The title here is misleading, I'm not ranting, I wanna talk about the second part of Horizon, Forbidden West and the DLC, Burning Shores :p . But it's a pretty good summary of the game, actually...
So, the sequel came out, and I played it and loved it. And recently they made DLC for it, and I also loved it, and want to comment on it.
The first game was tough to follow up, the stakes were pretty high, the discovery of what had happened was incredible and the feeling of the full plot was really amazing. So, Forbidden West had to expand on it. And I think it did a very good job, although it has a few flaws.
We start again following Aloy, who explains that even if we stopped the previous threat that wanted to kill everythign again, the world terraforming is not working properly with rogue AIs not doing their job, and therefore we need to find a solution, which would be to get a copy of the main AI involved in the job and restore it.
At the end of the previous game this wasn't that clear, but it makes sense. The previous AI had to sacrifice itself in order to stop another AI from going rogue and killing everything, so it makes sense that the terraforming is failing all around us. And even if the original rogue AI that wanted to kill us is gone, there was another rogue AI that was less aggressive but in charge of building machines that was causing problems on the first game, so it makes sense this will be a prominent antagonist.
Let's start with the basics: The graphics are amazing again, with a level of realism that is just beautiful. The different natural environments are relaxing to watch and traverse, and the enemies are detailed and cool to see. The game feels alive with nature and breeze, and some places that you discover are amazing to look at.
The gameplay is similar as before. This time you can climb more surfaces, although not all, and you become a lot more mobile thanks to a number of inventions, like a grappling hook or a kind of glider that lets you fly a bit, or at least fall down slowly. Combat lets you use more melee combos this time, although there's lots of new remote weapons you can also try and experiment. In my opinion a bit too much variety in weapons and skills, I ended up focusing on a few that worked for me and ignoring the rest, although I'm told some of the new ones really do damage.
You still scavenge resources, parts, plants and such, and then can craft or exchange for new weapons or upgrades.
The game suffers a bit from this tendency of open-world games to make a lot of options available, when you could get rid of several of them and still be a fully enjoyable game, but I guess it depends on how you play it. But in general it's good, very open. The extra mobility is quite welcomed, feels a lot better to be able to jump from high places.
The focus changes a bit, and now you can use it as if it was a sonar Ping, revealing things around you. This is very practical because it lets you use it without going into focus mode and then leaving, and it highlights elements that you can interact with that are close to you.
There's very hard hunter trials again, and now there's also strike matches (a table game you can play inside the game, very strategic, I liked it), solving little ruin puzzles, finding scanning drones, a few tallnecks and cauldrons, melee combo trials (hard to do, combo instructions are not always very clear) and machine races (pretty hard and annoying sometimes because the hardest races do these annoying tricks all race games do of using rubber bands and moments where rivals are just faster than you for no reason). There's also an arena mechanic, but you unlock that on the last segment of the game, so you can accidentally just skip it completely.
The world-building is superb, and special mention goes to the Utaru, with their amazing gardens and houses in giant disc antennas, a tribe that actually grows things and makes food.
So, this is a general feeling of the game, some improvements from the first, more content, more options, bigger map and plot.
About the negative, it feels a bit like nitpicking, but the following is true: one of the tribes of the game is this Spartan -like tribe where only warriors thrive, that bases all their culture on leftover vids displaying some kind of military air force group. This and other details feels like the USA air force and army paid to the developers to work these subplots and details as if it was a recruitment advertisement. We know they've done it more evidently in other games and movies, so I don't discard this is what happened here. It's not a lot, but it bothers me how there's moments where they're trying to make military stuff cool somehow, and feels a bit shoehorned. Then there's also the Vegas section, talking about the city of dreams as if Vegas was amazing, when it's a capitalistic hellscape made to trick people out of their money. Again, feels like a Vegas advertisement. Apart from that, some of the rewards for completing relic puzzles or drone scans feel underwhelming since it's just cosmetic details.
But well, that's about all I have to say about negative points.
The plot is amazing, and the characters are lovely and great. Without spoiling too much, it becomes apparent soon that Aloy is trying to do too many things without asking for help, and this just makes things worse. Once she actually asks for it, things improve a lot, and the sense of creating a network of real friends that will work together to prevent the end of the world is great, like a family that supports and helps each other. Also worth mentioning that I love that the real antagonist here become a group of rich bastats that managed to escape in a spaceship, became immortal, came back to earth and, as the rich bastards they are, decided to destroy the world to remade it to something they like, and the people already living in it can get fucked for all they care. It was quite cathartic to fight this type of people and to point clearly that they're at fault and that they were the problem originally. It's good that this message is made across the game loudly and repeatedly.
The game ens with the discovery of the real final enemy: Nemesis, made of the mind of the rich bastards, that is trying to come to earth and destroy the humans that created it. We will need to wait for the third part to finally fight it though.
Meanwhile, the DLC deals with one of these rich bastards causing chaos in a separated area. The DLC is quite nice, very epic (the final boss is spectacular and you'd need to see it for yourselves) and introduces a love interest that, finally, seems to be a good match for Aloy (and also a woman). There were several characters in the first game that seemed they could be interested in her, but nothing was done, and the most obvious one was kind of projecting from his dead lover to you, so didn't feel like the right choice. This new character, although introduced a bit suddenly, feels quite nice, the interactions are natural and it's kind of cute how both her and Aloy are flirting in a kind of clumsy way.
In general, I enjoyed both the game and the DLC very much. A lot of questions left unresolved from the first game are finally clear, several of the best characters have returned and improved upon, there's new amazing characters and the plot continues to be amazing, interesting and kind of relevant with the current world.
Totally recommended.
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