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

My impression of Horizon: Zero Dawn from about 5 or 6 years ago (it was released in 2017 but as with everything, I play games a few years after release to capitalize on sales and such), was that it was a cute game. Its very arrow-centric with a few lousy moves for melee, and the premise was about as ridiculous as it comes. You have this super civizliation that came tumbling down becuase of one evil man, and opposing him is this other avatar of everything good, and a few thousand years later, this avatar is reborn into a native american-like society and they hunt ROBOT animals. Yah. Don't think too hard about the background. The gameplay loop is relatively solid, with the arrow combat being quite satisfying, and there being a good "explore, kill, power up" cycle within each biome you explore. There was a servicable story, but like with the background, its there mostly for you to have an excuse to explore a new biome and kill all its robot and human denizens. H:FW is pretty much more of the same, except they added a bunch more activities. There's now a Mechanical Strike game which seems to me like a combo of Combat Chess and some other game I can't think of, I tried the tutorial and it never struck me enough to go back and play more of it. There's the return of Hunting Grounds where you try to complete some esoteric ways of killing animal robots, there's now a combat arena for you to practice the more complicated melee combat options they give you now, and a tournament arena where you have to kill stuff in a specific time limit. Oh, you can now glide, ala Breath of the Wild. There are more cauldrons, more story, and basically more of everything. The story is still a bit non-sensical, as are the reasons why Aloy lost all her equipment from the previous game, but it being a game, you just accept it and move on. The amount of exposition has increased, but 90% of the time, you can just skip it and its no big deal. The combat is still the highlight of the game, with there being more melee options now, and you also have a javelin tosser in the mix. You'll probably still be using the bows the majority of the time, and oh yes, there are now boss battles now (you're stuck in an Arena until you kill the boss), and those are probably the lowlight of the game. I understand how having unlimited space to run away and snipe the enemy is probably not going to happen in a boss battle, but I really hate how most of the game is about mobility and then they take that away from you in service of a story I mostly didn't care about. I still highly recommend this game though. Outside of the GoW 2018 series, this is still a very good game and I spent probably more hours on it than I did GoW: Ragnarok's main story. After having played Valhala, I feel that that is probably a type of rouge-lite gameplay loop they could add to Horizon and I'd be all over it, but I shouldn't blame that one on the devs of H: FW. Recommended, its probably going to be a game I pick up when its on super-sale 10 years from now. =)