It wasn’t long ago that Horizon Forbidden West came out for PlayStation 5, so at least two years ago. I played it back then and had a great time. Aloy’s journey through the Forbidden West was colorful and full of good experiences, but in my opinion there was also a lot of filler that wasn’t necessarily interesting. A PC version has now been released and I have been playing it for the last few weeks. So I want to talk a little more about this experience to bring it back into the spotlight and provide some insight into this particular game’s execution.
I bought a new and overpriced PC that used up all my savings, but at least it can run games in 4K/60fps and ray tracing works pretty well too. For the same reason, when I bought Horizon Forbidden West, I thought about how this luxury graphics card would perform.
Horizon Forbidden West was already great on PlayStation 5 and it’s only gotten better on PC. Almost every modern graphics technology you can imagine is on full display. Horizon Forbidden West runs great on my PC and isn’t too demanding on more modest computers, as the game doesn’t use resource-intensive ray tracing. However, that doesn’t make it any uglier, and taking a short break between each fight against the beast-like machines can leave you breathless as you watch the sunset across the sky of this beautiful world. If you crank the graphics to the maximum, it’s an incredibly atmospheric game. The fearsome machines are still impressive and detailed to the millimeter, and at 60 fps their animations are even more impressive than before. Most of the characters are also very well realized, but the ones you meet early in the game tend to seem more mature than those you meet later in the game, which is not a good thing. There are also some very ugly flaws in some of the textures further along that I didn’t notice when I played the game on PlayStation a few years ago. Overall, though, the PC conversion was excellent and curator Nixxes did an excellent job that other developers might take note of.
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Another aspect where Nixxes got an A is the controls, as you can now use both keyboard and mouse as controllers. I played with mouse and keyboard just to test it and generally it works perfectly. However, I have found that bow shots in particular can feel inaccurate as they don’t always hit the spot you were aiming for. While this isn’t specific to the PC version, I noticed it on the PlayStation 5 as well. On the other hand, there are too many buttons to control on PC, which is probably a common problem when converting console games to PC, but I had to constantly press the Windows key on my keyboard while hiding, which minimized the game. This is pretty annoying when it happens in the middle of an adrenaline-pumping sequence where you have to sneak around a herd of grazing Crackmaws unnoticed. While this is a minor issue since the game thankfully pauses when it happens, the buttons just aren’t laid out well. This happened to me in many games before Horizon Forbidden West, so it’s probably just an issue that’s difficult to avoid in certain situations.
What didn’t convince me was the story. The main plot and Aloy’s fight to save the world from extinction again are absolutely entertaining and fascinating. In this sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, you can feel the heavy responsibility on the shoulders of Aloy, the red-haired heroine. For most of the game, she seems to be under a lot of pressure from the responsibilities given to her by her creator, Elisabet Sobeck, of whom she is also a clone. This burden also makes it completely ridiculous when Aloy arrives in one of the many small tribal towns and is tasked with finding the bag of flowers belonging to one of the obviously clueless NPCs, which one of the monsters has stolen. Aloy is supposed to be the savior of Meridian, and everyone in the North American version of Horizon knows it. The way these tribesmen can use them as henchmen is a complete insult to Guerrilla Games, the creators of the original game, as they are so unimaginative when it comes to some of the tasks it has to complete. Additionally, some of the characters you encounter are extremely boring, something I didn’t notice on my first playthrough on PlayStation 5. Their dialogues are boring, their voice actors are bad and uninteresting, and their lame tasks make you want to skip them, which could be very Well, he managed to make his uncles sick. They do them just to gain new skills, not because they generate any kind of excitement. The good thing about this is that it makes you want to experience the main story more, which is extremely cool. I don’t know if the contrast between the pointless tasks and the incredibly impressive story is intentional, but if it is, it works.
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There are a lot of things you can do in Horizon Forbidden West’s massive open world, so much so that it can be overwhelming to look at the map and see the numerous activity icons available; However, not all of them are equally exciting. For example, there are these metal flowers that you can only open towards the end of the game, and then when you finally have the tools to open them, you find that they mostly just contain resources and sometimes even small story pieces. The same goes for what the game calls Fulgorite, which are red dots on walls that Aloy can blow up. These often also store resources, but are used more frequently than flowers. What I mean to say is that the game contains a lot of filler and I personally think that without all these more or less trivial tasks it could have been shorter and more focused on the main plot. The good thing is that there is good content behind some of these icons, but you have to go through all of them to find them, which is a bit annoying. I hope the final game in the trilogy has more substance than Forbidden West. Not all games need to be played for a hundred hours when you can have a lot more fun in half the time. However, it’s not just Forbidden West that suffers from this disease, but many other open-world games as well.
So, is Horizon Forbidden West worth playing on PC? Yes absolutely. Overall, this is an excellent adaptation of the PlayStation game. The main story is very cool and the graphics are beautiful. There are a few minor issues, but Horizon Forbidden West is an excellent game that as many people as possible should try out, it deserves it.
