickens and T-Rexes? Forbidden West asks the question, basically, wouldn't it be fun to do that some more but with prettier graphics and I guess in California this time? And the answer remains yes, with some caveats.

As before, you play Aloy, the Nora orphan raised as an exile who ended up saving at least three kingdoms' worth of people. In a slightly comical opening sequence, Aloy loses most of her badass skills and equipment from the last game, forcing you to spend a good chunk of the sequel just getting back to parity with where you were before. This would be more frustrating if it wasn't fully expected. Still, Aloy has access to more gizmos, tricks and options this time around, along with many more upgrades for her weapons and tools. In fact, the array of options on offer in Forbidden West is somewhat overwhelming, even compared to its generous forebear.

Also as before, you wander around the map engaging in a mixture of main story missions which further the primary plot, side-missions of varying degrees of interest and complexity, and various repeatable missions which are helpful in grinding your character's experience and skills, but don't vary much from one to the next. There are also a vast number of collectibles, optional activities and achievements to look at, although Forbidden West does a good job of looping these back into the game's worldbuilding; flight recorders aren't just items to be checked off a list, but they also contain vital information on the last days of the war against the machines before the old world (our world roughly forty years from now) crumbled.

The backstory and worldbuilding was Zero Dawn's greatest success, with the mystery of just why the world is now full of robot goats being explored in tandem with the forward moving plot of the game. With that backstory fully revealed by the end of Zero Dawn, Forbidden West might have struggled to have found something to match it. Fortunately it succeeds: the main storyline of Forbidden West is more compelling this time around, with more factions competing for control of the titular area, each drawn in a lot of detail and with a lot of cool backstory, often diving back into areas that Zero Dawn perhaps glossed over. Forbidden West delves into a lot more detail of the ancient war and fleshes it out with stories about stirring last stands and people whom history now calls heroes, but were just ordinary folk trying to do the right thing.

That said, Forbidden West does have a problem in that the primary antagonists don't show up until surprisingly late into the game and aren't given a huge amount of detail (mainly because they're so powerful it's implausible that they'd keep showing up and Aloy would somehow survive). The focus remains on the much less formidable tribal enemies you meet earlier in the game and on the machines.

As with Zero Dawn, the machines remain the main draw of the game. They are fantastically-designed, beautifully-animated and almost always a pleasure to fight. Each machine has strengths and weaknesses, requiring careful analysis before engaging them, and more subvariants this time around means you can't just assume one tactic will work against all machines of the same type. Forbidden West is a more tactical game this time around, requiring some forethought and preparation before the destruction begins. That said, the game does somewhat nerf the first game's more formidable weapons, with Tearblast Arrows now much less effective and vastly more expensive, which feels a little bit of a cheap move from the developers.

The map is larger than Zero Dawn's and the scale is much grander. You start in the Rocky Mountains and make your way to San Francisco (and, in the Burning Shores expansion, Los Angeles), taking in Las Vegas and El Capitan in Yosemite Park along the way. There's a much greater variety of biomes, with snow in the high mountains contrasting with the wastelands of the Nevada Desert, and the skyscrapers of San Francisco and LA becoming a fun, new type of environment to engage enemies in. As before you can proceed on foot, with an enhanced array of parkour moves, grappling hooks and a new paradrop shield which basically eliminates ever having to worry about falling damage again. You also get a new method of travel near the end of the game which is very cool (although it does perhaps expose the artificiality of the map design which is much less apparent at ground level). The writing is mostly solid, aside from the aforementioned lack of depth to the eventual main antagonists, and the characters are mostly likeable.

The game does perhaps falter a tad in pacing. At around 90 hours for a reasonably completionist playthrough (all story and side-quests, most of the collectibles that add story information, but not the grindy hunting grounds), it's a significantly longer game than Zero Dawn and on occasion your eyes may glaze over at how many question marks are covering just the small part of the map around you. Obviously you can motor through the main story much more quickly, but only with the nagging feeling you are leaving yourself underpowered for the main quest by not taking on side-gigs. That said, the story does do a good job of refreshing itself every few hours by introducing new ideas, backstories and characters. The game does have some minor technical issues, like wonky physics (being hit by an enemy and shooting off in a direction never intended by gravity gets old after a while) and occasionally iffy collision detection, but these seem mostly designed to not let Aloy get realistically crushed like a gnat when she's hit by a 15-ton rampaging deathbot, and only occasionally directly inconvenience you.

The game's only other major flaw - if you think it's a flaw - is that it really does not move the needle from the first game's paradigm. Forbidden West is really just more Horizon for people who really enjoyed Zero Dawn, even down to many of the controls being the same. Launching on later hardware, it is a much prettier game, and certainly a larger and more epic one. But it can't quite surprise or innovate in the way the first game did, and I'd hesitated to suggest playing them back-to-back as burnout over ~150 hours of the same kind of gameplay would be a real concern.

