Impressions now after 50 hours playing (40% game progression - yeah I'm a side quest nut and am weird and don't like to fast travel). My son, who just bee-lines the main quest line, has completed the game twice already.
This will largely be spoiler-free:
World: The same general world, only larger. Much larger. And just like the real world, you do wonder just how the people survive with the severe tribalism. I've only seen a few ham-handed attempts at more specific social commentary
1.
Good: fantastic vistas. Also now the moon moves across the sky! But it's still always full. On the PS5, the shader effects for water are fantastic. Characters now visibly sweat.
Bad: dust blowing in the wind still looks like it's following a piecewise-linear path. Weather is not persisted across saves; if it's raining at save it can be clear when you reload, or vice-versa.
Story: Pretty standard fare, but executed well. I don't have too much to say about this - I'm not disappointed. The one thing that's a potential drawback is I don't feel there is as much mystery about it compared to the story in
Zero Dawn; unless there's a twist later, it seems pretty straightforward. Still compelling, but at times it doesn't seem to have the urgency that the story actually suggests
2.
Mechanics: I play on Hard, which is a decent challenge. I feel like the difficulty is higher than in
Zero Dawn. I die
way more often - even when being over-leveled for my current quests. The world definitely feels more dangerous. I can be one- and two-shot by some enemies still if not careful, and the enemy aggression is much stronger - both machines and humans are now much more prone to gang-up on you. I do find the main story bosses so far to be easier than the heavy mechs in the wild... I suspect it's because the wild animals appear to level-scale, but the quest bosses don't appear to do so.
I'm of mixed feelings about the crafting mechanics - I like the concept of being able to "level up" weapons, but it feels like it is a bit more fetch-quest based than in
Zero Dawn to get upgrades - before you just got a new weapon to upgrade; now you've got to buy a new weapon then go hunt for quite a few tedious-to-get machine parts to get the most of the new weapons.
Most of the best weapons also seem to be locked behind side quests, which is somewhat nicer than just being able to buy the best from vendors.
I'm not sure I like all the "quality of life" changes; I never seem to be hurting for resources other than medicine. I remember running out of ammo in
Zero Dawn but I've never run out of the important ammo yet. I'm sure some people like the Stash mechanic, but I find that something is lost when I don't have to consider tradeoffs of what I need to drop when looting machines.
I do think that the weapons and armor themselves give more nuance - I like the additional weapon types, element types, and having to be much more aware of what approaches work for what opponents.
One character specifically talks about the glass ceiling for women. Another character goes out of his way to criticize a general comment about crazy, because he chose to wear women's armor. I only noted these because the first installment of the game made these points without it just being the NPCs literally talking about it the first time they met you, a complete stranger.
They specifically give about a 4-month timeline for the end of the world. Yet you are traversing, on foot, from Yosemite to Las Vegas and later to San Francisco. Also the amount of side quests you can take...yet I do have to say it doesn't feel terribly unbelievable. I understand the geography compression for gameplay sake, but it does feel incongruous with the stated timeline - I don't think you can walk the distances implied in the time allotted.
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Topic: Horizon Forbidden West: even more mechanical megafauna! (Read 1426 times)