The original game was a promising yet flawed open world exploration-heavy game with a great setup and great worldbuilding. It was a very "PG-13" corny theme park experience sometimes and the best moments were rooted in the lore, not the actual story of Aloy. But especially the first half was a great hero journey surrounded in mystery with some rather harrowing plot twists. The villains weren’t that important, the main focus was the unravelling of the mystery of Aloy's origin and getting to know the history of the world.

Horizon Forbidden West was in a difficult position – Aloy couldn’t continue on her discovery-filled journey. She was all-knowing now. Unfortunatelly Guerilla opted for a classical Marvel-like structure with a cookie-cutter world saving story and it fell apart quickly. There was also an attempt of something like "Mass Effect-ish" plot development with the base of operations and the assembling of your own team and whatnot but it fell incredibly short (it just doesn't work well with the premise of a solitary hero like Aloy I guess).
Once again – the world itself is beautiful and well realised. But now the side content just repeats itself with little to no innovation. Side missions are slightly better then in HZD but - boy oh boy! - the main story pisses itself so hard so quickly.
The premise of the dying world could be good, but right after the Embassy mission you realise the main portion of the game consists of three to four big fetch quests – these are supposed to bring you to the different areas of the map which they achieve but it feels very unorganic. The writing is like a watered down Avengers story with unnatural and cringey dialogue, unlikable NPCs and cliché after cliché after cliché…
I actually liked parts of the exploration. The traversal while not being flawless was definitely better and snappier than in HZD. Guerilla "borrowed" once again from better games (Zelda and others) and introduced a glider, a grappling hook, rebreather and a free climbing mechanic - but for some reason you can't use them while solving puzzles. All those are completely on rails and strip you of your abbilities, which is utterly and completely frustrating.
Side activities were completely unoriginal and there were some mindboggling design decisions, but for a limited time I really enjoyed walking through all those beautiful forests and I loved all the different vistas – but that was it. I basically facepalmed the back third of the game, constantly on the brink of putting the game down.
One of the most criminal parts of the story setup were the villains. What on earth were those Superman-1978-Zod-like idiots supposed to be? They’re introduction and basically every second of their screentime (except for Tilda – mainly thanks to Carrie-Anne Moss’s great performance ) were one big comedy nonsense.
And of course – there is the (very rushed) happy ending with a sunset and with a looming danger in the background: a sequel bait…!
Please Guerilla – you’ve managed to create a good lore and a beautiful world, now you should really work on that writing.

If you consider buying/playing the game maybe just put the main story aside and enjoy the world itself and the things Guerilla is quite good at - the combat and the machine variety. Because the story might kill the game for you as it did for me.

(While not being the main problem, the technical state of the game wasn't the best - despite what was said about this Nixxes's port since release. It still needs a few patches - the frame generation was a welcome addition, but it is not very well implemented, there are also some shadow flicker issues, particle artifacts, frame dips and some inexplicable performance degradation over time. Some of it could be on my side but some of it are definitely an engine related issues and should be adressed.)

Graphics is good.

NO SPOILERS REVIEW

I played this game thinking WOW this game looks so good to then turn my camera and realise Im running at a total of 4 frames, if that wasn't enough my pc caught fire and burned my entire apartment building down. Thanks Sony. after I bought a new pc and apartment building I realised the game still ran like ♥♥♥♥, alas I was still able to play the game. after you load in you quickly learn that Varl is a wild animal and lives in bushes. after he jump-scares you by coming out of the bush you'll realise hes now going to follow you around like a lost dog.
This is just one problem, you will not be able to predict the games story, like seriously you could think ohhh i see whats going on to then being hit by a train at 200mph going the other direction. (This happens multiple times)
This games ending is surprisingly ♥♥♥♥ im not gonna lie. although most of the story is really good apart from the ungodly amount of yapping Aloy does throughout the entire game, sometimes i think she actually might be insane with the amount she talks to herself. The game will never beat zero dawn in terms of story, but i think it got pretty damm close.
Well done Bethesda!

They lost their DNA
I hate to be a hater, but HFW deserves it. They completely abandoned the core principles of Horizon Zero Dawn and replaced them with generic open world slop. Where HZD has you slow down, analyse the enemies that you're about to face, and set up an intricate series of traps and make a plan to defeat giant robot dinosaurs, HFW nerfs every ability in your arsenal to the point that no amount of planning matters.

