‘Horizon: Forbidden West’ is the final boss of the outgoing gaming generation

techcrunch.com:

It’s hard to imagine a bigger game than Horizon: Forbidden West. The second in the open-world series following the adventures of Aloy, future cave woman, in a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by robot dinosaurs, it’s literally difficult for me to think of things the developers could include that they didn’t at least try to. In an age of enormous games, this one attempts to be the most enormous of all — and whether it succeeds depends largely on your appetite for the type of game it offers up so very much of.

I’ll save you a little time with a TL;DR: If you liked the first game, and the prospect of a lot more of it sounds good, stop reading and start playing. If you’re looking for something different, however, this definitely ain’t it. And as a showcase of the “next generation” it’s a baffling mix of gorgeous graphics and decade-old gameplay concepts that haven’t been given so much as a fresh coat of face paint (unlike everyone else in the game).

Horizon: Forbidden West (hereafter referred to as HFW) is a game large enough that by the time I’d started putting together this review, more than 20 hours into it, I had not yet even encountered the things the review guidelines warned against including. When I finished the intro, I realized that what I thought was the intro was actually just the intro to the intro; now I see that at that moment, I was only just beginning the real intro, and after 15 hours had arrived at The Game.

(Minor spoilers for HFW follow, along with major spoilers for the previous title.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. HFW is the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn, a PS4 flagship title from Guerilla Games that adopted the now familiar open world scheme pioneered and repeated regularly by Ubisoft. Look at the