Horizon Forbidden West PS5 PlayStation 5 1

A big emphasis in Horizon Forbidden West will see you hunting mechanical wildlife for parts and components in order to upgrade your gear. More than the past game, you’ll need to destroy specific species in order to get the items you want. Guerrilla Games has streamlined this aspect by allowing you to create custom, on-the-fly jobs directing you to the machines you need so you don’t have to rely on random exploration.

Obviously you can explore the world freely if you wish, but when you’re looking for a very specific thing it can feel frustrating to just run around in circles until you stumble upon what you’re searching for. “In this game, we tried to bring the machines and the encounters with the machines more into play, so a lot of the upgrades also cost specific machine resources. You have to go out and hunt specific machines,” director Mathijs de Jonge told Game Informer.

There were elements of this system in Horizon Zero Dawn, but it sounds like it’s been expanded here, which perhaps rings true for the majority of the game. Side-quests will now offer better rewards, encouraging you to engage more with them. And the whole animation rigging has been overhauled as well, which means the time you spend with companions will look better to boot. Oh and by the way, you’ll be spending a lot of time with allies.

You’d think all of this would lead to an increasingly cluttered HUD, but Guerrilla Games has a simple solution: remove as much as possible while you’re playing the game, and allow you to swipe the touchpad to bring up more information as and when you need it. Scanning has also been given a total overhaul: you can mark weaknesses and detachable parts on the machines. This sounds like a total refinement of an already stellar title.

[source gameinformer.com]