Alex Birlo on February 8, 2023
In this review, I finally get around to talk about my personal Game of the Year for 2022. Because, unfortunately, I do not think that this game had received enough attention. Specially towards the end of the year, it was dwarfed by much anticipated and extremely hyped games such as “Elden Ring” and “God of War: Ragnarok”.
Let us establish this from the very beginning. The story of the game is nothing too elaborate or mind-blowing. It is mostly a vehicle to move you through the game’s amazing world. Yet it is a very solid one. It is justified, has no plot holes, introduces new threats, creative characters and tribal cultures, and has a couple good plot twists.
The world of Horizon is set in the far future. The previous game explains, that the world was devastated by an apocalypse that our civilization brought upon itself. The only way to save humanity, was to create a powerful and intelligent terraforming system, that would recreate the world after it is destroyed.
The system was supposed to repopulate the planet with plants, animals and reintroduce new humans back to it, with all past knowledge. But ultimately, people forget and lose most of their technology and revert to a tribal lifestyle. And the world is tended by the system’s machines that create an echo system, based on real world animals.
After the final battle of “Horizon: Zero Dawn”, Aloy is on the hunt for a copy of the terraforming system. It has to be fixed now, because the world spirals out of control. Storms ravage the sky, the waters become polluted, and the terraforming subsystems create machines that become extremely dangerous for humans.
The hunt will take her into the western part of the post-apocalyptic United States. It is an untamed area, called “The Forbidden West”.
There, Aloy will encounter new tribes and a vast territory, encompassing a plethora of diverse biomes and locations. Which brings us to our next topic.
The playable world of the Forbidden West, and the gameplay, share one aspect that I will repeat again and gain. This entire game is a repetition of everything that was good in the previous one. Just everything you will see here, is so well improved upon, that you will not notice that it is nothing fundamentally new.
The nature of the forbidden west is even more varied and impressive than in the previous game.
The stunning graphics bring to life a world full of gorgeous vistas. From the deep jungles at the shore of the pacific, to the deserts surrounding the ruing of Las Vegas. They took the exploration factor of “Zero Dawn” and cranked it up to 11!
There is more of what we loved in the previous game, but it is now more rewarding and more varied.
Traversal is made more dynamic. Since, players can climb most surfaces now. Even if not every surface like in “Assassin’s Creed”, but most of the places that make sense. Not only the “yellow marked” areas as previously.
The world is populated by major new tribes. Each with their own esthetic and cultural principles. Even long after playing, I can still distinguish tribes and people by the colors, clothes and behaviors.
There are no world shaping decisions, really. The game still has the minor conversational choices in dialogue, but they are only for flavor, and none of them really affect the story or the world.
The best way to describe the gameplay of Forbidden West is “a safe evolution”. No crazy, conceptual overhauls of the systems, but does a game like Horizon really need them?
The exploration, open world activities, side quests, and hunting are an evolution here to be sure. And are most certainly as enjoyable as they were in “Zero Dawn”.
But you will not be surprised too often. The developers decided to play it safe, and introduce only a natural evolution of the same features you had before.
For example, the gameplay feature of stripping parts of armor and weakening machines, is now extended to human foes as well. They have armor pieces that fly off. Not new, but neat.
There are more mountable machines. Each with their unique traversal functionality. You can even fly! But this is cleverly reserved closer to the end of the game, otherwise players would naturally miss out on a lot of exploration and gorgeous perspective set-ups throughout the world.
But again, it is not new, but it is cool. The act of overriding machines was already a thing, and the mechanics of it were not really changed up in any substantial way.
I could keep describing how there are new types of elemental damage, more build diversity in terms of outfits’ effect, and how there is a massive array of new and old weapons to change up the hunting tactics.
But I will just keep repeating myself.
There is nothing really “bad” or terribly exciting to say about a game, that plays it so safe, that the developers literally just took everything that was good in the previous game, and just made it better and added more of it!
It really puts our views on game development in perspective. Because this game is a solid case of one of my favorite sayings, that rings true in this case like no other – “Don’t fix, what’s not broken”.
On the one hand, we would expect more innovation from a new game, from an accomplished studio. But on the other hand, too often do we see how developers panic from player feedback, and end up “innovating too much”. Ultimately ruining or outright omitting things that were already good in their previous games.
Again and again, I repeated myself, saying that everything in this game is just like in the previous – just bigger and better.
And in a weird way, that is the charm here. For me, a game that I call “Game of the Year” should somehow push the medium forward.
Of course, it is strange to say that, taking into account how most of this article is me both being excited about how fun this game is, but also ranting about how they do not innovate enough.
In 2022, we had some absolutely legendary games releasing. But none of them really impressed me. Not because they are “not masterpieces”, they quite honestly are. But maybe it is just me, getting “old and stingy”.
Regardless, “Horizon: Forbidden West” was both a welcome return to one of my most favorite universes, and a game that, strangely, actually stood out for me!
Humor yourself for a second, and allow me to recall the situation in which our world was for the past few years.
The pandemic has hit all game developers hard. It also made it so that two years into the new generation, and people still cannot get their hands on the new consoles.
This created a situation, that developers have to compensate, by creating their games as “cross-generational”. And this, in turn, causes their games to be not as impressive as they could have been. Because they are essentially making their games both for new and powerful hardware, in addition to creating a downgraded version for hardware that is almost a decade old.
And somehow, arguably better than anyone else, Guerrilla Games managed to create perhaps the most impressive cross-generational game.
Despite all the hardships, on the new PlayStation 5, they achieved a massive open world, with stunning textures and amazing particle effects. Everything in solid 60fps and near to no loading screens.
It might not be the most “innovative” game of 2022, but it is most certainly the best looking and amongst the most technologically impressive ones.