The PC version of the game also ships with the Burning Shores expansion, which takes Aloy to the ruins of Los Angeles in search of a new enemy. This is a very solid expansion, adding another ~15-20 hours to the main game with new locations, new mechanics, new robots, new enemies and new allies. It also has the benefit of being much more focused than the base game, with a more constrained map that's easier to 100% explore (despite some new obstacles to travel, but also new traversal options like boats).

Another complaint might be that Forbidden West is the middle part of what is clearly now a trilogy, with the game ending on a major cliffhanger that we'll have to wait quite a long time to see resolved. But there's enough juice in the concept that I think it can sustain a third game to wrap up the saga.

Horizon Forbidden West (****½) can't quite match the original game's freshness or superb backstory revelations, but it's still a compelling and fun action-adventure game (with light RPG elements). It may outlast its welcome, or risk doing so, but for those looking for a game to lose themselves in for a long time with lots of combat, exploration and reasonably effective storytelling, it does the job well. The game is available now on PC and PlayStation 4 and 5.

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Horizon Zero Dawn

The old world has been destroyed but its legacies remain: vast, ruined cities, strange underground structures and, everywhere, machines. Scrappers sifting through ruins, Grazers absorbing nutrients from the ground, Watchers keeping an eye out for human interlopers and, terrifyingly, Thunderjaws and Stormbirds as massive engines of destruction. Humanity has been reduced to a small number of tribes, hunting machines for material resources and animals for food. Strict codes of conduct govern their behaviour, with the merest transgression leading to exile.

Aloy has lived her entire life in exile, raised by the outcast hunter Rost. Aloy has no idea why she was banished from the Nora Tribe at the moment of her birth, but Rost advises her of a loophole in the law: if, upon coming of age, Aloy can win a competition known as the Proving she will be allowed to rejoin the Nora. Rose trains Aloy in the ways of hunting, combat and survival, but Aloy has extra help: a Focus, a device of the old world that helps her identify threats and find hidden paths. Aloy's skills and talent will be tested when a new threat to the Nora is identified, one which will take her far from her homeland in search of answers to questions about her very existence, and how this world came to be.

In a lot of post-apocalyptic video games, the reasons for why the old world was destroyed are pretty irrelevant: the game just needs a cool backdrop for exploration and adventure, and sticking in a ruined Capitol Building, an overgrown Hollywood sign or a Hoover Dam turned into a fortified military base can be a good shortcut of letting players know what's what. Horizon Zero Dawn - which sends you scrabbling into the ruins of Denver, Colorado just a couple of hours into its lengthy runtime - initially feels like the same sort of game. The world has been destroyed and the wilderness is now overrun by robot animals. Cool. Move on. But after a while the game, it becomes clear, hasn't thrown these things in just for giggles. The writers and designers at Guerrilla Games have done something very unusual by modern gaming standards: they've come up with a deep, rich and well-thought-out backstory and mythology for their title, one that makes the story and the world matter in a way they don't in so many other franchises.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that initially feels overfamiliar. The game is set in an impressively-sized open world which you can explore at leisure, packed with robotic monsters and human enemies to defeat, bandit camps to conquer, quests to undertake and better gear to unlock, along with a sprawling skill tree to slowly level up through. It's another open-world action game, a genre that feels not so much over-explored at the moment as utterly exhausted. From the solid Grand Theft Auto V to the fun-but-shallow Fallout 4 to the disappointing Far Cry 5, the open world game is starting to feel like a done deal and the prospect of yet another huge map filled with icons for you to tick off like a violent accountant may cause some to groan and move on.

Fortunately, Horizon Zero Dawn is much more at the Witcher 3 end of the quality scale than the identkit Ubisoft collect 'em up one. The game ties together it's central storyline, where Aloy is trying to uncover the mysteries of her birth and her past, with the side-activities in a highly organic manner. Aloy is a hunter, an explorer and, later on, a Seeker, effectively a licensed adventurer and peacekeeper, so it makes sense for people to stop her and ask for her help, and for her to agree. The game deserves plaudits for how it organises quests into categories: "main" quests directly push forward the main story. "Side" quests are useful for exploring the world and new locations, but not essential to progress. "Errands" are not important at all and don't even further your understanding of the world and its factions, but are a source of experience and loot. Other tasks are simply listed by location: hunting areas, Cauldrons (effectively techno-dungeons, in a splendidly inverted Dungeons & Dragons twist where cavernous underground sources of adventure and loot are highly high-tech robot factories) and bandit camps, which can be cleared out and turned into new, allied settlements. Side activities can be ignored, but completionists are rewarded as doing these missions gains Aloy new friends and allies who may show up later in the game to provide support during tough missions, especially the grand finale.

