Horizon Forbidden West Review – Tweakers

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There it is finally, the game that shows what the PlayStation 5 has to offer. Since the release of Sony’s new console in November 2020, the same phrase has been repeated endlessly: the machine offers potential, but there is no game yet that really impresses. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart showed nice things, but is of course a very different game from the most acclaimed PlayStation titles such as Uncharted, The Last of Us, God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn. With Horizon Forbidden West, the latter game gets a successor and the PlayStation 5 has its first really big exclusive. At a time when Microsoft is trying to put the spotlight on Sony with acquisitions, it is very nice for the Japanese that the first really big exclusive game is also a direct hit.

Horizon Forbidden West is a direct sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn. The game starts with a short recap that shows what happened in that game, but that didn’t completely bring back all our memories. It might be advisable to look up a more extensive summary or, if you really have time to spare, just play Horizon Zero Dawn again before starting Forbidden West. Anyway, below we take a look at how Zero Dawn was put together, because not only the story plays a role in the new game. Many elements from the gameplay of that game also return in Horizon Forbidden West. The main character, Aloy, doesn’t need to get to know the world again and the game kind of assumes that the same applies to the player.

What happened in Horizon Zero Dawn?

Horizon Zero Dawn is set in the 31st century. The player takes on the role of Aloy, a red-haired girl who grew up exile from the Nora tribe. Humanity lived primitively, in a world where the traces of a more developed society are still visible. For example, parts of the landscape were filled by buildings and vehicles from our era, but then completely overgrown by nature. As it turned out, humanity perished about a thousand years earlier, when control over machines was lost. Taking the form of animals and dinosaurs, these machines were designed to perform all kinds of tasks for mankind, including keeping the peace, but they ultimately brought about the downfall of mankind. In an effort to save Earth’s future and give humanity a fresh start, a team of scientists led by Elisabet Sobeck developed the Zero Dawn project. That project should be able to shut down the machines and give humanity a new start by means of stored DNA samples. That would have to be handled by Gaia, the main system that had to reshape the world with the help of various subsystems.

Zero Dawn didn’t go as planned, though. That had several causes. Theodore Faro, a colleague of Sobeck, sabotaged Apollo, one of the subsystems. This led to the loss of all knowledge of mankind until its extinction, which also immediately explains that the new people on Earth lived many times more primitive than their thousand-year-old ancestors. Another subsystem, Hades, has since gone on to do its job of exterminating humanity once again if Zero Dawn’s results weren’t satisfactory. With the help of some other characters and tribes, Aloy battled Hades and the evil warriors under his rule, eventually ridding the world of the threat that Hades brought with it. There was no such thing as ‘that ends well, however. In expansion ‘Frozen Wilds’ it turned out that again a subsystem caused problems. This time it was Hephaestus, who built an army of murderous machines on his own. Aloy managed to defeat Hephaestus, but was immediately warned that Hephaestus was not gone. He had simply moved to another factory to make more machines there.

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