Shocking to no one I have been spending a lot of time over the last several days playing Horizon Forbidden West on the PlayStation 5. This is ultimately the game that sold me on upgrading my platform, because after experiencing it on PlayStation 4… I knew I wanted to go into this game with the best possible graphics I could. This is maybe the first game to come out so far that really makes it worth shelling out all of that money for the next generation of hardware. I never upgraded to the PS4 Pro, so honestly I was going to get a PS5 regardless… but now I finally have a game worthy of that system. This morning I am going to share some of my thoughts about the game and will try my best to do so in as spoiler free of a way as possible.
At it’s core… Horizon Forbidden West is everything that made the first game phenomenal… but improved upon. There is this almost uncanny valley experience of playing this game, because it plays like I remember the first game playing… even though pretty much all of the controls are tighter and more polished. It was shocking how fast my muscle memory came back upon picking up the controller and playing as Aloy once again. This was largely surprising in part because the last time I played through Horizon Zero Dawn, it was on the PC with Mouse and Keyboard and I was uncertain how quickly I would adapt to the more fiddling controller aiming. In short there has been nothing cumbersome about the experience of adapting to it, and to be honest there are so many new abilities that finding unique key binds for them might have been their own kind of fiddly.
The moment to moment gameplay is just as satisfying as I remember it being. Each encounter feels unique because of the way that combat works, and how you are trying to strategically separate parts from your “dinobot” prey. What is greatly improved this time around however is melee combat and your spear actually feels like a completely viable option even if you aren’t going down the path of “secret stabbing”. Combat for me is a dance of trying to whittle down the herd with careful strategic hits and then finally finishing off with my spear when it is time to “go loud”. There are so many new combat combos that do interesting things like allow you to flip up into the air and leap off of a target… giving you time to get some bullet time arrows shots off while flying backwards. As a result I find it very rare that I pass up combat, even though I have an inventory full of materials that I will likely never spend.
There are so many small quality of life improvements. In the first game when it came to climbing it was essentially a challenge to find all of the surfaces that were painted yellow and then move your way across them. This time around there is a “free climb” system, which looks significantly more natural but you can also just send out a pulse with your focus to get neon yellow glyphs indicating where the handholds are located. In the first game I found myself with the desire to constantly be trying to pick up everything in the world, but my bags filled extremely quickly and after awhile I stopped picking things up… even though I probably needed some of them. Now when you pick something up and you don’t have room in your bags, it “automagically” goes into your stash and you can restock from your stack with the press of a single button. If you need a single component to get that next upgrade, you can set a job as your main quest and the game will direct you towards where you can find that component. So many little things add up to a much better experience.
One of the big differences this time around is that the game expects you to go back to places you have already been before. There is almost a Metroidvania aspect to the game where instead of gating your access to weapons… the game is giving you special upgrades that give you new ways to interact with and traverse the large open world. One of your first items that you craft is a Pullcaster, which is part hookshot from Zelda and part winch giving you new ways to ascend vertically as well as solve puzzles. Very quickly you also enter into a battle with someone that has an old world shield, that they use to glid into battle… and while you damage the shield in the encounter you can still use it as a means of traversal. As you move through the world there are various places that you find that the game indicates are a “blocked passage” that at some point you will get some item that will open up. The end result feels very Zelda like and I am curious what some of the upgrades will ultimately allow me to do.
I thought I would take a minute to answer a few questions I have gotten with some of my posts about this game.
Do You Need to Play Horizon Zero Dawn?
In the strictest sense of that question… no. The game does quite a bit of catching up to where the story was left off… but the game is going to ASSUME you played the first game to completion. This could lead to some really weird moments where characters inexplicably know you and don’t really spend any time explaining who they are. Additionally I would say that yes you should probably stop whatever you are doing now and play through Horizon Zero Dawn because it is one of the best games period. If you jumped straight to Forbidden West you would be robbing yourself of a really great gaming experience. Aloy is legitimately one of those characters that we will remember for decades to come and will be placed among the pantheon of Mario, Link, Master Chief, and Sonic etc.
Do You Need to Play The Frozen Wilds DLC?
At first my answer was going to be no here… but again Horizon Forbidden West assumes that you have played everything from the first game to completion, including the DLC. The very early game did not appear to be drawing heavily on the DLC at all, so I thought folks were going to be safe here. However a sequence of events that happened recently in my play-through of HFW… tells me that the game is absolutely going to delve into the impact of the events of Frozen Wilds. It is going to be beneficial to have played through that content so you can walk into Forbidden West knowing some things. That is about all I can say there without delving into spoiler territory.
Should I Just Wait for PC?
I think ultimately this is a question you are going to need to answer for yourself, namely whether or not you have access to a PlayStation 4 or 5. Roughly 3 and a half years passed between the release of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 and its eventual release on PC. Now there are a bunch of things in play there, specifically that Sony was not really habitually releasing first party titles on the PC in 2017. Since then they have been more focused on getting games on the PC, but doing it extremely slowly. Example we still do not have the Uncharted collection out on PC even though it has been announced for almost a year that it was going to be a thing. I would expect a two to three year wait here, with the bare minimum being a year of platform exclusivity on the PlayStation. If you feel like you can wait, then by all means it will almost assuredly end up releasing on the PC at some point. Being completely honest I am probably going to buy it when it comes out again and play through it again.
Do I Need a PS5 or is my PS4 Good Enough?
This game is phenomenal on the PS5 and the graphics just look so damned good in brilliant 4K HDR. However if you have not taken the leap to 4k, or don’t even really care about it… I cannot see how you would not still have a good experience playing this on the PS4. I linked a Digital Foundry video comparing the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game and honestly… I am pretty impressed that they managed to make the game look as good as they did for the previous generation. If it were just a case of going to the store, plunking down some money, and walking away with a PlayStation 5… then maybe I would say wait it out until you can pick one up. However that is not even a reasonable statement because in the current situation we have found ourselves in for the last two years… it is bordering on impossible to reliably get one without overpaying by a large margin. I think players who choose to play this on the PlayStation 4 are going to have a perfectly enjoyable experience.
I am roughly twenty hours into the game and I am guesstimating that I have maybe seen a fifth of the game world… maybe even less? Sony estimates that I am 21% through the game, and recent events have lead me to understand a bit more about the path before me. I could be completely wrong though and it ultimately will depend on how much fiddling about and trophy chasing that I end up doing in the end. This is probably easily going to be a hundred hour game for me, so expect me to probably talk quite a bit more about it in the coming weeks. For this first post however I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts and try my best to keep things spoiler free.
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