The game's storyline starts off rote - why was Aloy abandoned as a baby, and why was she immediately outcast by the tribal elders? - but rapidly becomes more complex through a series of brutal plot twists. Aloy's understanding of herself involves uncovering what exactly happened to the old world, where the early and familiar answers - humans in the late 21st Century created military AI which rapidly gained sentience and spiralled out of control - are rapidly complicated and given much greater nuance and understanding as Aloy uncovers holographic recordings and logs of those events. The true story of what happened to Earth in the late 21st Century becomes central to the present-day story in the game, a rare example of backstory and present-day narrative combining into a single, cohesive whole. These stories are delivered through splendid, much-better-than-expected writing, dialogue and voice acting (Lance Reddick from The Wire and Fringe is particularly excellent as Aloy's extremely reluctant "guy in a van" advisor, Sylens, she inadvertently contacts via her Focus). Aloy herself is a strong protagonist, one who goes through some knocks as the game progresses and learns some incredibly disturbing secrets, but never loses her wry sense of humour, optimism or hope. After a near-endless parade of video game protagonists who are taciturn, gruff and relentlessly cynical, Aloy's relative confidence and integrity is a welcome relief.

This incredibly strong narrative and character-focus, but where the player is free to break away at almost any time to pursue their own agendas. Those who want to build up their skills and experience through hunting missions can do so, and the game's strongly dominant storyline is helped by its robust combat system. Human enemies are fairly easy to dispose of, but the game's real challenge comes from fighting the "mechafauna," animal-like robots who can be found spread across the entire landscape. These machines come in different types, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, weapons and abilities, and learning these about each type is crucial to defeating them. Early in the game fighting even a bottom-tier machine can be fraught with peril and pursuing a stealth build (allowing you to take down low-ranking machines in a single hit from cover) can pay off handsomely. Later on, you can gain access to more exotic weapons, such as "tearblast" arrows which can rip machines' armour and externally-mounted weapons clean off before you can engage them in more direct combat. Aloy's growing prowess is offset by the game steadily drip-feeding tougher and more powerful machines into the fray, culminating in the top-tier creatures, the T-rex-like Thunderjaw and the massively-winged Stormbird (visible from several miles away, at which distance it's already bigger than the much smaller Glinthawks when they're right next to you), which will have you running screaming for cover the first time you see them. The satisfaction gained when you finally bring these behemoths down is immense.

The game does not lack for content: a comprehensive playthrough taking note of all the secondary material and completing the expansion, The Frozen Wilds, will easily take around 60 hours, if not more. Even that opens up new possibilities, including unlocking "New Game+" mode and new difficulty levels to give you more of a challenge. If you're less interested in the optional stuff, you can mainline the main story in under 30 hours or so, and even play on "Story Mode" where combat is decidedly trivial and, in many cases, unnecessary. 

Horizon Zero Dawn does not have many negatives. The expansion relies perhaps a little too much on fighting one particularly annoying new enemy type which can be a bit tedious. Hitting 100% on the game requires grinding certain hunting missions which can get very repetitive very quickly. It's a little too easy to spend all your money and resources during and after a particularly tough fight, forcing you to spend some time gathering new resources and supplies before the next battle. But then that's also a central part of the gameplay, and as the game continues Aloy's ability to resupply becomes much more powerful (towards the end of the game you can go from being totally out-resourced to fully equipped and ready to roll again in a few minutes). Truth be told, the only complaint than can really be made about Horizon Zero Dawn are the technical issues on the PC version of the game, which are being addressed through patches (see postscript).

Horizon Zero Dawn (*****) is visually-stunning, well-written, impressively characterised and it has a central SF storyline and backstory (along with what the cool kids are calling "lore" these days) which ranks amongst the best in recent video games, certainly in the AAA space. The game is perhaps a tad slow to get going, but once it catches fire it never lets up through dozens of hours of hunting, exploring, fighting and learning more about how this world came to be. The game is available now on PlayStation 4 and PC, and an enhanced and expanded edition should be available for the PlayStation 5 after it launches.

Technical Postscript: Horizon Zero Dawn's PC port has suffered a number of technical glitches and problems since release. Although several major problems were fixed quickly through the release of two patches and several hotfixes, other issues remain. I was lucky that my experience was mostly smooth sailing, with only a few crashes (oddly only after the first patch was released and then addressed in the second). Weird framerate spikes were a more consistent problem across multiple settings and even continued when upgraded to a new graphics card (an nVidia 2060), although I was only playing at standard HD resolution. This seems to not be related to how the graphics are rendered but how the Decima Engine handles the background streaming and loading of assets; simply put, the engine wasn't designed to handle the vastly more rapid camera movements that the PC can handle compared to the PS4. Death Stranding, which uses the same engine, was designed from the ground up to be a PC title, so they fixed these problems in development. Horizon Zero Dawn, which was never supposed to be a PC game and was ported by Sony as a revenue-generating experiment, hasn't quite had the same expertise expended on it. Fortunately, Death Stranding's much more solid port shows that these issues can be fixed with the engine and I expect they will in time (a third patch was released just before this time of writing which fixed several of these issues).

In the meantime, one solution which has fixed a lot of problems is switching on "Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling". To do this, make sure you have the Windows 10 2004 update installed (this is one of the newer major updates, and may not have auto-installed for everyone yet), then right-click on desktop > Display Settings > Graphics Settings > Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling ON. Then restart the PC. This should eliminate a lot of the background stutter which in turn causes some of the crashes.