Posted on 16 May 2025

Horizon Forbidden West is a game I was waiting to play since it was released. It's actually the entire reason I upgraded my PC – I looked up the final fight of Burning Shores and realized there was no way my GPU at the time would be able to handle it. Unfortunately, I didn't get to that boss fight, as I only got 1 hour into Burning Shores before burning out on the game entirely.

This game is much bigger than Horizon Zero Dawn. There are more places to explore, more sidequests to complete, and more items to upgrade. It's very easy to get sidetracked by the side content and end up incredibly overleveled by the time you get back to the main quest. And since I'm the sort of person who likes to do all sidequests possible before focusing on the main quest, I was overleveled for most of the game.

It's very easy to level up and gain skill points. Maybe even too easy. I hit level 50 before getting to Thebes, and was level 59 by the beginning of the last main quest, Singularity. Leveling didn't feel like it slowed down in the higher levels, either, despite the experience required increasing for each level.

Combat didn't seem as difficult as it was in Zero Dawn, though that's possibly because I actually took my time to get used to it in this game. In Zero Dawn, I dropped the difficulty down to story mode early on because I was having serious struggles getting used to the combat system. I did end up dropping the difficulty in Forbidden West toward the end of the game, but that was mostly because I wanted to hurry up and finish the game.

The Utaru and Utaru areas feel a little neglected. There isn't much reason to go back to Plainsong once you're done with quest chains in the area, and Utaru don't really appear in other areas of the game. The same goes for the Oseram and their settlements – you do go back to Chainscrape to talk to Petra later in the game, but once you've cleared those starting areas, there's no real incentive to go back.

The story seems to set up Sylens as a major character for the next game. It'll certainly be interesting to see how that goes, given that Guerrilla will have to replace Lance Reddick.

I'm not quite sure I like the Nemesis reveal. Far Zenith was already a serious escalation as far as antagonists go, and now there's a new antagonist that not even Far Zenith could defeat. How could the tribes possibly win against that?

Ultimately, I had the same issue with this game that I had with Jedi Survivor. It's an improvement upon the first game, but now there's way too much content for the me to go for 100% completion (which is something I always try to do) and I ended up burning out on the game towards the end.