Ryan Carney

Graphics are great, play is pretty smooth, bugs are few. That said, after 20 hours of play I’m losing interest. Main story, which is based on a tight timeline to avoid the end of the world, often feels discarded as you are forced to navigate through a litany of side quests and errands that just feel like fetch quests meant to make the game longer. Many of these quests are not particularly interesting, yet you are essentially forced to do them in order to gain skill points as this is where many (if not most) of your skill points come from. Sure, you could avoid them and be super picky with your skill trees, but then you lose out on many of Aloy’s new skills and abilities. This makes the player feel forced to play through often dull side content just to progress their skill trees, which is a bit sad as the skill trees are one of the more interesting things that Forbidden West brings to Horizon. Cutscenes tend to be long and, despite great voice acting and animation, most are dull and drawn-out. Sometimes I just want to read subtitles quickly to grasp the details and get back to PLAYING instead of just WATCHING uninteresting dialogue, but the player is often left with the choice of enduring the cutscene or skipping it altogether with no in-between. Weapons are much more complicated and you now will need several different bows just to fire all of the arrow types available for that bow. The bows will still be the same TYPE of bow, but can’t fire every type of arrow for that type of bow, which is pretty lame and a marked diversion from Zero Dawn. Oh, THIS Hunter bow can use arrow type A or B, but not C. Oh, THAT Hunter bow can arrow type A or C, but not B. I get it - you want me to customize every bow, but I don’t like feeling like I need to carry around 15 bows just to be able to use all ammunition types and be ready for anything. Same goes for outfits. It’s feels very tedious. On top of that, every weapon and outfit also has to be upgraded multiple times to reach peak performance using resources from the world, and often machine parts as well. Oh, but you can’t just kill the machine to get some of the needed parts, no no. If you do, the part you need will be destroyed 100% of the time. You have to REMOVE the part before the machine dies in order to collect it. Again, an unnecessary complication that makes the game feel slow and plodding as you track down the specific parts you need to power up your many, many weapons and outfits. Machines are a mixed bag. Yeah, there are many cool new ones, but many have also been recycled from Zero Dawn, yet Aloy has somehow lost the ability to override many Zero Dawn machines in Forbidden West and have to start all over with obtaining the overrides from new cauldrons. It’s as if Forbidden West ignores the player progression of Zero Dawn altogether except for specific elements it needs to carry the story forward, which is a huge injustice to the hours players put into Zero Dawn. Overall, Forbidden West feels like efforts to revamp the Horizon formula went into overdrive, but not necessarily in a good way. Plenty of new story, but is it interesting? Plenty of new gear, but has managing that gear become burdensome? Plenty to explore, but is what you may find worth the time and effort? Not giving up hope yet, but losing some of my optimism as well.