Horizon: Forbidden West Review — The Best Playstation Game to Date?

Horizon: Forbidden West is massive, jaw-droppingly gorgeous, challenging, and a massive step up from the previous game. Its hunting, combat, and exploration mechanics have all been refined, and an added dose of cinematic quality to the story moments makes Forbidden West one of the best games you can play on the Playstation platform.

The sequel is a testament to developer Guerilla Games on their ability to take something that already exceeded expectations with Horizon: Zero Dawn, and expand on it in interesting and clever ways. Forbidden West includes the already-impressive breadth of gameplay elements, and adds in a gliding tool, new weapons, a massive skill tree, new enemies, and a vastly bigger world. And thinking that the upscaling in scope would cause some cracks in the presentation would be foolish, as everything looks even better and more detailed than it did in the first game.

Visually, the game is stunning, with colourful vistas, volumetric light pouring in through broken structures, gorgeously-realised character models, and intriguing robotic enemies that move, steam, and operate in their own ways. The voice acting is top-notch and matches this attention to detail too, bringing in a captivating second chapter of the story, which picks up 6 months after the events of the first game.

The red-headed heroine Aloy is now battle-hardened and dead set on ending the malevolent AI Hades and restarting GAIA, a terraforming and planet-management system, in order to ‘reboot’ Earth, so to speak. The overall plot has a lot of weight to it, with an ever-present threat of failure, and the stubborn and often neglectful side of Aloy comes through, which creates an interesting micro-character arc amongst the whole world-ending fiasco at hand.

However, there are some bugbears. There’s no denying that, on top of a camera which can be tricky in tight spaces, you may find yourself a little discombobulated with the complex controls and menus, especially during combat. Holding down triggers, moving wheels, cycling with the D-pad – a whole bunch of inputs are required during intense fights, and it becomes increasingly overwhelming when the difficulty ramps up. Like memorising a run or set of tricks in a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game, Forbidden West asks you to do some serious preparation and memorisation before taking on bigger tasks.

That said, Forbidden West does so much right that it leaves a lot of room for hiccups. The sequel is a bigger, better, and more ambitious game that nails just about everything it sets out to do. If you love open-world adventures with ferocious and challenging combat mixed in with some puzzles, jaw-dropping visuals, and a gripping post-apocalyptic story, you don’t need to think twice about picking up Horizon: Forbidden West.

Horizon: Forbidden West is available on PS5 and PS4.