Horizon: Forbidden West teaches players the power of friendship while blowing up robot dinosaurs

This story contains minor spoilers for Horizon: Forbidden West and Horizon: Zero Dawn.

A few hours into Horizon: Forbidden West, the latest marquee open-world adventure game for Sony's PlayStation, heroine Aloy stares at a statue of herself rendered in gold.

A plaque at its base hails her as the saviour of the city of Meridian, after her role in a major battle six months earlier. As an exile from the reclusive Nora tribe, Aloy (voiced by Ashly Burch) is uncomfortable with the public adulation. 

But she — and gamers along for the ride — will have to learn some tough lessons, including how to ask for support from friends, allies and frenemies alike, to save the world a second time.

In the sequel to 2017's Horizon: Zero Dawn, Aloy will still spend most of her time as a lone wolf, fighting off human rebels and robotic dinosaurs the size of a double-decker bus.

In that respect, Amsterdam-based developer Guerrilla Games plays it relatively safe, while adding some much-appreciated tools and weapons as Aloy treks across the giant map that stretches from the Grand Canyon in Arizona to the sunken ruins of San Francisco.

The story so far

The world of Horizon is set some time in the early 3000s. In the 2060s, human-made war machines gained sentience and started consuming all plant life, rendering the planet a sterile husk.

Though all life was wiped out, human-designed artificial intelligence helped a new generation of life emerge. Since then, humans have returned to a roughly pre-industrial, tribal level of civilization. Some of these tribes worship those who came before them.

And they're not alone. Sentient mechanical creations resembling long-extinct creatures also roam the countryside.

In Forbidden West, a plague called The Blight has overtaken the land, choking plant life and threatening to starve the people. It's up to Aloy to learn what's causing The Blight and find a solution to clear it.

The perfect shot

While the main quest looms large, players often find themselves caught in the middle of minor political squabbles between tribes or factions, and stopping to help beleaguered citizens.

Usually, players end up fighting one or more machines along the way. Dozens of new varieties of these machines make their debut in Forbidden West. Combat was one of the most impressive parts of Zero Dawn, and that remains true here.

There's nothing quite like pulling back on one of Aloy's bows, slowing down time and sniping a tiny explosive fuel canister on a robotic raptor. If you hit it, the canister explodes with a kinetic ka-pow that sends parts flying everywhere.

Using Aloy's Focus — an old world "relic" resembling a Bluetooth headset that can interact with old technology and add an augmented reality overlay to much of the natural world — she can scan machines for the weak points and form an attack plan.

The hectic fighting can mix with the terrain in unfortunate ways at times. It's not uncommon to get stuck on a rock by your feet and get stomped by a mastodon-like Tremortusk.

New weapons, like an exploding javelin, feel great and are easy to pick up and use. Others, like a slicer that requires you to throw and catch like a boomerang to adequately power it up, less so. Still, the breadth of options encourage experimentation.

Players can manipulate the camera, but it's placed a bit too close to Aloy's back. As a result it can struggle to give you a good vantage point, particularly when high-flying enemies zoom in for a dive-bomb.

Hollywood stars make a pit stop

Zero Dawn's story earned praise from critics and players alike for its condemnation of the hyper-capitalist billionaires who caused the destruction of the "modern" world.

Ted Faro, a tech magnate and war profiteer, created the machines that eventually went rogue and ate everything. Aloy learned that his selfish and petty actions doomed all of mankind.

As a sequel, Forbidden West tries to up the ante even further, and doesn't quite succeed. About a quarter of the way into the story, a new organization called Far Zenith arrive with mysterious but menacing intentions.

They get precious little screen time, other than Tilda, played with a detached panache by Matrix stalwart Carrie-Anne Moss.

A couple other Hollywood heavyweights make passing appearances. Angela Bassett plays Regalla, leader of a rebel faction of the Tenakth people who populate much of this world. But she's given few chances to do much other than snarl with menace.

Lance Reddick returns as Sylens, Aloy's sometimes-mentor, sometimes-rival. He steals every scene he's in by chewing the scenery, every line he utters dripping with condescension, like a disappointed math tutor.

Burch does the most heavy lifting, contributing dozens of incidental lines to help the player along — almost to the point of making it sound like she's constantly talking to herself.

Most importantly, she charts the character's path as a hypercompetent but weary heroine, who slowly — sometimes painfully — learns to accept help from her closest friends and comrades.

Native American appropriation problems persist

Some critics have raised the issue of Zero Dawn's tribes, noting the appropriation of Native American imagery and language, particularly the way the game describes warriors in Aloy's Nora tribe as "braves."

The word doesn't make it into Forbidden West's script, but the design of the Tenakth unequivocally evokes imagery reminiscent of some Indigenous people, including feathered clothing, tattoos and warpaint. We never learn exactly why the Tenakth — who are mostly dark-skinned — dress like this, nor why they speak a language filled with warrior tropes like blood and honour.

We do learn that the Tenakth found journals and voice recordings made by a fighter pilot squadron from the 2060s. The Tenakth worship them and have adopted several of their military traditions: calling fighters soldiers, their leaders marshals, and even saluting each other in a distinctly American manner.

I'm not the right person to judge whether or how culturally insensitive this might be. But a vaguely Native American faction worshiping American soldiers as revered ancestors feels very strange, to say the least.

The potential cultural missteps, along with a story that doesn't quite reach the heights of Zero Dawn, might give some fans of the series pause. But what Guerrilla Games does well, it does better than perhaps any other maker of big-budget prestige games out there today.

Horizon: Forbidden West is an astonishing achievement in game and environmental design. Perhaps most encouragingly, it carries a message of optimism and friendship — a welcome change from games in the genre that often wallow in cynicism and brutality.

Horizon: Forbidden West is available now for the Sony PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

Written by Jonathan Ore. Interview produced by Yamri Taddese.