Horizon Forbidden West: A Personal and Biased Review

[deldoomgun]

TLDR

 

Fun: 6/10

Difficulty: 5/10

Grind: 7/10

Time taken: 85 hours

Playthroughs needed to get all trophies: 2 to be the absolute minimum, but highly recommend 3

 

Detailed thoughts and opinions

 

Bit of a mixed feeling with this one. I wasn't a huge fan of the series despite many praises I've heard of it. The only reason I played Forbidden West was I heard that you can do a save file transfer to collect two platinum trophies for the effort of one. I started playing but then I fell asleep while still in the middle of the prologue mission. Wasn't a good sign at the start of this journey.

 

As I continued playing, I somehow felt a lot of elements of the game is becoming a cliché to me. First off, I don't quite like how Aloy explains to the player that the world is about to die and she's the only one that can save the world. This feels really boring to me because there are already millions and millions of stories where the protagonist is portrayed to be the only person that has any chance of saving the world. This plot point is more than a few decades old. The way the story gets presented on screen and the in-game dialogue also feels very staged, and orchestrated and intentionally using real life office environment acceptable vocabularies.

 

Story aside, the game design is way too user friendly. Almost at any given moment, Aloy will talk to herself saying things like “Maybe I should climb that ledge” “I think I should try find another path”. Whenever there is a companion NPC that joins you on your mission, the NPC will take this role and say things like “Maybe you can finally open the door now that you’ve got the key” or ”there’s a wheel over there, try turn it”. That’s making it way too obvious to the player, to the point that I feel like the game designers are presuming anyone playing this game has either never played a single video game his entire life, or they assume that we only have cognitive abilities of a 5 year old, so they need to turn every character in the game into Captain Obvious. Throughout the entire campaign I feel like I’m only doing exactly what the game pin points me to do, and it somehow starts to feel tedious.

 

I couldn’t really enjoy the game until I’m almost done with the story where I start to get some higher level weapons. It was the late game machine hunt (for their body parts to upgrade the most powerful gear in the game) that I was genuinely having fun. Because by then I’m actually doing things based on my own choice and decision, not doing exactly what the NPCs (or Aloy herself) explicitly tells me to do. Unfortunately, the fun didn’t last long when I started to read more details about the three DLC trophies.

 

As with most other supermassive open world games, Forbidden West has many side quests / things to do outside the main story campaign. A summary of all these things to do can be tracked in the statistics page, that also gives you a percentage of your overall completion. For the sake of base game trophies and the platinum, you should only need to do about 50% - 55% of everything the game has to offer. The story only makes up 30% of all the contents the game has to offer. One of the DLC trophies “Obtained all new game + rewards” is basically asking you to complete the game to almost 80%. There are two layers to this problem. First, everything you did on your 1st playthrough doesn’t count. You MUST start a second playthrough and play it to the point of completing almost 80% of all contents. What ever you’ve done in the first playthrough you are most likely going have to do it again. The bigger problem is, you also need to beat the game on Ultra hard. Unlike your first playthrough, if you start a second playthrough on Ultra hard, the option to change difficulty mid game is completed removed. You cannot change difficulty forever, and the only way to make another change, is if you complete your second playthrough AND THEN start a third playthrough, which is when you can finally choose something else other than Ultra Hard.

 

This leaves you with the two possible choices: Start a second playthrough on Ultra Hard, play it until you hit 80% total game completion. The other option is, play Ultra Hard for story only, and then start another third playthrough to grind the NG+ rewards on an easier difficulty setting.

 

This feels like a massive dick move to trophy hunters, and even for those that doesn’t care about trophies, if someone has already played the game since day one first launch, and they completed the game to 100%, now the developers are asking them to do almost everything again to unlock the new game + gears. That’s also a dick move to non trophy hunters.

