Horizon forbidden west gameplay11/19/2023 ![]() Bigotry is on display between clans and lifestyles, to be sure, but no one discriminates based on race, gender or age. All different kinds of folks are to be found in every part of the game: the sunny plains peopled by frond-wearing leafniks don’t tend toward anything but a slimmer body type… probably because they spend most of their time gardening, compared with the beefy beer-swilling miners of Chainscrape. ![]() ![]() The level of care put into making the future a diverse place is also easy to appreciate. And the characters you travel with along the way are more detailed than the main characters just about any other game. The people you chat with to take on jobs or buy items are all highly individual even within regions. In HFW, you have dozens - hundreds - of NPCs wandering around, offering quests, getting attacked, and so on, and they’re all extremely well rendered. The characters too are the best I’ve seen, with the possible exception of God of War - but that game had a much more limited cast. I didn’t play on PS4 but I expect it will be considerably less enjoyable, given how large a role the graphics and short load times played in my opinion of the game. If you can wait to play this on PS5, I’d recommend it. The draw distance and realistic fog and lighting are particularly lovely. Even at 1080p, sometimes I could barely believe what I was seeing (by which I mean the opposite: that it was very believable). I played the game on PS5 in “Performance” mode, which aims for a higher frame rate, rather than the 4K resolution, which added a bit of detail but was fatal to playability. Funnily enough it’s the “modern” areas that feel the fakest. A dozen times I stopped at some vista I’d arrived at as part of the normal course of things, thinking “now this is the header image,” before finding another even more amazing view half an hour later.Įach environment you travel through is convincingly rendered in extreme detail, from tribe towns to the many natural biomes and ruins. The world is beautifully sculpted, large and varied. It has to be said right off the bat that HFW looks phenomenal. After the revelation of thousands of years of history, of Aloy’s identity as a clone of the system’s designer, and her victory over the rogue AI element Hades, what possible surprises could remain? The trick Guerilla had to pull off was to continue to make that story interesting after the big reveal: that humanity had essentially destroyed itself, leaving behind an AI to manage the terraformation of the ruined Earth - an AI that self-destructed, along with the fragile balance of mankind with machines. ![]() People wanted to explore the vast world, not simply to check things off a list, but because every location they visited or enemy they overcame added new tidbits to the surprisingly rich and complete lore. Yet in spite of the open-world fatigue already setting in back in 2017, the original game provided something fresh - largely because of a highly original setting and story. Look at the map, go to a point of interest, unlock new quests and collectibles to get you to the next part of the map, rinse and repeat for about a hundred hours. HFW is the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn, a PS4 flagship title from Guerilla Games that adopted the now familiar open-world scheme pioneered and repeated regularly by Ubisoft. (Minor spoilers for HFW follow, along with major spoilers for the previous title.)īut I’m getting ahead of myself. When I finished the intro, I realized that what I thought was the intro was actually just the intro to the intro now I see that at that moment, I was only just beginning the real intro, and after 15 hours had arrived at The Game. Horizon: Forbidden West (hereafter referred to as HFW) is a game large enough that by the time I’d started putting together this review, more than 20 hours into it, I had not yet even encountered the things the review guidelines warned against including. And as a showcase of the “next generation” it’s a baffling mix of gorgeous graphics and decade-old gameplay concepts that haven’t been given so much as a fresh coat of face paint (unlike everyone else in the game). If you’re looking for something different, however, this definitely ain’t it. I’ll save you a little time with a TL DR: If you liked the first game, and the prospect of a lot more of it sounds good, stop reading and start playing. In an age of enormous games, this one attempts to be the most enormous of all - and whether it succeeds depends largely on your appetite for the type of game it offers up so very much of. The second in the open-world series following the adventures of Aloy, future cave woman, in a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by robot dinosaurs, it’s literally difficult for me to think of things the developers could include that they didn’t at least try to. It’s hard to imagine a bigger game than Horizon: Forbidden West.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |