Horizon: Forbidden West Review Thread

[Jarrito3002]

About 14 hours in and I am still in the starting area and I have not gone west yet because I was doing side quest and gaining some skills and materials to upgrade my armor and weapons. I mean this much content is just the starting area is going to make this my game for a while which will help me financially save some damn money.

I am having great time right now because main gripe is the combat of the machines seem to just auto lock on and target you. Like you can only dodge roll but machines will attack you full on and do some physics breaking in air turn to hit you and some projectiles have undefined homing abilites. This does make me us more options and cautious and I am still starting so some investment in the skill trees might help alleviate this. The platform sections are fun to traverse and finding ruins that offer those lore bits of pre dino apocalypse is always good fun. Plus I find my self just playing machine strike and waiting for the meat space counterpart to appear hopefully.

I do not play that many open world titles that much last one of Ghost of Tsushima which was a chefs kiss and it looks like I am going to be down bad for this one too.

It's only funny when Dunkey is shitting/indifferent towards a game fans don't like nor care for. When it's a game fans care about, then they get butt hurt and bratty about it. This has always been a problem in the YouTube sphere since 2006.

Dunkey is Dunkey. The man has hot and cold takes but at least he doesn't double down on them and just makes a passing joke and keeps it moving. It is that approach he has that keeps him from going full ass clown.

 

[BrawlMan]

Isnt dunkey's whole gimmick to just shit on things? Like i cant remember the last time he just praised a game, and usually when he is shitting on a game it just comes across like he didnt pay much attention to it or is just bashing for the sake of bashing.

Not entirely. Dunkey has praised games before, and knows when to get serious. Especially if he is passionate about a game. Though recently, there is not a lot of worth praising in a majority of the AAA industry, so I don't blame him there. The funny thing is, Forbidden West he does not consider bad, but just another open world game. He's not exactly wrong. Zero Dawn came out just a few days before Breath of the Wild. Forbidden West released a few days before Elden Ring. History repeats itself. Another piece of irony is that he said if you enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima, you'll enjoy this game. I have 0 interest in either Horizon game, but I can see the appeal for people.

Here's him praising or getting serious recently.

​

 

[Jarrito3002]

So call me picky, but why'd they have to get rid of Aloy's abs?

Like, the girl was already a tad too skinny for a highly skilled hunter/warrior, but after the first game even her abs have disappeared.

And yes, I also just find abs on women hot. So yeah, bummer.

Ok I have been playing in game and found the carja blazon and its weird depending on lighting and cutscenes Aloys abs are there and sometimes they are not.

Aloy has Schrödinger abs.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Horizon Forbidden West - Zero Punctuation - The Escapist

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee Croshaw reviews open-world adventure game Horizon Forbidden West from Guerrilla Games.

www.escapistmagazine.com

Yahtzee didn't like it.

Which is weird because I feel like a lot of his complains are just as applicable to Elden Ring, which he did like, so who really knows. It just shows you that the same mechanic can be present in two completely different games, but one game is enjoyable for you and the other one isn't. For example, i think Elden Ring is mediocre as a game and i really liked Horizon.

I do understand his gripes about Aloy though, her personality is really stunted for no real reason and it's the side characters that give the game life. Since he rushed the game it makes sense he would miss that and be stuck with just the Aloy bits though. I mentioned in my impressions that Forbidden West has a much weaker story than the original game because the original game had a mystery with an interesting explaination. Here that mystery is gone, and it's just another quest so story-wise it falls apart.

Interestingly Yahtzee liked Breath of the Wild, which stole the thunder away from Horizon in 2017. And he also liked Elden Ring which has done the same thing to Horizon 2.

I wonder if things would be different had the games been spaced apart better.

 

[BrawlMan]

I wonder if things would be different had the games been spaced apart better.

Probably not. Yahtzee already mentioned that he has a disdain and boredom of Jiminy Cockthroat games, like he did with spunk gargle wee wee of the 7th generation. Separate month releases wouldn't have made much of a difference.

I already knew he was not going to like the game. There was no surprise there. The signs were all over the wall weeks ago.

