Review: Horizon Forbidden West is the first game to show what the PS5 can really do

You have to feel sorry for Guerrilla Games. As soon as it released its fantastic open-world RPG in 2017, Horizon Zero Dawn, it was overshadowed by Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which came out a week later and turned out to be a great game.

Now, while delivering an excellent sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, another phenomenon is on its heels to suck up all the oxygen, Elden Ring. Poor Guerrilla, a team of wonderful developers with a serious case of bad timing.

However, being out of the spotlight also makes sense. Horizon games sell well, but don’t steal the show. Rather than tearing up the manual, they offer exercises in refinement, borrowing ideas from other games and synthesizing them with impeccable polish. Like its predecessor, Forbidden West is consistently impressive and satisfying, but rarely revealing.

Summing it up in one line: you are a hunter-gatherer fighting robot dinosaurs in a post-apocalyptic USA. With such a fun hook, no one needed Horizon Zero Dawn to have a good story, but its narrative turned out to be unexpectedly interesting.

The games take place a thousand years after raging machines wiped out most of humanity. Survivors have grouped into tribal communities that view relics of technology as objects of suspicion or religious reverence.

The dramas of the warring clans are told alongside the story of how our world was ruined. Guerrilla found gold with the flaming-haired heroine Aloy, who balances courage and tenderness as one of the most memorable new characters of her console generation.

Where the first game spanned an Earth-like Colorado, Forbidden West draws players to Nevada and California with a new threat to humanity that, naturally, only you can solve.

The previous game revolved around the mysteries of Aloy’s identity, which were carefully wrapped up in its conclusion. The new game’s story is more diffuse, but cleverly explores themes of climate catastrophe and the swagger of big tech with a distinctive script and brilliant voice acting that includes cameos from actors Angela Bassett and Carrie-Anne Moss.

Action junkies be warned: this game contains a huge amount of dialogue, best suited for those who like to kill robots interspersed with long, though rarely monotonous, sci-fi policy dissertations.

Forbidden West is the first to truly show the PS5’s muscles, with graphics so beautiful that I often find myself interrupting the adventure just to admire the scenery, whether it’s clouds of dust crossing the desert or forest leaves shivering in the breeze. Enemy robots are ingenious biomechanical clockwork, shaped like snakes, hippos, ferrets, sheep and pterodactyls, with electrical cables for tendons and gleaming steel for ligaments.

Most impressive are the character models. Aloy’s complex hairstyle is a marvel in its own right, and the animation of facial expressions achieves unprecedented realism — never before have I seen a game character communicate subtext so convincingly by clenching his jaw or subtly shifting his gaze.

Forbidden West’s gameplay offers robust and satisfying combat under its good looks. Aloy’s movement feels ultra fluid as she deftly transitions between sliding, climbing and making use of new tools like a grappling hook and paraglider.

Every fight with an enemy robot is tense and exciting, requiring players to think like a hunter by analyzing opponents’ behaviors, deploying traps and elemental attacks to gain the upper hand. Minor annoyances from Zero Dawn have been addressed, allowing you to make better use of stealth and melee weapons or manage resources more easily.

Any developer making a sequel to a successful game needs to figure out how to make a sequel worthwhile. Now that the novelty of robot dinosaurs has worn off, how could Guerrilla keep players engaged? The developer’s response is to expand: in Forbidden West there is more to absolutely everything. In addition to the extensive main story, there are underwater caves to plumb, salvage contracts to fulfill, giant giraffes to climb, even an entire board game to master.

While some open-world games seem to drown players in pointless work, Guerrilla’s clever design and text ensure that most activities feel consequential. Forbidden West isn’t bloated, it’s just massive. While the quality rarely drops, I admit that I occasionally feel exhausted with how much there was to do in the game, with how much time I still had to go. The question for those who doubt whether to play it should not be “Is it good?”. It definitely is. Instead, ask yourself: how much game do you really want?

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves