{"id":23936,"date":"2022-04-16T22:52:12","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T12:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23936"},"modified":"2022-11-16T22:53:10","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T12:53:10","slug":"horizon-forbidden-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23936","title":{"rendered":"Horizon Forbidden West"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"horizon-poster\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Developer:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Guerilla Games
\nPublisher:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Sony Interactive Entertainment
\nPlatform:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Playstation 5<\/p>\n

H<\/span>orizon Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0is a welcome arrival for Playstation 5 owners.\u00a0\u00a0The first twelve months since the system\u2019s launch have been hampered by the effects of covid on both the availability of the console itself and also the production pipeline of games that feel \u201cnext gen\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0For now, the availability of games that feel like they sufficiently represent a technological leap over PS4 games is slim to say the least.<\/p>\n

Happily,\u00a0Horizon Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0is just the sort of game to make a new PS5 owner feel good about their new hardware.\u00a0\u00a0Guerilla\u2019s open-world fantasy adventure game feels like a \u201cbigger is better\u201d sort of sequel to\u00a0Horizon Zero Dawn<\/em>\u00a0with a larger, more expansive world to explore than the PS4 original and an impressive list of expanded features including more weapons, more side quests, new enemy types and an expanded moveset for the heroine Aloy.<\/p>\n

Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0picks up a few months after the events of the first game.\u00a0\u00a0A mysterious blight is spreading across the world, killing all life forms and threatening the existence of the surviving tribes.\u00a0\u00a0Aloy seeks out a new form of GAIA to restore balance to the planet\u2019s biosphere.<\/p>\n

This quest takes Aloy westward where she encounters new tribes of humans, both friendly and hostile.\u00a0\u00a0To complicate matters, Aloy appears to be betrayed by her former ally Sylens, who has stolen HADES, a powerful technology that if enacted, is capable of creating an extinction-level event.<\/p>\n

On paper, there\u2019s little I can find to fault\u00a0Horizon<\/em>\u00a0Forbidden West.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>I think the game smartly expands upon its foundations in a way that should satisfy most fans of the original.\u00a0\u00a0The scope of the new features is impressive and graphically, the game is exactly the sort of showcase that is sought after to highlight the wonders of a brand-new, premium games console.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"forbidden-west-scene\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I have a pretty major chip on my shoulder for\u00a0Horizon Forbidden West<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0Firstly, after roughly ten hours of play, I encountered one of my most severe bugs I have ever encountered in over thirty years of gaming.\u00a0\u00a0The bug not only wiped my entire progress for this game, it rendered my PS5 unusable until it was restored to factory settings, effectively wiping all my save files I had carefully transferred across from my PS4 (I\u2019m not a PS+ subscriber so they weren\u2019t backed up in the cloud).\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s hard not to begrudge a game for causing me to lose several hundred hours of gameplay and I\u2019m more than a little miffed that my save files for games I completed including\u00a0GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2<\/em>, all the PS4\u00a0Yakuza<\/em>\u00a0games and countless others, are all gone.<\/p>\n

Starting over and playing through\u00a0Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0a second time, I also found myself casting a more critical eye over what I was playing.<\/p>\n

Although technically polished, I often can\u2019t help but feel bored by\u00a0Forbidden West<\/em>, which seems criminal for a game about exploring a post-apocalyptic world filled with giant robot dinosaurs.\u00a0\u00a0I find Aloy as a character to be rather two-dimensional and uninteresting.\u00a0\u00a0She is a warrior woman who saved the world once already and yet everyone she comes across in this game seems unwilling to help her unless she completes some sort of mundane chore for them.\u00a0\u00a0And too frequently she feels like a doormat for these demands.\u00a0\u00a0Compared to other prestige AAA productions from Sony, I find it hard to imagine Kratos or Joel agreeing to fetching a bunch of rabbit pelts (or some equally tedious fetch request) just so that a gatekeeper will agree to let them pass.<\/p>\n

The heightened production quality that\u00a0Horizon<\/em>\u00a0has also raised my expectations for the acting performances and cinematography and once again\u00a0Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0feels disappointingly flat.\u00a0\u00a0Most of the NPCs that Aloy encounters feel like walking, talking exposition machines.\u00a0\u00a0There also feels like a lack of pacing to the story.\u00a0\u00a0The future of the planet is apparently at risk but Aloy always seems bogged down by endless side quests and distractions.\u00a0\u00a0Even the main narrative feels plodding and padded out to fill a 25 to 30hr running time.\u00a0\u00a0It made me yearn for\u00a0Miles Morales<\/em>\u00a0and its lean, efficient story telling.<\/p>\n

I think my opinion of\u00a0Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0is definitely coloured by that brutal bug I encountered but equally, I don\u2019t think I\u2019m entirely off-base with my opinions either.\u00a0\u00a0The original game had the misfortune of releasing within a week of\u00a0Breath of the Wild<\/em>\u00a0which ultimately cast a long shadow over\u00a0Horizon<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0It happened again with\u00a0Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0which had its lunch eaten entirely by From Software\u2019s formidable\u00a0Elden Ring<\/em>, a title which occupied the gaming zeitgeist almost single handedly for many months after its release.\u00a0\u00a0Forbidden West<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t a bad game, far from it.\u00a0\u00a0I do think its very safe though.\u00a0\u00a0I wish it would\u2019ve taken a few more chances and swung for the fences harder with its game design.\u00a0\u00a0As it is, it feels very paint-by-numbers, no matter how pretty and technologically accomplished it may be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a deadly blight threatens the planet, Aloy travels to the Forbidden West to find answers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2648,3013,2646,1200,2936],"class_list":["post-23936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-aloy","tag-guerilla-games","tag-horizon","tag-playstation","tag-playstation-5"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23936"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23941,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23936\/revisions\/23941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}