Horizon Forbidden West Fails To Solve Zero Dawn's Biggest Problem
Horizon Forbidden West iterates on its predecessor in a variety of ways, but doesn't solve what is perhaps Horizon Zero Dawn's largest issue. Both games have incredibly long, often tedious, opening chapters. This may be a symptom of the series' storytelling technique, and some form of tutorial is almost always needed in a video game, but the Horizon games only truly shine once players are set free in the open world. Horizon Forbidden West is a superb sequel, but repeats an unfortunate pitfall from the first game in its inclusion of an extensive, constraining prelude to the main gameplay loop.
It is understandable that both games start a little slow; the Horizon series is lore-intensive and both games have to do a lot of work narratively in order to get the player up to speed. Even in Forbidden West, which takes place shortly after the first game and generally has a self-contained primary conflict, there is a lot of ground to cover in order to establish what Aloy's goals are now that she seemingly dealt with the HADES threat at the end of Horizon Zero Dawn's story. Separately instanced tutorial missions in open world games can be done well, but both Horizon games refuse to take the training wheels off even long after all the basics have been thoroughly explained.
Related: Horizon Forbidden West's Fake PS5 Load Screens Are Wasting Your Time
It is certainly important for a game to communicate to the player how all of its systems interconnect, especially in open world games where there can be a wide variety of content simultaneously, but both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West can feel like they assume the player has never played a video game before. Even long after the introductory cutscenes and the most basic tutorials
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