3.5/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of Horizon Forbidden West.

Horizon Zero Dawn was a game that, while I felt somewhat underwhelmed by, I felt had great potential to be a pillar of Sony's first party IP. Does this game finally live up to that potential? I'd say yes. Firstly, I gotta get this out in the open, but the animation quality of this game is fucking amazing, especially compared to the first game. The initial outing for this franchise had fairly cheap looking animation, especially facial-wise, and it was just not something I expected out of a big AAA Sony first party game. Seeing the vastly improved animation as well as the upgrade in regards to camera angles (with a vast amount of cutscenes last game simply being a shot-reverse-shot type of deal) it fixes one of my gripes from last game. Not to say that it's perfect tho. The game is still receiving frequent updates and you can tell this game really came in hot. A lot of it, while perfectly playable, had a jankiness to it. Hell, Aloy's hair for me still glitched out quite often, and that's 4 months post-launch. A particularly notable example happened when I was fighting a machine and it decided to partially fuse through the floor and start flipping out jumping around everywhere. I was only able to fix this by fast traveling very far away and then back again. Another improvement this game made was in regards to the story. While last game I felt the most interesting part was the world-building, having an okay story, this game's story definitely a lot better. While the world-building isn't quite as engaging (probably due to you finding out how the apocalypse happened last game, there isn't as interesting a mystery to discover this time), the story more than makes up for that having great characters and a cast that Aloy will frequently interact with. In regards to the promised "free-climbing", it's not quite what I expected. It's better than Zero Dawn's very constrained, Uncharted-like system, however it's still not what I would call very "open" like Breath of the Wild or classic Assassin's Creed games. Melee combat has improved. It's not on the level of a real hack and slash or anything, but it is significantly better than the first game. I wouldn't rely on it though as your ranged weaponry is still the best option. The traversal though is a HUGE amount better. The addition of a grappling hook, BOTW-style glider, and SPOILERS a flying mount make the world genuinely fun to travel around (I will say tho that you don't get that flying mount until the second to last mission so it's usefulness is kind of not great, but whatever). It'd be hard to go back to the very slow first game after this. The ending is also a hell of a lot better. ZD's ending felt very lackluster with a final boss you've seen before, and an abrupt, inconclusive-feeling stopping point. I won't spoil it here, but know that it is very satisfying and sets up a sequel a lot better. Overall, I quite enjoyed this game, but it does suffer from the classic open world bloat. I did enjoy my time with it but I think I'm done with open worlds for awhile.