The maximum amount of traps you can place is six, and that with every upgrade and wearing the right outfit, and the traps do almost no more damage than just arrows. pair that with enemies that have insanely high health, you really cant execute any sort of satisfying strategy.

They've added a number of new weapons, but too few of them are useful or practical, or,, you know, fun.

The cool new features they've advertised amount to little more than gimmicks. the glider is boring and slow, and is only occasionally useful; the grappling hook just pulls you up to predetermined hooks, and does so slowly and without any sort of fluidity; the new underwater sections dont really have...anything to do.

the climbing is incredibly awkward, with way too much time having to backtrack on cliffs because Aloy won't take the next handhold for no discernible reason. plus a whole lot of awkward bumping into the environment.

all that comes packaged with a whole lot of bugs and grinding and searching for minor stat upgrades.

absolutely fantastic world-building and out of this world graphics, but they cant make up for the lacklustre gameplay.

If you loved HZD, I'd wait until its on a hella good sale before spending any sort of money on this

PS: Don't listen to the losers crying about male erasure or that the game is full of powerful women who spend their time hating on men or any of that jazz. all the characters are EQUALLY lifeless and poorly written

If you enjoyed the first game you will enjoy this one too. It's pretty much a direct upgrade from H:ZD. I do have a lot of criticism for the game, but most of it is minor and I would give the game a solid 85/100.

- At first, I was sceptical about the story, it starts off slow, but it ended up growing on me. Thought it would be very hard to follow up on H:ZD story, and while I did like H:ZD story more, this one was also pretty decent.
- The final boss of the Burning Shores DLC is incredible.
- Repetitive open world content from previous game has more variety, making it fun. This is especially the case for tallnecks and cauldrons, with each changing up the formula just enough to make exploring each cauldron and overriding each tallneck a fun experience.
- New machine enemies that are fun to fight and the fights feel and look really cool.
- Most side quests either offer a small story or change the world around the player, or both. Not to be confused with errands though, they are, well, errands.
- Difficulty can be changed at any time (Except on ultra hard) and enemy difficulty can be set separately from player damage difficulty
- Easy loot option and loot animation cancelling option (either pick up with animation, without animation or by just walking over). Easy loot very nice QoL settings that doesn't destroy enemy components that are still attached to them during their death.
- Puzzles and jumping puzzles aren't exactly hard but still satisfying and mostly not repetitive.
- The new weapon skills and weapon types are really nice and offer great variety.

- Wish that more actions that you do had more impact on the world, such as clearing out human enemy camps.
- I really hate how every conversation with every stranger basically begins with them saying something along the lines of: "Oh you're the saviour Nora with the <description of Aloys hair> that <one of the amazing things you did> maybe you can help me with something." I guess the NPCs want you to have a god complex.
- Too many of the side quests begin with "My <family member> went to <activity> and hasn't returned back, help!"
- Fighting human enemies is still as boring as in the first game and their AI is pretty stupid.
- Parkour can sometimes be pretty frustrating, but I assume if you play with a controller it should not be a problem.
- The stash is basically a storage that items go to when your inventory is full. I don't see the point of it. You can find a stash pretty much everywhere, just let me carry all of the items on me.
- Can only skip time in shelters, not by campfires. To skip time you have to get to a campfire, teleport to a shelter, skip time, teleport back to the first campfire and continue.
- Melee combo system is just bad and should not have been in the game in the first place. It doesn't really work when you're up against multiple enemies and 1 attack from them cancels your whole 5 input combo. Besides, who wants to learn melee combos?
- Recovering from being knocked down to the ground takes what feels like a lifetime.
- Can't cancel animations such as melee attack or climbing. When you accidentally start climbing in the middle of the combat you have to wait for the animation of starting to climb to end, then you can drop off and then you have to wait for the animation of the dropping to play out.
- Sometimes an interaction with a character is a cutscene which can be skipped with 1 button, sometimes, it's just dialogue and you have to skip each individual line of dialogue and sometimes it's just unskippable. This is mainly an issue when you're going for 100% achievements and have to beat the game an additional 2x on NG+.
- Acquisition of NG+ items is stupid, if you're going for 100% just don't do any side quests on normal game and wait for NG+.
- Story spoiler: The story revolves around getting the GAIA subordinate functions to restore the climate. Then, the Far Zeniths show up, you kill them, and that's the end of the story. No more mentions of the climate and if it's recovering or if you ever get Hephaestus back after the final mission.
- And finally, my biggest problem with the game, the coil system. In H:ZD the weapon coils, or mods, would be dropped randomly by machines. You could farm legendary coils from the hardest enemies. In this game, each coil has a specific place where to obtain it. There is a +15 crit chance and +15 crit damage legendary coil that you get from the first mission of the Burning Shores DLC. Once every playthrough. Legendary weapons have 5 coil slots. Thats 5 playthroughs of the story and the first mission of the Burning Shores. Sure, you don't need all of this even on ultra hard difficulty. But I definitely would have wanted to see the crits I could have pulled off with that build.

