Developer: Guerilla Games
Avaliable on: Playstation 5, Playstation 4
The development of Horizon Zero Dawn was a tale of taking risks. Guerrilla Games, which had mostly made linear first person shooters, made an open world game featuring a female lead in a world of primitive humans and hostile robot dinosaurs. It was an ambitious undertaking in a genre the developers had little experience in.
The final product was pretty good.
The map was gorgeous and fun to explore. A common problem with open world games frequently discussed at the time was maps being too big and barren. Zero Dawn didn’t make this mistake. They took a relatively small map and crammed it with a large variety of scenery and stuff to do. Side quests never felt too tedious and traveling from point A to point B never felt too long. There were beautiful sights all around and the robot dinosaurs looked truly majestic when they weren’t trying to kill you.
The gameplay was solid. Everything was simple and the game was ok with the player being powerful. Taking down little machines with stealth attacks or direct hits to the eye was satisfying. The bigger machines feel impossible at first, but the more you learn about the game’s mechanics and the machines’ anatomy, the more approachable it becomes.
Zero Dawn was far from a masterpiece though. Its terrible dialogue, weirdly bleak story, and embarrassingly bad facial animations held it back. Considering all it did right though, I still felt it was a genuine attempt at a great game.
To make a great sequel though, there was still a lot of work ahead of them. Adding to the challenge, Breath of the Wild was released just 3 days after the Zero Dawn was. Now, the expectation for open world games is to truly let the player loose. With their understanding of the open world genre and their willingness to take risks though, if any team of developers was gonna pull it off, it was gonna be this one.
Or so I thought.
Horizon Forbidden West disappointed me in almost every way it could. Far short of being a Breath of the Wild experience, it was even more of a stale open world game than Zero Dawn was.
Although the facial animations were fixed (at least for most NPCs), the writing and dialogue didn’t improve. In fact, the writers doubled down. Every cutscene and interaction is drowned in dialogue, very little of which is good. It wasn’t long before I began regularly skipping dialogue and cutscenes. Even during gameplay though, Aloy is still a chatterbox. She’s constantly muttering to herself and telling the player what to do as if they’ve never played a video game before.
The story itself isn’t much better. Life on Earth is portrayed as something that’s very fragile and requires Aloy’s constant protection. She’s trying to reboot GAIA, and to do so, she needs to travel to the west, home of the Tenakth. I had gotten my hopes up that the writing was gonna be better after I arrived in the first town. There, I enjoyed a story where Aloy exposes and takes down the corrupt demagogue that was running things. Once I entered the forbidden west though, things went downhill.
It’s forbidden to go to the west because the Tenakth are a savage, brutal people who are hostile to all outsiders. The exception to this is every single one that Aloy comes across.
The Tenakth are a very boring people. Each of the clans has a series of beliefs and traditions that might’ve been interesting with better writing, but as it is now they require so much reading and dialogue to understand that I just didn’t bother.
Aloy’s journey to stop the extinction of all life on Earth is also boring. Where the story was at its best in Zero Dawn is at the beginning of the game, where you were introduced to the world of machines and explored how people developed their understanding of the world having grown up in it. In Forbidden West, the machines the game is famous for play no role in the story. Instead, the game expands upon its weird backstory as Aloy and GAIA are trying to figure out who exactly wants to kill the world this time. From start to finish, the story is nonstop exposition that ultimately just serves as setup for a third game.
The open world in Forbidden West is just as beautiful as in Zero Dawn, but it’s less fun to explore. Everything is waypoint-to-waypoint. There’s virtually no reward for straying far off the beaten path. Half of everything in the world is blocked by artificial barriers that require tools obtained later in the story.
Forbidden West tries to be bigger and better than Zero Dawn, but it goes about it in all the wrong ways. Instead of expanding upon the experience and making it better, they just added new things here and there as if they were going down a checklist of standard open world mechanics.
There are new enemies that are cool, like the big snake or the loch ness monster machine, but they hardly make for a fresh experience. There are new elements, like abrasion and purgewater, but they don’t do much that couldn’t be done in the first game. There’s Machine Strike, Guerilla Game’s attempt at their own Gwent, but, well, it just isn’t very fun.
Zero Dawn was ok with the player being powerful and having fun. Forbidden West is not. Almost everything in Aloy’s arsenal has been nerfed. Arrows take longer to craft and Aloy can’t carry as many of them as she could in the first game. Tearblast arrows do much less tear damage and now take much longer to draw than other arrows. Heavy weapons that Aloy can tear off machines and wield now carry significantly less ammo. In Zero Dawn, your loadout essentially consisted of 3 bows that, between them, give you ammo for every element in the game. In Forbidden West, weapons are a disorganized cluster-fuck where attributes and elements are haphazardly spread amongst what seems like hundreds of weapons.
The golden fast travel pack? Gone. The ability to call a mount from anywhere? Gone. The ability to do those extra long rolls? Gone.
Worst off though is probably overrides. In the first game, completing cauldrons gave you the ability to override new types of machines and make them fight for you. With upgrades, overridden machines can stay overridden indefinitely. In Forbidden West though, completing the cauldrons is not enough anymore. Now, you also have to grind for parts from the machines to actually unlock the override for it. The amount of time a machine is overridden has been reduced, and can no longer be upgraded to indefinitely. There’s a new feature, which is the ability to make them aggressive or defensive, but for mountable machines, this just hurts. In the first game, mountable machines stood still unless they were attacked in which case they defended themselves. In Forbidden West, upon first overriding them, you can either set them to defensive, where they will always stand still and let themselves get killed if attacked, or aggressive, where they will never stand still including when you’re just trying to mount it.
Granted, there were a couple of things that Forbidden West did well. They implemented a new system for climbing. Most things that look climbable are climbable, and by scanning with their focus, the player can easily identify what exactly is climbable and what isn’t. It’s a clever system that makes climbing feel dynamic while still giving developers full control over what can be climbed without making it frustrating for the player. The underwater sections of the game are also great, offering beautiful sights and a breath of fresh air the game lacks elsewhere.
Horizon Forbidden West could’ve been an incredible experience. Imagine if the game just dropped you off in a world and let you explore the beautiful world of machines as you pleased.
Just as Breath of the Wild completely overshadowed Horizon Zero Dawn, Elden Ring is now completely overshadowing Horizon Forbidden West. A lot of people joke that the Horizon series must be cursed for this to have happened. I disagree. I believe Guerilla Games had every opportunity to make a game that could compete with Elden Ring.