Horizon Forbidden West

A triumphant combination of enthralling combat, top-tier creature and character design, and a captivating open world, Horizon Forbidden West is an absolute blast

Horizon Forbidden West sometimes packs in so much that it gets in its own way, but the many well-drawn characters populating its quests keep it compelling.

Another beautiful technical achievement, Horizon Forbidden West is held back by clunky characters and new features that lack purpose.

Returning to Aloy’s machine-threatened world is well worth the wait

What Guerrilla Games has achieved here is nothing short of phenomenal. Story, gameplay, mechanics, and the world itself are all such an improvement on the original game - which in itself is a feat alone.

Horizon Forbidden West reaches a new high bar for Guerrilla Games. It does more than surpass its predecessor; it takes Horizon’s fiction to captivating places and builds a rich world that rewards you for the effort you put into it.

I don’t think I’ve seen half of what Forbidden West has to offer. It bored me sometimes with endless dialogue and exposition, but is equally generous with things to do and places to explore and creatures to unwisely provoke. Unlike many open-world games it is continually offering you something new, and a couple of the tools you acquire later in the game really open the whole place up. It’s got the spirit of a Metroid or Tomb Raider-style puzzle adventure on the scale of an Assassin’s Creed. And once again: by god, it is beautiful. I’ll happily endure 10 minutes of being lectured about terraforming, in exchange for marvelling at these sunken caves, forbidding plains and mechanical T-rexes.

The overriding question “Horizon Forbidden West” left me with is ‘when will its prospective audience grow tired of the tired conventions that underwrite so many go-and-save-the-world adventure games?’ As much as I appreciated the fun that came from smashing up robots, “Horizon Forbidden West” won’t earn a spot in my long-term memory.

Horizon Forbidden West is an incredible game set in a world that we wanted to return to many hours after the credits rolled.

Horizon: Forbidden West does a great job of building on the foundation that Zero Dawn laid out