Hey Yahtzee, Sifu or Young Souls? I'm also looking forward to the first option, as I just want to see his reaction. I don't care if he likes the game or not.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Probably not. Yahtzee already mentioned that he has a disdain and boredom of Jiminy Cockthroat games,

YEah he says that, but then likes Elden Ring because it scratches his Souls itch. Then again you never know when an open world might come out and it'll blow your mind like Spec Ops: The Line I suppose.

 

[BrawlMan]

YEah he says that, but then likes Elden Ring because it scratches his Souls itch. Then again you never know when an open world might come out and it'll blow your mind like Spec Ops: The Line I suppose.

ER is the exception, not the rule. Second, Spec-Ops does not have much replay value, other than FUBAR difficulty. Once it's done, it's done. Plus, almost no one started appreciating Spec-Ops, until after its commercial failure. In a few months to a year later after the fact. I'll still take ER over that. I will give some credit to Spec-Ops, for having players think about things on a thematic and consequential level on violence, but there's many before that already done that better.

 

[CriticalGaming]

ER is the exception, not the rule. Second, Spec-Ops does not have much replay value, other than FUBAR difficulty. Once it's done, it's done. Plus, almost no one started appreciating Spec-Ops, until after its commercial failure. In a few months to a year later after the fact. I'll still take ER over that. I will give some credit to Spec-Ops, for having players think about things on a thematic and consequential level on violence, but there's many before that already done that and better.

Grung no like think, grung only like shooty bang bang, think make grung angry. Angry grung die to dragon because grung can no dodge.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I kind of love this game. I haven't played it yet.
I just love that it was hyped, came out to great acclaim, and is now the go-to-shit-on for critics. What a range of emotions for... a game... that is exactly what it promised.

I loved post-ZP stream where Yahtzee and Marty were shitting on it while talking about other random shit. I am very much looking forward to playing this game.

 

[BrawlMan]

​

 

[Dalisclock]

I kind of love this game. I haven't played it yet.
I just love that it was hyped, came out to great acclaim, and is now the go-to-shit-on for critics. What a range of emotions for... a game... that is exactly what it promised.

I loved post-ZP stream where Yahtzee and Marty were shitting on it while talking about other random shit. I am very much looking forward to playing this game.

The Horizon Subreddit has been getting Salty over this whole thing. Someone posted Yathzee's ZP on it just to talk about how Yathzee doesn't fucking know what he's talking about and he's not funny anymore. Which sounds like some people don't know what Yahtzee does or it's not funny any more because it's their particular favorite game getting dumped on.

There's also a couple threads about how apparently it makes no sense ER is like 5 points higher on Metacritic then HFW, which also have a fair amount of salt, usually with a dash of "THe critics have to like it because the illuminati threatened to kill their dogs if they didn't say nice things about Elden Ring" or something to that effect. I could open up a salt mine over there and retire in a week.

 

[BrawlMan]

Someone posted Yathzee's ZP on it just to talk about how Yathzee doesn't fucking know what he's talking about and he's not funny anymore. Which sounds like some people don't know what Yahtzee does or it's not funny any more because it's their particular favorite game getting dumped on.

Defintely the second option. 99% of Reddit users know what Yahtzee is and does, but wanna act oblivious or "surprised" when it's a game they love. This was the same problem this site had back when there were way more users.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Someone posted Yathzee's ZP on it just to talk about how Yathzee doesn't fucking know what he's talking about and he's not funny anymore. Which sounds like some people don't know what Yahtzee does or it's not funny any more because it's their particular favorite game getting dumped on.

When people say that they want Yahtzee to review a game, what they usually really want is either for him to dump on a game they hate, or praise a game they love, so that they can feel validated. "See? Yahtzee agrees with me, so I'm right and you're wrong." But of course, they can't do that if he goes the opposite way and praises a game they hate or dumps on a game they love, so they get angry.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

When people say that they want Yahtzee to review a game, what they usually really want is either for him to dump on a game they hate, or praise a game they love, so that they can feel validated. "See? Yahtzee agrees with me, so I'm right and you're wrong." But of course, they can't do that if he goes the opposite way and praises a game they hate or dumps on a game they love, so they get angry.

