For my first foray into the current generation, I choose a game I knew would be enjoyable to play, have a huge map, and showcase the improved graphics and load times of the Playstation 5 I purchased after Christmas. Horizon Forbidden West, from Guerilla Games of Killzone fame, was an easy choice as I had found the first game in the series "good enough to forget Killzone" a few years ago.
It's a gorgeous game set in a far future after an apocalypse wrecked civilization, leaving tribes of various folks to survive in the wild, salvaging the scraps and living under the threat of strange mechanized animals and dinosaurs. The story behind this world is really deep and interesting science fiction, and in this second installment in the series, kicks into high gear as the bigger picture of what happened is revealed.
The graphics are amazing, but not photorealistic or anything. Load times are the welcome improvement with this generation's hardware, and that is a relief as the PS4 and XBox One load times were reminiscent of the days of loading cassettes to my Commodore VIC 20. There were still some things happening that made me less impressed with the new hardware, however. "Arrow stuck in space" still occurs; this is when the player is shooting the bow while standing close to an object and the line of sight shows a clear shot, but when they fire the arrow sticks to the cover they were using and stops there floating in space. I saw this a lot in Dark Souls games, and it continues again here.
Once I got through the opening part of the game and was unleashed in the Forbidden West, I enjoyed the freedom of exploring in an organic way. I would usually finish any local side missions before moving on the the next town, for example. So why was this game so good at keeping me engaged when other open world games lately have me scrambling for the end?
The things that are out there to do are just as plentiful as any Ubisoft open world, but they were not as in-your-face about them in Horizon. Side quests felt organic, and some of them just occur out in the wilderness and not just at a town or camp. I spent most of the two and a half months trying to clear out each area, revealing the map, fighting whatever beasts I came across, before taking up the next story quest and moving to a new area.
That's not to say I did everything that popped up on the map, but I did reveal a lot of it. I skipped some of the game's side missions entirely, such as the Hunting Grounds, as they were of no interest to me. I did every rebel camp, though, as those were fun. I must note here that this game has the best sound effect for a headshot I have heard in recent memory.
I must be burnt out on equipment management as well, because I hardly upgraded weapons, coils, weaves, pouches, and all that other stupid minutiae. My game time is limited, so the choice between shooting some giant dino-robot with arrows for a few minutes versus spending time in menus checking my recent loot for the next shiny thing was no choice at all.
While most of the open world enables the player to use the terrain to their advantage, there were many story missions that put the player in a very closed arena for a boss fight. Even some of the most challenging fights had some cover, at least. Which brings me to the final boss fight.
After entering the final stage of the game with no turning back and no chance to restock, I found myself fighting all the way to the last boss (minutes after beating the penultimate boss) with very few healing items and overall just not prepared for the out-of-scale battle that was waiting. It was another closed arena fight with no permanent cover, and a boss that can one-hit kill even my level 50 maxed-out character.
After about a week of trying and failing, I determined that I was screwed - I would need to load up a previous save from before I took on the final mission, then spend another week or two in the open world dealing with all those equipment and upgrade details that bored me so much, and then repeat the whole final part of the game again, including both bosses.
I said screw that, set the damn game on "Story Mode" and beat the boss that way to see the end of the story. At first, I thought I would then return to the game and repeat the boss battle on Easy, and then Normal before declaring that I had beaten the game. However, once the game was over, I goth the trophy for beating it, granted regardless of the difficulty I choose.
Well shit, if they are granting me that, I'll take it as a win. I did not play Horizon Forbidden West to stress about inventory or to spend a month hit-and-running an overpowered boss fight in the hopes that one lucky instance might put me over the line. I am also old enough to not care about "gittin' gud", unless we are talking about a From Software game, of course.
This game is amazing, gorgeous, fun, and has a great science fiction story to tell. One thing it fails at, though, is to allow for the kind of playstyle I was using to be able beat the game. That is fine, though, as the available Story Mode was an adequate solution for that.
