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

Horizon Forbidden West is wild. From the jump it’s gorgeous to look at. The greatest achievement of the game is the world the devs built. The gameplay is unique as well, as Alloy, the main character uses a variety of bow and arrows as her weapons to traverse this open world. On the PS5 using the weapons feels great and each now type feels unique with varying draw speeds, range, power, and elemental damage. One interesting drawback I found was that because the majority of the things you fight in this world are metal, hitting enemies in the game mostly feels very unrewarding . The hollow clank of bow on metal sounds realistic but feels unsatisfying. I found the combat system very difficult to master. Alloy can focus on metal beasts to find their weaknesses but the monsters are so intricately designed that there are seemingly hundreds of parts on each. It’s very confusing to figure out what to focus on. And Trial and error is all but useless because of how many monsters and how many parts are in the game. This leads to another flaw for the game… there is simply too much of everything. Armor, weapon types, elemental types, monster parts, currency, skill points, experience points. It’s the type of system that open world games have normalized because the only way to coherently play is to spend hours pouring over the menu, or do what 99 percent of people do and follow the yellow dot to do what the game tells you to do next. I hope the next evolution in game design is to scale back. There are way to many weapons and types in the game. Each weapon has minute changes, and because your constantly getting new stuff there isn’t time to figure the new one out before something with slightly better stats replaces it. I found myself figuring out new strategies 50 hours into the game that I feel like I should have known 15 hours in. Traversal in the game has been improved from the first. You’ve got riding mounts, gliding, repelling, swimming, running, climbing, and flying mounts. The riding mounts feel pretty good, the flying mounts are awesome but way to slow, swimming is horribly slow, running feels great, and gliding feels pretty lame, especially compared to Breath of the Wild. Climbing is very akin to Uncharted, but not quite as snappy and free moving, and the routes to climb are all predetermined, which is not a bad thing and there are some light puzzles involved with routes, mostly involving blocked paths. There are four route opening skills you can learn from breaking open flowers, igniting a dynamite type rock, swimming with unlimited oxygen, and ultimately flying. These are fun skills that open different puzzle areas or quests throughout the map, and they are implemented well. The stories plot is pretty interesting. I never completed Zero Dawn and I was able to follow along well enough. Certain characters pop up that were obviously important to the first game without much introduction but that didn’t affect much. I have some qualms with Alloy as a character. She is a clone, but she should still technically be human, I think, and her demeanor for much of the game is frankly, rude. She’s just not an enjoyable protagonist. I like that she doesn’t fit stereotypes for protagonists in stories but she needs to be more like able for people to care about the story. My other big complaint is with the costume design. It’s all over the place. It definitely gives the game a unique visual quality, but every tribe is a complete spray of uncoordinated colors and some of the tribes just look totally silly. Also, the character animators made some interesting decisions about facial features and skin clarity. Almost everyone in the game looks, there’s no other way to say it, soft. They look like they were animated to be carbon copies of people off the streets of San Francisco. There skin is beautiful. These tribes are living in the WILD with ancient technology and some new tech as well. They should be a little harder on the edges and definitely not super clean. It got me wondering if the whole world isn’t a virtual reality game. The score and sound effects are great. Nothing ground breaking, but sweeping orchestrals come in at dramatic moments in the open world and the sound effects are good for the most part excluding projectile contact. I’d really like for those arrows to hit a bit harder. Horizon Forbidden West is a great game. Each part of the game has some issues, but the sum of its parts add up to be something special despite that. We’re in August of 2022 but so far this game is my game of the year. Yes, I think it’s better than Elden Ring.