 

At this point I can’t wait until I’m over and done with this game. At least I believe I’ve made the best possible choice of doing a third playthrough instead of trying to complete the game to 80% all on Ultra Hard, which would be a total nightmare, as a lot of these side quests or trials are much harder than anything within the story campaign. I end up with the following completion rates: 55% for the first playthrough, 30% for the second playthrough (Ultra Hard story only), and 45% for the third playthrough to collect NG+ gears. Note that I actually didn't even complete the story for a third time. I only did around 7 or 8 story missions on the third playthrough before getting what I need. I just need to collect champion tokens, which are award for doing almost any main quests / side quests / trials / races / cauldrons / rebel camps / relic ruines etc in the game starting from NG+, and these tokens are used to trade for the new game plus gears needed for the trophy. Finishing a story quest only gives you 2 champion tokens, and the story quests can take quite a while to do. On the other hand, killing everything in a Rebel Camp will give you 3 champion tokens, and it doesn't even take as long as a story quest to do. Some side quests, such as the gauntlet run races, can be done in about less than five minutes (if the run was successful) and for winning these races you also get 2 champion tokens. If you having the Sun Wing flying mount then simply fly on top of a tallneck to effortlessly hack their brains and you also get 2 champion tokens for it. At that point I realised that doing the story campaign is actually the least effective way to collect champion tokens, when you compare the amount of time and effort you need to put in, versus the amount of token you receive.

 

Safe to say I am not totally satisfied with this journey into the Forbidden West. But I have to admit, although I didn’t like the game personally, it’s actually not a bad game. In fact I would say it’s a very well made game. It’s got amazing graphics and the basic mechanics are well implemented, the variety of weapons and traps leaves a lot of room for players to be inventive as well. Then why wasn’t I having as much fun as I hoped to?

 

Although Forbidden West is an adequately made game, it’s made according to an existing gaming archetype, and it is that archetype itself I’m no longer a huge fan of. I hear some people calling it the UbiSoft formula.

 

For me these days its almost like Soulsborne or nothing. FromSoftware please hurry up and release Armored Souls VI: The Fires of Rykard.

Edited December 25, 2022 by deldoomgun

[alexandra-jane09]

Diving into a sequel of a game or series, that continues a story is never a good idea particularly when you state that you are not a fan [ of the whole action-adventure open world thing ] which suggests that you are already prejudiced thus biased against the narrative and its gameplay.  If you had played the first game, you would know that Aloy IS the saviour of humanity and essentially the new world created for them after the previous world [ our world ] perished due to a system glitch in the AI of machines created for warfare by a man named Ted Faro [ voiced by English Actor, Lloyd Owen ] and his company, where by they defaulted to using biomass as fuel meaning that not just human's but basically the entire biological world were essentially food,  the entire world and our earths atmosphere, the very air that we breath would be eaten and we basically die.   When Elizabet Sobeck an Environmental scientist of which Aloy is a copy of, decided the only way for earth to survive  somehow, she created a computer AI called Gaia [ named after the Greek Goddess of Creation ie Mother Nature ] of course Ted wasn't happy about her solution, he started to become paranoid by then because of his mistakes.  Gaia was made with sub AI to recreate a terraforming system to basically "replant" the world by creating robot machines that re-established the eco system, not only that  Gaia would clone human's from DNA, and give them an entire database to learn the history and culture of our times, but they would have a new world to live in and grow by the time the atmosphere was breathable.  Here is where things went wrong, not with the AI but with Faro, the man didn't like the idea that the new "human's" would learn our history [ good, bad and ugly ] and also his part in the destruction of our world [ the world that once was ], so in his paranoid delusional state, he completely destroyed the AI and purged its hard drive that had that database, Apollo [ named after the Greek God of the Sun ] and then murdered all of the work force after they got angry at this cultural elimination.  This made the new human's revert back to our hunter, gatherer tribal "stone age man" state and they were also not aware the machines that they began to hunt for resources were there to keep their world alive.   I cannot really go into an entire games story, you really need to play the first game, to know what's going on.  I just couldn't get into the Souls games, I tried Bloodborne, but spent most of the time dying to all the people attacking me, the setting was interesting, but got bored with that and I tried Mortal Shell but couldn't get into that either.  Souls games aren't my thing, the same way I don't play FPS as they would make me motion sick.   I think if you HAD played the first Horizon, even if you still didn't like the series as much or its formula,  that you would have had a better understanding of the story and its gameplay when it came to its sequel. 