Base game 9/10 DLC (Burning Shores) 10/10

TL,DR: Forbidden West is a game of two halves, the first one, gameplay, is just as sublime as the first game. Hunting machines is always fun, and the multiple different weapons one can use to solve the same problem makes this game infinitely better. The second one, the story, is underwhelming. There’s plenty of factors that play into this, but the main two are the lack of a true antagonist and pacing. You can do the entirety of act 2 at your leisure, neither of the antagonists will pose problems to Alloy like the eclipse/ Hades did in the last game, and the story focus every dramatic bit to its final act, leaving the pacing quite unbalanced. This is a game one should buy if they played the first one, and probably get on a sale. 7/10

Gameplay
Very little has changed from HZD, thus I’ll be short. It is still one of the most satisfying games to play. Hunting machines are as fun as ever, although some machine combos can get frustrating at times. The biggest annoyance is with the exploration and puzzles, Forbidden west puzzles have one solution, yet three different solutions that look plausible without the focus. This made me give up on environmental puzzles for the entirety of the game, as I rather not keep looking this beautiful graphics through the focus.

Performance:
Game runs fine, didn’t drop out of 60 FPS once with a 7800XT + R5 5600X 32 GB RAM on ultra, 3440x1440 (21:9). One of the best optimized ports I’ve come across, and just as impressive graphically as the first game.
Story (this will contain spoilers)

The premise of Forbidden west is that despite our victory in the previous game, the lack of Gaia has made its subfunctions lose control, and create essentially a blight in the land, with infertile soil, hostile climate conditions that will end life on planet. Alloy, as the clone of Sobeck, is the only person who can access the old zero dawn facilities to find a Gaia backup and reboot the terraforming system. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is Mass Effect Andromeda.

It goes far beyond than only the premise, plenty of plot points match, Beta another Sobeck clone acts as the Ryder twin, who also gets herself kidnapped at the end of act 2 and arguably, a similar ending. This is hardly the first time the Horizon games have done this, HZD has its fair share of similar elements to Dragon Age on the current earth narrative, from the end of act 1 to Sylens being what amounts to discount Solas. Once more this meant that, personally, I was not caught by surprise by quite a few of the plot points, removing a sizable part of its impact.

That said, this is a good take on that narrative. A lot has to do with Alloy being a much better character than Ryder, and so is her journey. A competent person who needs to learn to share the burden is a far more endearing journey than nepotism places you in a bad spot. One empathizes with Alloy’s journey, her challenges and the weight of her knowledge. Her character has evolved to become far more cunning than when we last saw her and it is somewhat of a joy to play as her.

This game had the challenge of making you interested in the current world, as the first one rode on the Zero Dawn project. And it sort of rises to the occasion, most of the new tribes are interesting, and the narrative has a rather clever angle of culture being defined by how they interact with the old-world ruins or data.
The problems of this narrative stem all from a core issue: the lack of a true antagonist. Neither Sylens nor the Zeniths rise to the occasion, as both are missing from the entirety of act II, and with no subordinates to deal with. This impacts both the pacing, as everything is dumped on the player in the last act, and the themes of the narrative.

