4/5 ★ – hcolesmith's review of Horizon Forbidden West.

I have a controversial opinion: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is Better than The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both incredible games that have done so much to influence the intermingling of tactical combat with RPG elements. Both feature great World building and top tier writing. That said, where Witcher 2 succeeds is in what what left behind when CDProjekt Red made Witcher 3: the difficulty. In Assassins of Kings, the combat difficulty is quite honestly ludicrous at times—with a major caveat. If you take the time to understand your foe, do a little extra legwork into thinking about their strengths and weaknesses, and then prepare ahead of time the battles become significantly more manageable. I first played Witcher 2 in 2012, I think. And in the eleven years since, there are few games that have managed to capture that exact feeling of tactical power. This is an area in which Horizon: Forbidden West approaches proficiency. In the modern arena of open-world gaming feeling identical between games, it’s important for developers (and reviewers) to focus on what sets your experience apart from others. Since the release of Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, every developer has struggled to actually set a new standard in this sphere of gaming. The AAA open world experience is in identity crisis because it sells well. There’s no real need to push itself to be different because of this, but when games try something new it can make all the difference. Horizon: Forbidden West has the bones to differentiate itself from its comparables, but rarely does enough with that skeleton to actually set it apart. Twice in a row, developer Guerilla has had extreme misfortune in its release window. Zero Dawn released within a month of Breath of the Wild: the perennial open world title that essentially acts as a gold standard. Then, Forbidden West released within weeks of Elden Ring, another goes standard. Both of those titles are games that thoroughly modified the open-world experience, games that dared differentiate a bog-standard sea of repetitive content and came out the other end showing the industry there is life left in the genre. And twice in a row, Horizon’s existence has pointed towards the status quo. Whereas I believe Guerilla thought these games could be a counterpoint towards modernity, they have a tendency to read as dead weight. This is an unfair comparison, one that is forced by corporate marketing and release timing strategy. Both Horizon games have ample space to exist on their own, but those strong elements fight for control in open-world experiences mired in sameness. Horizon has all the things: bandit camps, viewpoint towers, crafting, traversal mechanics, a mix of melee and range combat, and (the now standard) robust side-quest featuring significant storylines. Since CDPR made Witcher 3, every developer has incorporated these elements together as an attempt to…hold that space. But no other game has managed to captivate on that level, because they all read as imitation. Every one of these experiences has a tendency to homogenize and become one similar feeling goo. So again, I iterate: it’s important to set yourself apart. Horizon: Forbidden West’s biggest points of difference lay in the enemy design and combat design. There is more of a Monster Hunter feel of tactical combat based on a wide variety of tools. There are elemental attacks that allow you to focus on a melding of Dead Space-esque dismemberment and JRPG reminiscent status effect focus. The problem is: the game doesn’t do a great job teaching you this. There’s a lot of generosity given to healing and regular attacks that you might go through the entire game feeling like enemies are bullet sponges because you haven’t been properly motivated to exploit weaknesses. This is where Witcher 2 succeeds, because some of those combat encounters become flat out non-starters if you don’t have the proper equipment. It forces the player to understand their circumstances. It was dumbed down in its threequel as a means to accommodate the open-world. That’s admirable. But that’s also the key place where I found Witcher 3 to have room for improvement. It’s the key place where Horizon has space to stand out. And it’s the key place where the game drops the ball. The combat in Forbidden West feels like it fumbles the ball at the 5 yard line. The pieces are there: accuracy-important ranged combat to emphasize the dismantling (check), large enemies that you chip away at until they are a reduced form of themselves (mostly check), powerful glass cannon feel of a fleshy human fighting a machine (kind of check), ability to min/max your way through combat (check, but not emphasized). There are so many fumbles along the way as Guerilla implements a very competent combat system. And a ton of it would be fixed if they knew to crank up the feeling of unlikely odds and boast the opportunistic sense of a well-placed melee strike. As it stands, large machine encounters go like this: dismantle components, prioritize their external weapons to reduce their attack capabilities, get them malfunctioning, then fire about fifty arrows into them until they stop moving. That last piece is the disappointment, because some enemies end up feeling so flat when you spend so long just waiting for them to die. It’s made worse in the human combat, which is sometimes meant to emphasize the undercooked melee system. It’s made laughable when you fight the specter enemies and suddenly dismemberment is amorphous and their health pool is too large to notice any differences from chipping off a piece of their armor you can barely see. In Horizon: Forbidden West, the developers struggle to stick the landing on the element of gameplay that makes it the most unique and as a result are doomed to exist in the same space as every western open-world game. The storyline is better-written, but lacks a certain punch. The side quests want to be compelling, but feel like fetch quests when you’re playing them. The obligatory inclusions line bandit camps and viewpoints go the distance to be different, but are either too infrequent or too frequent to strike a balance and stand out. And so in the long run I’m bound to think of Forbidden West for its almost flawless combat and gorgeous visuals. While this is enough to set it apart from its most similar contemporaries like Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry, it lacks the polish and inspiration to remain in the zeitgeist like Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, or Elden Ring. I enjoyed my time with Horizon: Forbidden West for the most part, but found myself pushing through to the end after a months long break just to see the credits. As I felt after wrapping up Zero Dawn, Guerilla is a team of capable developers who seem unwilling to push their game into desperately needed new spaces, even when they’ve created something beautiful and fun for the short term. I anticipate the next game just as I did after Zero Dawn because this recipe gets better with each design iteration. But please, make the world smaller. This is just too big.