[deldoomgun]

7 hours ago, alexandra-jane09 said:

Diving into a sequel of a game or series, that continues a story is never a good idea particularly when you state that you are not a fan [ of the whole action-adventure open world thing ] which suggests that you are already prejudiced thus biased against the narrative and its gameplay.  If you had played the first game, you would know that Aloy IS the saviour of humanity and essentially the new world created for them after the previous world [ our world ] perished due to a system glitch in the AI of machines created for warfare by a man named Ted Faro [ voiced by English Actor, Lloyd Owen ] and his company, where by they defaulted to using biomass as fuel meaning that not just human's but basically the entire biological world were essentially food,  the entire world and our earths atmosphere, the very air that we breath would be eaten and we basically die.   When Elizabet Sobeck an Environmental scientist of which Aloy is a copy of, decided the only way for earth to survive  somehow, she created a computer AI called Gaia [ named after the Greek Goddess of Creation ie Mother Nature ] of course Ted wasn't happy about her solution, he started to become paranoid by then because of his mistakes.  Gaia was made with sub AI to recreate a terraforming system to basically "replant" the world by creating robot machines that re-established the eco system, not only that  Gaia would clone human's from DNA, and give them an entire database to learn the history and culture of our times, but they would have a new world to live in and grow by the time the atmosphere was breathable.  Here is where things went wrong, not with the AI but with Faro, the man didn't like the idea that the new "human's" would learn our history [ good, bad and ugly ] and also his part in the destruction of our world [ the world that once was ], so in his paranoid delusional state, he completely destroyed the AI and purged its hard drive that had that database, Apollo [ named after the Greek God of the Sun ] and then murdered all of the work force after they got angry at this cultural elimination.  This made the new human's revert back to our hunter, gatherer tribal "stone age man" state and they were also not aware the machines that they began to hunt for resources were there to keep their world alive.   I cannot really go into an entire games story, you really need to play the first game, to know what's going on.  I just couldn't get into the Souls games, I tried Bloodborne, but spent most of the time dying to all the people attacking me, the setting was interesting, but got bored with that and I tried Mortal Shell but couldn't get into that either.  Souls games aren't my thing, the same way I don't play FPS as they would make me motion sick.   I think if you HAD played the first Horizon, even if you still didn't like the series as much or its formula,  that you would have had a better understanding of the story and its gameplay when it came to its sequel. 

 

 

I'll try to avoid what I've already said above as much as possible.

 

1) I never stated I don't like the entire genre of open world action games. I just said not a huge fan of the series. That means Horizon games only. I played some other open world action games like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Assassins Creed, Infamous, Prototype, Just Cause etc.

 

2) I never said I don't understand the story. I just said I didn't like the story. The world itself isn't bad, and I feel like it's a nice backdrop that would be ideal environment for a video game. I just don't like how the protagonist Aloy is the one and only world saviour. I didn't said I don't understand why she is the world saviour. I just don't like the fact that she is the world saviour. Because the protagonist being the sole world saviour is the type of story for 10 year olds, and it has been done a million times already. I understood the story, I just don't like it. But I like the game world itself lol.

 

3) I got bored with the game mainly because of two things, how I don't like the protagonist being the sole world saviour, and also how the game simply holds your hands throughout the entire journey. Aloy will keep on talking to herself non stop, and sometimes NPCs will also talk to Aloy, but in both instances it's just Guerrilla Games explicitly telling you exactly what to do. I don't like how the developers think that I have no capacity of thinking for myself, when it's rather obvious on what needs to be done. 

 

4) If I have played Zero Dawn I don't think I will ever play Forbidden West, because now that I'm done with Forbidden West I sure as hell not going to play Zero Dawn. Don't get me wrong I never said Horizon (ZD or FW) is bad, I played FW and I did gave it some credit. I said basic mechanics of the games are well implemented, thats basic functions like trying to move around the map normally without glitching out of the map, battle system is well made, graphics are pretty good etc. Unfortunately it's just not my type of game.