The narrative seems to be about how one must learn to share the burden and accept the different cultures if you go by Alloy, she is running away from her friends, not accepting any help, trying to barge through the gates of a diplomatic mission, and she ends saving the Tenakth and shouting for the winds for help against nemesis. But there’s no such thing as a foil to challenge that, the Zeniths fall as they have no allies, but they are barely present, and Tilda’s obsession with Elizabeth is hardly aligned with the story. Regala could’ve worked if Hekaro was a questionable leader, but as he is mostly a bland okay leader, her goal of returning to war is just shortsighted and clearly wrong.

Finally, Sylens is the most disappointing, as he ends up doing the same thing as the last game, Regala’s rebels are the eclipse from the last game, but not as connected to the story because there’s no Hades. It is not like it was easy to avoid this, as it stems from last game twist, Sylens threat level in taking Hades is too vague. In HZD, the issue with the twist was how predictable it was (coming from Inquisition), but now, it seems they borrowed a great twist with no plans to follow up with it.

The companions are another part that doesn’t quite work. As they spend most of the time in the base and said base is not required to access the open world, like a Ship or Camp, you barely interact with them. Their individual missions don’t push the story in exploring the main theme or branch of it.

The exception to this is Beta. Here both her and Alloy hold themselves to an impossible standard, Alloy to Elizabeth and Beta to Alloy, which they see as a perfect role model. This leads to Alloy to throw all her frustration onto Beta, who herself cannot gain a once of confidence, and is ball of nerves, due to her past experience with the Zeniths. Their dynamic essentially worsen the problem, while Varl tries, but fails to help. When it reaches the boiling point, their growth comes from the shared experience it becomes one of the best moments in the narrative.

The Burning Shores: (8/10)
The DLC fixes most of the problems discussed above. Londra is a clear antagonist and Seyka, present in the whole narrative, is a character that gets development. She is actually the centre of the emotional core, as it is her sister missing. Alloy’s challenge of interacting with someone, whom she clearly has feelings towards, and the knowledge of what’s to come is certainly an interesting idea. While thematically it doesn’t go much beyond cult bad, it is a narrative that flows much better.

It brings, however, a point regarding Alloy. The Horizon games must either make her a character in which the player has more input, akin to Sheppard/Geralt, or make her more into Nathan Drake. There’s no reason for in the final scene to be a player choice, the entire narrative is built for that moment to be a yes.

Conclusion:

While this review might sound harsh, and it was, it is mostly because the first game was truly special. I think Forbiden West is one of those cases of unplanned sequel, the first game didn’t really leave much room to follow up, and now the eventual third game is in a better place, despite likely going for a tried and tested narrative motif.

Take the first Horizon and just made it better! Story is excellent and moves a good pace!

Only issue is, set your key bindings before playing but other than that, cannot wait for the next one!

Amazing game... Its only flaw is that it's unnecessarily WOKE!!!! Why would you do this?!!? Almost every single man is portrayed as a weak, stupid, loser.... Which, I really wouldn't mind, but the premise of the game is based on hunters and tribes... yet, almost every single clan is ruled by a woman who looks down on weak men. I don't know... It's just tiresome seeing this repeat over and over again, as you progress in the story...

Well, this game is mediocre in every way. I didn't like the zero and I honestly don't know why the hell I bought this one. they're both very similar, and overall, if you liked the zero below, you'll probably like this one too.

the positive points:
- the graphics are really beautiful, perhaps this is the most beautiful game I have in my library.

the negative points:
- not very interesting story
- repetitive missions, practically all missions revolve around the same things: go to an npc, get a mission and they will send you away, there you will have to fight with machines and/or get an item, return to the npc and receive the reward is always something like this or variations of it, the main missions are that added to the exploration, better than the first game but still very boring.
- combat just doesn't appeal to me. you have to keep removing components from the machines, which seems fun at first but becomes boring towards the end of the game, the hitboxes are strange and don't work properly, this means that on higher difficulties every fight is hell.
- the characters are bland and have no personality.
- there is an almost absence of a soundtrack, honestly if there was one I didn't notice it.
- there will be a sequel, instead of focusing on new IP these Sony companies only focus on maintaining games of this type and making remakes


conclusions:

There are some much better games out there for you to buy, this is one that I don't think is worth it, but if you liked the first game you'll almost certainly like this one.