Horizon Zero Dawn introduced an amazing foundation to Guerrilla Games’ post-post-apocalyptic world, one overrun with robotic creatures as stunning as seeing a brachiosaurus for the first time in Jurassic Park, centered around an instant PlayStation icon in Aloy, and layered with a surprising level of mystery, lore, and history. Following it up is no small feat, but after four hours of hands-on time with early portions of its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West is shaping up to be a fulfillment of all the promises made by its predecessor.
Zero Dawn was by no means a disappointing start, and in fact, was a hugely successful beginning for a new PlayStation franchise. But there were clear areas for refinement, and Guerrilla seems to have addressed nearly every one of them based on my time with Aloy’s new journey. Combat is more complex, exploration is more free, and the world is teeming with more intriguing life (both robotic and human) and meaningful things to do. The Forbidden West in all its glory still waits to be seen, but I’m not forbidden from telling you about so much of why it’s an adventure I can’t wait to embark on.
My time with Forbidden West didn’t start exactly where Aloy’s journey begins in the sequel - Guerrilla is still preserving plenty of secrets - but rather a little into her quest to find new answers, and maybe save humanity along the way.
“It's been six months since the events of Horizon Zero Dawn, and Aloy has noticed throughout the world that this Red Blight is encroaching everywhere. And this is a world-ending threat, and she has to find a way to stop it,” narrative director Ben McCaw said. “Where the game starts, there's a few things that we haven't talked about or shown you before that point.”
Forbidden West’s gameplay will feel immediately recognizable to players of Zero Dawn, but refined in nearly every way. (And new players shouldn’t have too much trouble catching up - Horizon’s mechanic ideas are revealed over time, but with enough new twists to not play out as rote, elongated tutorials.) The first big question I had when jumping in, after having seen past gameplay showcases for Forbidden West, was how much freer exploration actually would be. Zero Dawn did many things right, but its climbing navigation was one of its most frustrating limitations, and I’m sure I’m not the only player who spent time jumping haphazardly over geometry to try to get Aloy to climb up a rockface she wasn’t necessarily supposed to.
In playing Forbidden West, it was immediately apparent (and appreciable) just how much more of the world is scalable. Rather than just brief, sporadic sections with convenient handholds placed by the tribes, so much more of the rocky terrain is built to be climbed and explored in a volume much more akin to nsomething like the Assassin's Creed series. Not every single inch of every bit of terrain is meant to be climbed, but there's certainly a lot more at your disposal, and that is a HUGE relief. It makes exploration, whether to get to a destination or just to check out an area of intrigue, such a more natural, fulfilling experience.
It’s made better by an improved Focus, the detective mode of the Horizon world. The focus can be activated by a quick click of R3 to do a pulse scan around Aloy, revealing resources to pick up, as well as highlighting climbable parts of the world with yellow lines and markings. Just a few pulses will reveal how much more of the world is there to be climbed and not just be an obstacle in Aloy’s path, and that’s only good news.
But the Focus has also been upgraded in other ways. You can still scan a robotic foe and assess its various, detachable elements, but rather than having to scan slowly and precisely over a beast, you can use the D-Pad to, well, focus on each of these elements. You can also now tag a specific part of a robot, rather than just the whole thing itself. It’s small in the grand scheme of things, but it feels indicative of how Guerrilla seems to have examined every element of Horizon, kept what worked, but found clever ways to improve upon it.
Anyway, back to traversal. Another nice addition is the Pullcaster, a fancy sort of grappling hook that lets the player pull Aloy to harder to reach or further points. It’s even something that can be used in conjunction with the Shieldwing, a glider Aloy obtained near the end of my demo. Launching off a point, letting Aloy sore through the skies, and pullcasting to an interesting spot on a nearby cliff face creates a real degree of freedom missing in Zero Dawn’s movement. I only got to use these three in tandem for a bit, but they’re such a welcome change that should make navigating the sequel’s large map all the more rewarding.
New in Town
Speaking of rewarding, Forbidden West seems purpose-built to ensure that everything you do has more worthwhile and varied rewards. Deeper settlements is a core part of Forbidden West, and if my time in Chainscrape, the first one I came across, is any indication, there will be a lot for players to find, discover, and lose hours to.
Chainscrape, first and foremost, is a bustling little township that, while not meant to be anywhere as big as Zero Dawn’s metropolis Meridian, instantly felt more dynamic and bursting with life, and for good reason.
“We really wanted to listen to the fans and listen to our reviewers, and also based on our own internal feedback. And so there was a whole set of things we wanted to do with settlements, including general sense of them being more lifelike, better animations, better schedules for the NPCs, and also audio,” McCaw explained. “We really wanted to improve the sort of crowd audio in the sense that when you go into any given place in a settlement, it has its own kind of like audio personality. And we also have a situation where Aloy's going into the Forbidden West and encountering new tribes, specifically the Utaru and the Tenakth. And we really wanted to make sure those were as differentiated as possible, with NPCs doing things that they would only do in that tribe to give it that sense of life.”
The centerpoint of Chainscrape, a busy brewery, had so many cute, bespoke animations of characters sharing a pint, conversing, and more. But settlements aren’t going to just be full of NPCs you can only watch. There seem to be more sidequests, and worthwhile ones at that - one of the first I picked up not only introduced a pair of lovable crafters named Delah and Boomer, but finishing their quest by collecting some specific machine parts led me to acquire a brand new weapon type, an explosive Javelin Thrower.
“Generally speaking, if you do a side quest in Forbidden West, that's not the last you'll see of that NPC,” McCaw said. “And also, this is all woven into the story that we have talked about before, of Aloy, her companions, her evolution as a character, and really that question of how does she kind of learn to fit into the human race; starting as an outcast, becoming a savior, how does she really fit in with all of these tribes and all these people?”
But on top of more meaningful sidequests and little details that brought Chainscrape to life, there is a wider swath of side objectives I encountered in and out of town. There will be multiple melee fight pits throughout the world; there are Vista Points, in which Aloy must line up a vision on her focus with a location in the world (a more complex take on Zero Dawn's Vantage Points it seems), and Salvage Contracts, which tasks Aloy with hunting down specific machine parts in a longer quest for an incredible outfit. And look, in today’s open-world market, you can’t not have your own in-universe game like Gwent or Orlog. And Forbidden West's Machine Strike is shaping up to be a pretty damn entertaining one. It sees the player taking on opponents on a board made of various tiles representing different terrain, with an arsenal of carved machines going up against each other. Machines have different health, attack, and movement stats, and each type of terrain can have negative or positive impacts as you try to take out your opponent’s fleet. I only played a few tutorial missions, and there will be plenty more matches to play, game pieces to collect, and strategies to ascertain, but it already had its hooks in me, particularly thanks to little twists that adapt the real robot’s armor plating, the Overcharge ability, and more.
And all of these objectives don’t feel like one of any open world’s biggest potential problems - filler. Instead, McCaw explained how everything is built with more and better rewards in mind, whether they be new equipment, outfits, weapons, or key pieces of lore.