Edited December 25, 2022 by deldoomgun

[Burritoprime]

Why not post these personal reviews as a status update? It just cluster the game forums with trivial information.

[deldoomgun]

45 minutes ago, Sunnyburrito said:

Why not post these personal reviews as a status update? It just cluster the game forums with trivial information.

 

If you can't even say what you want to say then whats the point of a forum.

[Burritoprime]

5 minutes ago, deldoomgun said:

 

If you can't even say what you want to say then whats the point of a forum.

Never said you couldn't talk or open posts just to do it in the right place.

[deldoomgun]

34 minutes ago, Sunnyburrito said:

Never said you couldn't talk or open posts just to do it in the right place.

 

Also I disagree with you calling my review trivial information. Main reason is what I said about the DLC trophies. I read many other users on this forum, as well as the Powerpyx trophy guide, where they are all suggesting to do the following:

 

Second playthrough on an difficulty just for grinding champion tokens, then Third playthrough on Ultra Hard story only.

 

I did it the other way around. I did second playthrough on Ultra Hard story only, and then the third playthrough on any difficulty for collecting champion tokens. Reason why I think that's better is:

 

With the Powerpyx guide, it's mandatory to fully complete all story quests a total of three times. If you switch the order like I did, then you don't need to complete the story for a third time, as story missions isn't the most cost effective choice for collecting champion tokens.

 

Also, with the Powerpyx guide, once you're done with unlocking all trophies, you will be stuck on Ultra Hard on your third playthrough with no option to change difficulty unless you start a fourth playthrough. Simply switch the order around like what I did, and you will still be free to change to any difficulty while still at third playthrough. This means you don't have to force yourself to play the burning shores DLC on Ultra Hard, or having to enter a fourth playthrough to play the Burning Shores on anything else besides Ultra Hard. When it releases.

 

I believe this information can benefit the community hence shouldn't be considered as trivial.

Edited December 25, 2022 by deldoomgun

[alexandra-jane09]

I understand your feelings over the "holding ones hand" in the game, there were times when games didn't do that, you needed to work it out yourself like in the classic PS1 Tomb Raider's for example, those never told you where to go.  

[AngelicaK92]

On 12/25/2022 at 5:56 AM, deldoomgun said:

TLDR

 

Fun: 6/10

Difficulty: 5/10

Grind: 7/10

Time taken: 85 hours

Playthroughs needed to get all trophies: 2 to be the absolute minimum, but highly recommend 3

 

Detailed thoughts and opinions

 

Bit of a mixed feeling with this one. I wasn't a huge fan of the series despite many praises I've heard of it. The only reason I played Forbidden West was I heard that you can do a save file transfer to collect two platinum trophies for the effort of one. I started playing but then I fell asleep while still in the middle of the prologue mission. Wasn't a good sign at the start of this journey.

 

As I continued playing, I somehow felt a lot of elements of the game is becoming a cliché to me. First off, I don't quite like how Aloy explains to the player that the world is about to die and she's the only one that can save the world. This feels really boring to me because there are already millions and millions of stories where the protagonist is portrayed to be the only person that has any chance of saving the world. This plot point is more than a few decades old. The way the story gets presented on screen and the in-game dialogue also feels very staged, and orchestrated and intentionally using real life office environment acceptable vocabularies.

 

Story aside, the game design is way too user friendly. Almost at any given moment, Aloy will talk to herself saying things like “Maybe I should climb that ledge” “I think I should try find another path”. Whenever there is a companion NPC that joins you on your mission, the NPC will take this role and say things like “Maybe you can finally open the door now that you’ve got the key” or ”there’s a wheel over there, try turn it”. That’s making it way too obvious to the player, to the point that I feel like the game designers are presuming anyone playing this game has either never played a single video game his entire life, or they assume that we only have cognitive abilities of a 5 year old, so they need to turn every character in the game into Captain Obvious. Throughout the entire campaign I feel like I’m only doing exactly what the game pin points me to do, and it somehow starts to feel tedious.