At the same time, needing any review personality to make your own position feel validated is just all kinds of pathetic. People need to start having the courage to like what they like, regardless of anyone else’s opinions. These people are merely providing commentary for entertainment purposes, or at least that’s what it should be considered.

 

[Dalisclock]

When people say that they want Yahtzee to review a game, what they usually really want is either for him to dump on a game they hate, or praise a game they love, so that they can feel validated. "See? Yahtzee agrees with me, so I'm right and you're wrong." But of course, they can't do that if he goes the opposite way and praises a game they hate or dumps on a game they love, so they get angry.

The Irony being that Yahtzee has like maybe half a dozen games he's really liked in his ZP. Even Dark Souls, his comfort zone game by his own admittance, he has issues with. But apparently people keep thinking <Insert Your Favorite Game here> is gonna be the new Silent Hill 2 or Dark Souls or Portals for Yahtzee.

I don't know how many of you guys read the main site comments on ZP but for a while there was like always like one guy who, every single week, would insist on Yahtzee playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the comments because...yeah. I doubt it was because he wanted to see it get dunked on hard. I think the rest of the people finally gave up on explaining Yahtzee is basically just gonna ignore you doing that and it's doubtful he reads those comments in the first place. Apparently people also do this with the danganronpa series and when it comes up in the streams Yathzee will just respond with some varient of "I have literally no idea what you're talking about because I haven't had people yelling at me to play it over and over again"

 

[EvilRoy]

Horizon Forbidden West - Zero Punctuation - The Escapist

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee Croshaw reviews open-world adventure game Horizon Forbidden West from Guerrilla Games.

www.escapistmagazine.com

Yahtzee didn't like it.

Which is weird because I feel like a lot of his complains are just as applicable to Elden Ring, which he did like, so who really knows. It just shows you that the same mechanic can be present in two completely different games, but one game is enjoyable for you and the other one isn't. For example, i think Elden Ring is mediocre as a game and i really liked Horizon.

I do understand his gripes about Aloy though, her personality is really stunted for no real reason and it's the side characters that give the game life. Since he rushed the game it makes sense he would miss that and be stuck with just the Aloy bits though. I mentioned in my impressions that Forbidden West has a much weaker story than the original game because the original game had a mystery with an interesting explaination. Here that mystery is gone, and it's just another quest so story-wise it falls apart.

Interestingly Yahtzee liked Breath of the Wild, which stole the thunder away from Horizon in 2017. And he also liked Elden Ring which has done the same thing to Horizon 2.

I wonder if things would be different had the games been spaced apart better.

I'm kind of there myself - I bought the first Horizons on sale a little while ago and really tried to get into it since my partner liked it and I figured it would give me an interesting game to play that doesn't involve guns but I just couldn't do it. I'm honestly still trying to work out why I've enjoyed Elden Ring so much and disliked Zero Dawn so much; its a struggle to pin down exactly what the issue was. I think its kind of a dozen tiny factors building up to one big annoyance rather than any specific dealbreaker.

There are a lot of parallels between the Tarnished and Aloy in terms of background both being outsiders and having no family (no mother, no maiden), but I think I hate Aloy's personality which didn't help. Horizons combat was reasonably deep and challenging, but I have no idea why I actually dreaded combat while similarly deep and challenging combat in Elden Ring is exciting for me. I kind of want to say that the depth in Horizon coming from having a million different traps and options vs the depth in Elden Ring came from direct combat mechanics might have been it but even then I'm not sure. Its not like I don't sit and look through my backpack in Elden Ring to decide between all my various craftable bombs, and shield options before most major boss fights. It might be the pace, certainly I prefer the methodical approach of soulslikes games to rapid fire combat, but I wouldn't say combat speed in Horizons was supercharged or anything.

