Horizon Forbidden West Review

As a rendering achievement this is close to the top of its generation. Underwater San Francisco, the Nevada sequences and the sheer material detail on the machines are outrageous, and the animation on faces in main story scenes is a real leap from the first game. Combat improved where it needed to: the valour surges give builds a shape, component stripping matters more, and the new machine designs demand different openings rather than a bigger bow.

The shieldwing and pullcaster fix the traversal complaint. What is not fixed is the noise. The map is stacked with icons in the way the genre had already begun to abandon, every puzzle is narrated by Aloy telling you the solution seconds after you see it, and the story spends its middle third on a faction conflict that stalls the interesting science fiction underneath. Side character conversations still fall off a cliff in animation quality compared to the main line. Enormously accomplished, and exhausting in a way the first game was not.