 

I couldn’t really enjoy the game until I’m almost done with the story where I start to get some higher level weapons. It was the late game machine hunt (for their body parts to upgrade the most powerful gear in the game) that I was genuinely having fun. Because by then I’m actually doing things based on my own choice and decision, not doing exactly what the NPCs (or Aloy herself) explicitly tells me to do. Unfortunately, the fun didn’t last long when I started to read more details about the three DLC trophies.

 

As with most other supermassive open world games, Forbidden West has many side quests / things to do outside the main story campaign. A summary of all these things to do can be tracked in the statistics page, that also gives you a percentage of your overall completion. For the sake of base game trophies and the platinum, you should only need to do about 50% - 55% of everything the game has to offer. The story only makes up 30% of all the contents the game has to offer. One of the DLC trophies “Obtained all new game + rewards” is basically asking you to complete the game to almost 80%. There are two layers to this problem. First, everything you did on your 1st playthrough doesn’t count. You MUST start a second playthrough and play it to the point of completing almost 80% of all contents. What ever you’ve done in the first playthrough you are most likely going have to do it again. The bigger problem is, you also need to beat the game on Ultra hard. Unlike your first playthrough, if you start a second playthrough on Ultra hard, the option to change difficulty mid game is completed removed. You cannot change difficulty forever, and the only way to make another change, is if you complete your second playthrough AND THEN start a third playthrough, which is when you can finally choose something else other than Ultra Hard.

 

This leaves you with the two possible choices: Start a second playthrough on Ultra Hard, play it until you hit 80% total game completion. The other option is, play Ultra Hard for story only, and then start another third playthrough to grind the NG+ rewards on an easier difficulty setting.

 

This feels like a massive dick move to trophy hunters, and even for those that doesn’t care about trophies, if someone has already played the game since day one first launch, and they completed the game to 100%, now the developers are asking them to do almost everything again to unlock the new game + gears. That’s also a dick move to non trophy hunters.

 

At this point I can’t wait until I’m over and done with this game. At least I believe I’ve made the best possible choice of doing a third playthrough instead of trying to complete the game to 80% all on Ultra Hard, which would be a total nightmare, as a lot of these side quests or trials are much harder than anything within the story campaign. I end up with the following completion rates: 55% for the first playthrough, 30% for the second playthrough (Ultra Hard story only), and 45% for the third playthrough to collect NG+ gears. Note that I actually didn't even complete the story for a third time. I only did around 7 or 8 story missions on the third playthrough before getting what I need. I just need to collect champion tokens, which are award for doing almost any main quests / side quests / trials / races / cauldrons / rebel camps / relic ruines etc in the game starting from NG+, and these tokens are used to trade for the new game plus gears needed for the trophy. Finishing a story quest only gives you 2 champion tokens, and the story quests can take quite a while to do. On the other hand, killing everything in a Rebel Camp will give you 3 champion tokens, and it doesn't even take as long as a story quest to do. Some side quests, such as the gauntlet run races, can be done in about less than five minutes (if the run was successful) and for winning these races you also get 2 champion tokens. If you having the Sun Wing flying mount then simply fly on top of a tallneck to effortlessly hack their brains and you also get 2 champion tokens for it. At that point I realised that doing the story campaign is actually the least effective way to collect champion tokens, when you compare the amount of time and effort you need to put in, versus the amount of token you receive.

 

Safe to say I am not totally satisfied with this journey into the Forbidden West. But I have to admit, although I didn’t like the game personally, it’s actually not a bad game. In fact I would say it’s a very well made game. It’s got amazing graphics and the basic mechanics are well implemented, the variety of weapons and traps leaves a lot of room for players to be inventive as well. Then why wasn’t I having as much fun as I hoped to?

 

Although Forbidden West is an adequately made game, it’s made according to an existing gaming archetype, and it is that archetype itself I’m no longer a huge fan of. I hear some people calling it the UbiSoft formula.

 

For me these days its almost like Soulsborne or nothing. FromSoftware please hurry up and release Armored Souls VI: The Fires of Rykard.

Fair assessment.