Its surprising how similar the games look to me when I take a step back, and after I finish with Elden Ring I might go back and give Horizons a second shot to see if I was being unfair.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I'm kind of there myself - I bought the first Horizons on sale a little while ago and really tried to get into it since my partner liked it and I figured it would give me an interesting game to play that doesn't involve guns but I just couldn't do it. I'm honestly still trying to work out why I've enjoyed Elden Ring so much and disliked Zero Dawn so much; its a struggle to pin down exactly what the issue was. I think its kind of a dozen tiny factors building up to one big annoyance rather than any specific dealbreaker.

There are a lot of parallels between the Tarnished and Aloy in terms of background both being outsiders and having no family (no mother, no maiden), but I think I hate Aloy's personality which didn't help. Horizons combat was reasonably deep and challenging, but I have no idea why I actually dreaded combat while similarly deep and challenging combat in Elden Ring is exciting for me. I kind of want to say that the depth in Horizon coming from having a million different traps and options vs the depth in Elden Ring came from direct combat mechanics might have been it but even then I'm not sure. Its not like I don't sit and look through my backpack in Elden Ring to decide between all my various craftable bombs, and shield options before most major boss fights. It might be the pace, certainly I prefer the methodical approach of soulslikes games to rapid fire combat, but I wouldn't say combat speed in Horizons was supercharged or anything.

Its surprising how similar the games look to me when I take a step back, and after I finish with Elden Ring I might go back and give Horizons a second shot to see if I was being unfair.

Can't explain it really.

It's just so funny how Elden Ring gets heaps of praise doing the exact same shit most other open world games do. I posted a long theory about it in the Hot takes thread so I just copy that post here:

"
I think the linear game's problem lies entirely on whether the game itself is good or not.

Final Fantasy 13 was linear as fuck and everyone hated on it because it was just a "hallway". Yet FF7Remake and FFX are just as linear if not even more so, and people love those games. If the game is good, the the linearity doesn't matter.

Same thing for the open world though. We all talk shit about Ubisoft and there map full with icons but check this out. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Interactive+Map

Toggle "all" icons on this interactive map and immediately Elden Ring's map looks like a Ubisoft game. What is even worse is how many times the same bosses are scattered places, ruins all look the fucking same, chruches are the same, there is so much copy pasta all over the Elden Ring map it's insane. The difference is, the Souls gameplay is beloved, and by removing the icons on the map you instead give the illusion that Elden somehow is revolutionaizing the open world genre. It's not, it's the same fucking shit every open world has except the combat is a cockpunch.

Horizon Zero Dawn back in 2017 didn't have a remarkable open world, but gameplay and story are everything and because those elements were great the open world's mediocrity didn't bother anyone.

That's partly why I get upset when people talk so favorably about Breath of the Wild, because they somehow are blinded by the open world and think it's so incredible when it's the same shit over and over again. On top of gameplay that sucks a dog anus.

You know what I think it is.

1st open world syndrome. BoTW and ER are both the first games with open worlds in their franchises. Nobody cares about Assassin's Creed's world because it's the 1000th world for the series. "

 

[EvilRoy]

Can't explain it really.

It's just so funny how Elden Ring gets heaps of praise doing the exact same shit most other open world games do. I posted a long theory about it in the Hot takes thread so I just copy that post here:

"
I think the linear game's problem lies entirely on whether the game itself is good or not.

Final Fantasy 13 was linear as fuck and everyone hated on it because it was just a "hallway". Yet FF7Remake and FFX are just as linear if not even more so, and people love those games. If the game is good, the the linearity doesn't matter.

Same thing for the open world though. We all talk shit about Ubisoft and there map full with icons but check this out. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Interactive+Map

Toggle "all" icons on this interactive map and immediately Elden Ring's map looks like a Ubisoft game. What is even worse is how many times the same bosses are scattered places, ruins all look the fucking same, chruches are the same, there is so much copy pasta all over the Elden Ring map it's insane. The difference is, the Souls gameplay is beloved, and by removing the icons on the map you instead give the illusion that Elden somehow is revolutionaizing the open world genre. It's not, it's the same fucking shit every open world has except the combat is a cockpunch.

Horizon Zero Dawn back in 2017 didn't have a remarkable open world, but gameplay and story are everything and because those elements were great the open world's mediocrity didn't bother anyone.

