Horizon 2: Not on Gamepass Boogaloo

So, as Prolechilla and everyone has sold their Playstation products to a AILF from Sheffield (idk, losing track) then the lack of excitement for Horizon: Forbidden West is deafening.

I mean, the first game is a very slick take on the Ubi formula with a nice bit of worldbuilding. The second looks like more of the same, but with plants that move when you walk through them. It's painfully obvious how the game will play, but I don't think there's anything that wrong with a pretty, flagship Sony title which plays well and does what it sets out to do. The roboelephant in the room though is the price tag (which is the same as 150 years of Gamepass and a handjob from Bill Gates himself).

I'm going to get it, because why not. Yes, there'll be a PC version in a year, but it looks sort of warm and fuzzy and inviting. For those of you still with a PS4/Pro, any interest at all. Or is this going to be Sony's great realisation they gone dun fucked up.

I only have a basic, launch-model PS4, and it sounds like a jet taking off playing Spyro; I don't know if it would handle Forbidden West without catching fire.

And with no PS5, no PS5 stock even if I wanted one, and no money for a PS5 even if there was; it'll be a while before I get a chance to play this, so I've been actively avoiding any and all hype.

I thought the first one was dull and I haven't turned my PS4 on in nearly a year so I don't think I'm really in the market for this.

At this point these big-budget, relentlessly safe third-person blockbusters are pretty much their own genre, aren't they? Sonygames. This one feels more like a Days Gone than a God of War, if that makes sense.

Also, what the hell is an AILF? I'm so sheltered.

Also, what the hell is an AILF? I'm so sheltered.

I think the A stands for Alastor.

I think I meant aunt, but we all see what we want to see.

Alastor I'd Like to Follow for his detailed explanations of popular role-playing videogames.

Obviously.

AILF now officially stands for that. Someone please notify urban dictionary.

I don't even think the first game was a "relentlessly safe third-person blockbuster" was it? It seemed more like another reskinned Ubisoft-style map-icon-em-up to me. I opened the map. I saw all the icons. I sighed. As usually happens with these games, I went in the wrong direction, I did the things in the wrong order, I did story missions days apart so that I no longer knew why I was going to a particular icon, what I was supposed to do there, and what the significance of the events at the icon were. All the world building didn't really matter, because every time I ran past an NPC standing on their prescribed spot waiting for me to interact with them, any illusion that this was anything but a game environment dissipated. It was just another one of those games, a genuine ambivert. The only innovation was the hunting stuff, but even that was a version of the stealth from Assassin's Creed with some added bits but all of the infuriating trial-and-error twitchiness preserved.

So yeah, I'm not particularly excited about the sequel. I had to think for a bit about what game you were even talking about. I think I'm just done with open world games, at least in their current form (Breath of the Wild is a huge exception.) Give me a corridor to run down and a story to follow where all the beats are in the right order and spaced sensibly any day.

why do you hate strong women felt

The only innovation was the hunting stuff

Even that just felt like an irritatingly complicated version of the kind of thing I'd already seen in Far Cry 3. There was just so much stuff to craft, so many different kinds of ammo and traps and armour. It was so overwhelming for so little benefit.

What feltmonkey said, as ever.

Because I'm still only really playing games when I should actually be sleeping this sort of thing should be right up my alley. You don't actually need to pay attention to what's going on!! You can literally play it while half asleep, and the plot will be bullshit anyway!! However, like most of these things that end up being padded with content I still have far too many to already work through. I suppose, in a moment of weakness two years from now, when an 'all the tat' edition goes on the store for £pennnies I might buy it, but not before then.

Also, like Ninchilla, I don't want to risk my basic PS4 with this, so until I can actually get a PS5 this will not trouble me at all; and even after a PS5 it'll have to be amazingly cheap / I'll need much more time on my hands.

Besides - Deep Rock Galactic is fun. That'll do for now.

I actually really liked the first game, plot and all, but Zero Dawn felt complete enough as an experience (especially with Frozen Wilds), and the reviews for Forbidden West (even the glowing ones) don't make it sound essential.

why do you hate strong robot dinosaurs guys

Well I bought it. SO SUCK IT GAMEPASS.

That'll learn em.

Taking Microsoft down one £70 game purchase at a time felt #fightthepower

This is…. an interesting one. In a way this does perhaps feel a bit like a closing of an era of this-type-of-game. It's beautiful, all very slick, and all very videogame. But it is essentially very much like every other game like this. The game systems, the movement, the characters, the way the story is relayed… it's not markedly different to an Assassin's Creed to be honest. We're screaming headlong into the law of diminishing returns. Does it look better than HZD1? Yes. But not much. Better than AC Odyssey? I guess. Ish?

In terms of some general stuff, the 60fps vs 30fps choice is actually quite a complex one. The 30fps mode looks markedly better in 4k. 60fps is significantly more playable, but quite…. fuzzy? To the point where I even swapped backwards and forwards a few times (until I settled on 60fps because I'm not a psycho). But this does bleed into a little bit of a problem - so dense are the visuals it does inhibit gameplay a bit. The screen is so dense with icons, high resolution textures, smoke, post-processing and particles that picking out jump points or even enemies ends up relying on game systems to actually physically highlight them for you. The native 4k does actually help here, so dropping to the Favour Performance mode grants a benefit in frames, but not so much in terms of picking stuff out of the busy environments.

This is an area Last of Us 2 does a lot better - it looks similarly pretty but very carefully pairs what you're doing (shooting, navigating, looking) to the type of environment you're in. HZD2 just shits graphics on the screen for jollies. Which can look great, but is also quite fatiguing. But, so far, it does look great. Like the sort of thing if you'd shown your 8 year old self that videogames would look like in the future they simply wouldn't have believed you.

The plot is pretty shit. I mean, HZD1 gradually lost its way in a bizarre, increasingly weird fascination on taking what could've been a fairly solid Waterworldy post-apocalypse take into…. I don't even know what. Peak videogame overwritten science fiction bollocks? HZD2 clearly has to lean even more into this - and even about an hour in it's a bit irritating. It's a bit of a shame - I suppose in 10s of hours of videogames you have to explain why there are robot dinosaurs, but I'm not sure it's really going to be something you can ever explain in a satisfactory way. Not without better writers.

And the final thing is actually thanks to Eurogamer's (fair) review - once you notice how often Aloy sighs and points things out it becomes teeth-gratingly annoying. The pointing shit out thing is very videogame, but the voice acting is straight up weird. Aloy sounds so totally done with everyone's shit it lends the entire game a sort of air of piloting a reluctant toddler round a supermarket.

But it's good. Fine. I feel like God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Last of Us 2 and even Uncharted 4 remastered might be better versions of what's on offer. But it's still a great example of the scope, vision and sheer eye-bleeding beauty of modern videogames.