Horizon Forbidden West sends Aloy into a hostile frontier, and Guerrilla Games built the whole thing at a scale few studios can match. The 2022 action role-playing game is the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC. It plays from a third-person perspective in a post-apocalyptic version of the Western United States.
- Release year: 2022
- Developer: Guerrilla Games
- Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC
- Development start: 2018
- Peak staff: over 300 full-time employees
- Development cost: around US$212 million
- Score: 9.2 of 10
Trailer, via PlayStation.
The Blight and the Forbidden West
The setup is a mystery, not a war. A plague called the blight kills everything it infects, and Aloy crosses into the Forbidden West to find its source. The world is populated by animalistic machines that are dangerous first and beautiful second. Aloy’s weapons are bows and arrows, and the new Shredder Gauntlet launches serrated discs that tear armor and components off a machine. Traps, tripwires and tethers pin enemies down. Acid ammo melts armor; shock ammo stuns.
Aloy’s Focus and the Machines
Aloy’s Focus, the augmented reality device she collected in the first game, tags an enemy and scans it for weaknesses. Detach a machine’s parts and you strip its health, remove its attack options, and sometimes turn its own weapon against it. The spear handles close work. Tall grass handles the rest.
“there is always a mystery”
That line, from the team’s design goals, is the whole game in miniature.
Sylens, Regalla and Far Zenith
The story picks up six months after the defeat of HADES. Sylens stole HADES rather than destroy it, and he sends Aloy west. She and Varl cross into Tenakth territory, where Chief Hekarro is fighting a civil war against the rebel leader Regalla. Aloy finds HADES badly damaged and deletes it. Then Far Zenith arrives: Gerard Bieri, Tilda van der Meer, Erik Visser, and Beta, a clone of Elisabet Sobeck. Their technology makes them untouchable, and they take a GAIA backup from under her.
Ashly Burch and Lance Reddick return as Aloy and Sylens. Angela Bassett and Carrie-Anne Moss join them. The cast is the strongest argument the game has.
300 People and $212 Million
Guerrilla began development in 2018. The team peaked at over 300 full-time employees, and the game cost around US$212 million, one of the most expensive ever made. That money shows in the cinematics and the character-driven side quests, where Guerrilla spent real time. Underwater and aerial exploration were added, and quest designer Samantha Schoonen called underwater exploration a “natural extension to traverse long-lost unknown places”. The team avoided the oppressive tone these levels usually carry and built for agile traversal and stealth instead.
Where the Money Went
Not every dollar lands. The melee combat is expanded but still the weakest tool in Aloy’s kit, and the open world occasionally mistakes size for depth. The blight plot takes its time arriving at answers. These are complaints about a very good game, not a broken one.
The Verdict on Horizon Forbidden West
Horizon Forbidden West is a sequel that understood its assignment. It keeps the characters, the exploration and the strategic combat that made Zero Dawn work, then widens all three. The machines remain the best enemies in modern open-world games, and the Focus scan turns every fight into a small act of research before the violence starts. Far Zenith is the rare new faction that earns its menace. This is the most confident thing Guerrilla has made.
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