2024-04-09 10:00:54
It hasn’t been that long since Horizon Forbidden West released on PlayStation 5, or at least two years. I played it back then and enjoyed most of my time. Aloy’s journey through Forbidden West is colorful and full of cool experiences, but I also think there’s a lot of filler that’s not necessarily that interesting. Now that the PC version has been released and I’ve been playing it for the past few weeks, I wanted to talk a little more regarding the experience here, both to give the game another round in the spotlight and to shed some light on this particular version.
I bought myself an overpriced new PC that drained my savings, but it runs games at 4K/60fps and ray tracing runs pretty well. So, when I got Horizon Forbidden West, I thought, let’s see what my fancy graphics card can do.
Horizon Forbidden West is beautiful on PlayStation 5, and it’s only going to get better on PC. Nearly every modern graphics technique imaginable is on full display. Horizon Forbidden West runs like a dream on my PC and is less demanding on smaller machines since the game doesn’t use resource-hungry ray tracing. This in no way makes the game uglier, however, and the sunsets over the beautiful world will take your breath away when you take a break between battles with animal-like machines. When the graphics are at their best, this is a very atmospheric game. The crafting of these machines is still impressive, both highly detailed and terrifying, and at 60fps, their animations are even more impressive than before. Most of the characters are also impressively crafted, but the ones you encounter at the beginning tend to look more polished than the ones you encounter the further into the game. This is not a good thing. Also, late in the game, some of the textures have some really ugly flaws that I didn’t notice when I played the game on the PlayStation a few years ago. Overall, however, the transition to PC is excellent, and the Nixxes who made the transition did a great job that other developers can learn from.
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Another thing Nixxes managed to get an A+ for is the controls, which can now be done with a mouse and keyboard, but also with a controller. I played around with mouse and keyboard just to try it out and for the most part it works fine. However, I found that shots from the bow in particular seemed imprecise, and the shots you expected to hit didn’t quite land where they were supposed to. This isn’t something specific to the PC version, but something I noticed on the PlayStation 5 as well. Then there are many buttons to control on the PC. This is probably a common problem when console games come to PC, but I often find myself pressing the Windows button on my keyboard when I’m sneaking around, minimizing the game. It’s extremely annoying when it happens during an adrenaline-pumping sequence where you have to sneak around a group of grazing Snapmaws. However, it’s a minor thing that you can easily survive because luckily it pauses the game when it happens, but the layout of the buttons isn’t quite right. I’ve experienced this in many games before Horizon Forbidden West, so it might just be an issue that’s unavoidable in certain situations.
What wasn’t so great for me was the story. The main story and Eloy’s fight to save the world from another extinction is very interesting and engaging. In this sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, you can feel the weight of responsibility on red-haired heroine Eloy’s shoulders. For much of the game, she seems extremely stressed by the responsibilities given to her by her creator, Elisabet Sobeck, of whom she is also a clone. This responsibility also becomes completely ridiculous when Eloy arrives in one of the many tribal towns and is tasked with finding an apparently forgotten NPC’s bag filled with flowers stolen by one of the monsters. Eloy is known as the savior of Meridian, and everyone in Horizon Edition North America knows this, so how these tribesmen allowed themselves to use her as an errand girl is downright insulting, and the original creator of the game, Guerrilla Games, has nothing to say regarding Eloy Some of the tasks in charge are so unimaginative. Additionally, some of the characters you encounter are incredibly boring, something I didn’t notice the first time I played the game on PlayStation 5. Their writing is dull, their voice actors are poor and unengaging, and you want to skip the stupid tasks they might have had your sick uncle do. You do this just to gain new skills, not because they are in any way inspiring. The good thing regarding it is that it makes you want to experience the super cool main story even more. I don’t know if the contrast between the mindless missions and the insanely awesome story is intentional, but if it is, it works.
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There’s a lot to do in the vast open world of Horizon Forbidden West, and looking at the map and seeing the many icons can be overwhelming. However, not all are equally exciting. For example, some metal flowers can only be opened at the end of the game. Once you finally get the tools to open them, you’ll find that they often contain only assets and sometimes only a small portion of the story. The same goes for what the game calls Firegleam, which are these red dots on the wall that Eloy can blow up. These also often store resources, but they are used more than flowers. My point is that there is a lot of padding in the game, and personally I think it might have been shorter and more focused without all these more or less menial tasks. The cool thing is that some of these illustrations have great content hidden behind them, but you have to dig through them all to find them, which is a bit of a pain. I wish the final game in the trilogy had more substance than Forbidden West. Not every game needs to have a hundred hours of gameplay if you can be well entertained in half that time. However, it’s not just Forbidden West that suffers from this disease, there are too many open-world games in general.
So, is Horizon Forbidden West worth playing on PC? Yes, very much so. The game is overall a great conversion of a PlayStation game. The main story is super cool and the graphics are gorgeous. There are a few hiccups here and there, but Horizon Forbidden West is an excellent game that should be experienced by as many people as possible. It’s deserved.
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