Horizon Forbidden West review – robosaurs wrecks

metro.co.uk:

Sony’s first big exclusive of the year is a stunning looking sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn that adds more of everything, including robot dinosaurs.

Publishers always complain about how hard it is to launch a brand new franchise, with the difficulty of getting people to try something new being the most common excuse for endless sequels. That’s fair enough, but 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn demonstrated that there’s one simple trick to getting people interested in your game: dinosaurs. Preferably giant robot ones.

Add in state-of-the-art graphics and reassuringly familiar gameplay and, despite being a brand new IP, Horizon Zero Dawn managed to rack up an impressive 20 million sales. Its sequel will likely do just as well as it’s able to benefit from even better visuals, a now recognisable name and lead character, and a wider range of things to see and do.

Although its list of new features is not necessarily very inspired, Horizon Forbidden West does take to heart complaints that the original was ultimately quite shallow and repetitive. There are no big new answers to these problems though, just an attempt to add depth and variety to each individual element. And while that means this sequel will never be accused of breaking new ground it does mean it’s an even more effective crowd-pleaser than before.

On a conceptual level the setting of Horizon Forbidden West is fairly straightforward. It’s a post-apocalyptic action role-player where the world is inhabited by tribes of humans, using roughly medieval style technology, and robot animals (despite what we, and the marketing, might suggest the ones based on dinosaurs are in the minority).

As odd as that sounds the games have fashioned a surprisingly clever explanation for why there are