One of the most exciting games that I was looking forward to this year was Horizon Forbidden West, the follow up to Guerrilla Games first open world Action-Adventure game: Horizon Zero Dawn. To catch you up a little on where Forbidden West starts, it picks up right where HZD leaves off. You are still playing as Aloy, who is being hailed as the savior of Meridian after the end game of HZD. Even though you have saved "the world" in the first game, the plague that HADES and the rampart A.I. have continued to spread throughout the world with the help of your "ally" from the first game Sylens (voiced by blank_). That pretty much catches you up on where we are at with Horizon lore.
Just like with the release of the Horizon Zero Dawn, which came out at the same time as one of the best games of all time (Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) the same thing somehow happened with Forbidden West. Even though I don't play many of their games, I usually appreciate From Software titles from afar I had to play Elden Ring, which came out within the same ten days as Forbidden West. It turned out that Elden Ring was another revolutionary open world game (I spent about 30-35 hours with it, really liked what I played and really need to go back to it). Once again Horizon got put on the back burner.
Fast forward to September/October and with a lull in the 2022 release schedule till the new God of War comes out in November and with the game on sale, I finally decided to get into Horizon Forbidden West. The first thing that hits me when I booted it up was "Wow this game looks incredible" and it really is a technical marvel for the PS5. Being 12 hours into the game and finally in the Forbidden West that the game is named after. The more I played of it, the more the shine kinda wore off and I was left with a feeling that I had played this game before. Forbidden West for better and for worst feels VERY similar to Zero Dawn.
One of the things that feels exactly the same is the combat. The combat in Horizon is based around ranged actions (Bow/Arrow, Slingshot, Traps, etc) that then can bring your enemy closer for you to perform melee actions. The way the combat flowed in Zero Dawn was pretty basic, and eventually you found your strategy and you stuck with that. In Forbidden West, it seemed the developers wanted you to expand out of known good strategies, and made everything bigger than it was in Zero Dawn. The combat is similar, but with bigger skill trees, more abilities, and more meters to build (like the Valor system). On paper, these systems seem like a good thing, but in execution they just seem unnecessary. I don't feel like they add anything of value to the combat. I actually have moved the difficulty down on the game because the combat became a frustration early on which is something I did not have to do with Zero Dawn.
The end of Zero Dawn actually wrapped up really well, and even though I know you can't let a new franchise that sold really well not have a sequel, I would have been okay with not getting a follow up to Aloy's story. The story for this game feels VERY similar to the first game. Aloy chasing after HADES and trying to stop the world from ending while also trying to discover more about Elisabet and the past world. While everything makes sense and is presented in a really good way, it just feels like a continuation of a story that I felt like we had wrapped up with a nice bow. It feels like this the most when you realized that Aloy just dipped on everybody during the celebration and the first few hours are her just having to explain why over and over again.
They seems to be the overarching theme with my time with Forbidden West, this game is good but I feel like I have already played hours and hours of this game. Forbidden West is overall a better game than Zero Dawn, the world is more varied with environments, side quests seem to be slightly more involved, and the open world is larger than Zero Dawn. But it comes back to the age old question, is more of a good thing, still a good thing? Zero Dawn felt like a breath of fresh air for Guerilla Games who had been stuck in Killzone purgatory since the PS3. Forbidden West is a good game, it just does not feel as revolutionary as its predecessor and that is not its fault. Because of that however, I don't feel the impulse to power through this game like I did with Zero Dawn. I will probably will finish it eventually, but hopefully when Guerilla decide to revisit this world, they try to bring back the fresh air with them.