Horizon Zero Dawn was rightly revered for being an amazing new IP for PlayStation. Now Guerrilla Games has followed it up with an even more accomplished action-RPG. Forbidden West is bigger, bolder and more beautiful than its predecessor, while the story is similarly epic, innovative and interesting. This has to be an early contender for game of 2022 already.

Stunningly beautiful game; Enormous open-world with masses to see and do; Great ranged and melee combat; Involving and complex plot; Aloy is one of the best gaming characters around;

Some side missions and tasks can be repetitive; So too can machine hunting for resources;

Huge number of machines to fight; New upgrade system has rewarding gameplay loop; Map is packed with a variety of biomes; Story takes a fascinating new direction;

Platforming often feels clunky; Multiple irksome technical issues;

Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the PlayStation 4's best-received games, which made a sequel inevitable. Five years and a console generation later, we have the $69.99 Horizon Forbidden West. It builds upon everything that made the first game great, with a new and bigger world that features more verticality thanks to superior climbing (and falling) mechanics. Horizon Forbidden West keeps the same open-world, spear-and-bow-wielding, machine-hunting formula, but its greater variety keeps the game interesting even after you sink a few dozen hours into it. The action-adventure game (available for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5) is a few steps better than Horizon Zero Dawn, and for that it easily earns our Editors’ Choice award. Horizon Forbidden West's Gameplay The game takes place a few months after Horizon Zero Dawn, and once again stars the lone huntress, Aloy. After the previous game's events, HADES is no longer a world-destroying threat, but there are still numer...

Horizon Forbidden West takes everything that made Horizon Zero Dawn an excellent action-adventure title, and adds more environmental variety and quest verticality to create an even better game.

Huge, dense world; Many entertaining missions; Improved climbing, and new tools that let you easily scale the many vertical environments; Looks fantastic, even if it isn't a revolutionary leap from the first game

Some stability issues even after day-one patch; The Cauldrons sidequests are a chore

Midway through Horizon Forbidden West, Aloy discovers a video from the old world. A holographic figure stands in front of the White House and delivers a hopeful rallying cry for a country at war. “True courage means facing [our] fears with conviction instead of cynicism,” the long-dead speaker firmly declares. It’s a line that sums up Aloy’s entire raison d’être, making her the perfect hero for her “techno-nihilist” times. Horizon Forbidden West is a sequel to 2017’s hit Horizon Zero Dawn. It once again drops players into a postapocalyptic world where humanity and nature alike have begun to reform following a man-made catastrophe that filled the world with deadly machines resembling malevolent versions of Boston Dynamics robots. Despite its gloom-and-doom premise, it’s not a cynical game. Instead, it presents a bright and beautiful open world full of tribes that have found ways to coexist with machines without sacrificing nature. Aloy sees the potential utopia growing amid the decaying...

Improved combat; Excellent new machines; High-effort side activities; Stunning world design; Better traversal tools;

Dry dialogue; Frustrating swimming; Crashes and visual bugs;

10/10 game, beautiful, adventure, stealth, thrill. Everything I love in a game.

Fantastic game that takes the fantastic original game and improves on it in every way. If you want a game to show off your PS5's fancy graphics, this is it!

Great gameplay hook engaging story fascinating and vast world to explore

I am a big fan of Zero Dawn, this is even better, love love love it

No spoilers here.

It's the nicest game on PS5, Love it, and not only a good story, looks great also