That's partly why I get upset when people talk so favorably about Breath of the Wild, because they somehow are blinded by the open world and think it's so incredible when it's the same shit over and over again. On top of gameplay that sucks a dog anus.

You know what I think it is.

1st open world syndrome. BoTW and ER are both the first games with open worlds in their franchises. Nobody cares about Assassin's Creed's world because it's the 1000th world for the series. "

I do want to come out a bit against the copy/paste brush thing, but this goes for both Horizons and Elden Ring since they both include a lot of dilapidated structures. People often complain about how churches or ruins all look similarly collapsed across Elden Ring, and I've heard similar for Horizons where the destroyed cities all follow the same notes type thing.

I'm not saying your wrong for disliking that, but I do really want to say that they look the same because they are more or less structurally correct. This is something to do with my dayjob so I tend to pay a lot of attention to structures in real life and games over the last ten or so years have been basically getting it right. New Vegas has some great examples of collapsed bridges where the rebar sticking out of the concrete girders is correctly laid out for example.

So the reason the masonry structures, in particular the churches in Elden Ring, all seem to look very similar, is because that is how a masonry structure produced from quarrystone and mortar collapses. They actually just got it correct with respect to how the stones and walls would fall away, right down to the parts that would survive. If you rewound time hundreds of years its entirely possible those churches would be unrecognizably distinct from eachother beyond basic layout, but when a building falls apart a lot of those distinctive elements disappear because they aren't really part of the structural elements of the building, they're just like window-dressing and they're the first thing to go when things start falling apart. Same with Horizons. Those wrecked office buildings all look similar, because the only distinguishing elements of most city box buildings are facade's, which are designed for a service life between 5 and 30 years while the structure itself will be designed for 50-200 years.

There are definitely cut/paste or at least template based structures all over hell, which I won't deny, but this has been my Ted talk on how structures look when they fail.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I'm not saying your wrong for disliking that,

I don't dislike it at all. I'm just pointing it out because people have been saying that ER doesn't do the copy paste thing when it absolutely does.

I don't personally mind it or care that much. But the major criticism of open world games is always how they reuse the same assets to fill the world or expand the size of it, which is valid and the expectation of making a large map with zero repetition is unrealistic. However that doesn't mean you should slag one game for doing it, yet praise another that does the same thing.

It boils down to gameplay. People like Elden Ring's gameplay, therefore the open world is great. Meanwhile Horizon is just bow combat, or Assassin's Creed is just that combat, and therefor those game's worlds suck for some reason.

It's all boiled down to the gameplay and how it pleases the goopy gamer brain within us.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Horizon Zero Dawn back in 2017 didn't have a remarkable open world, but gameplay and story are everything and because those elements were great the open world's mediocrity didn't bother anyone.

I've been avoiding basically all things about the new Horizon as I don't have a PS5 yet and I like going in as blind as possible. I did skim your take on it and the story for the sequel was the one thing I was most concerned about actually.

Anyway, I think Horizon's open world worked because it had purpose to it and was very reserved about copy/pasting content into it. It had purpose for both gameplay and narrative as Alloy was discovering the world herself along with the player and the world was needed to house the enemies. The world was visually very interesting and I wanted to see what the next area looked like along with what new machine there was to fight. And even if you weren't fighting a new machine, you were probably fighting a new combination of machines, which was a "new" fight itself like you barely handled that new machine the first time and now it's with such and such. The open world of Horizon was also very reserved in content (which I really hope Horizon 2 sticks to) and the size of the world (it wasn't all that big), the collectible in the highest amount was the metal flowers and there was only THIRTY of them. You'd only have like 1 bandit camp and corruption zone (and other minor side activities) in each area and when you got to a town, instead of like every NPC with a freaking exclamation point on their head for a quest, I think there was like 2 side quests per city you came across. The open world never felt like you were ever just going from "point of interest" marker to the next to get your next bit of content, just traveling the open world itself was much of the game's content. Horizon's open world wasn't innovative or exceptional by any means, it was just done well and fit with the rest of the game's design.