Edwin Crump
Horizon: Forbidden West was the competent, graphically impressive sequel to 2017’s Horizon: Zero Dawn, which was one of the first PlayStation games released on PC in this new multiplatform era.
And now, two years after it was released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, it is also on PC. And the port takes on the characteristics of the game itself. Competent, full-featured, relatively issue free, but ultimately unspectacular. We are now far beyond being excited at the mere prospect of a PlayStation game on Steam, and in the future porting house Nixxes and Sony may need to push their ambitions higher to regain the hype of the initial releases.
Horizon: Forbidden West continues the journey of Aloy as she seeks to discover the source of a blight threatening the land, coming up against new challenges and unexpected foes. The PC version has nothing new or specific to it in terms of the game’s narrative, but everything is here and fully featured. This means it includes the game’s Burning Shores expansion, which is a meaty addition to the main game that in my experience can be quite a bit harder (perhaps it was just my time away that made it feel trickier than it actually is).
As before, you can only access the DLC area after the very end of the main game, so unfortunately there is no concession to those who may have played through the original title on PS4 or PS5 and wanted to tackle the expansion on their PC. And again, there is no ability to transfer your Playstation save into the PC version, something I sorely missed after putting about 50 hours into it on Sony’s console. It seems like a missed opportunity, seeing as you can even link your Steam account to your PlayStation Network account. And while there is full DualSense support when using it wired, there is still no ability to get the full DualSense experience via wireless play, something Sony seems utterly uninterested in addressing.
I was happy to see though that there is a bevy of graphical options and settings to fiddle with, and there weren’t any strange exclusions of features. In terms of upscalers, there’s support for NVIDIA DLSS 3, including frame generation and DLAA, FSR2 and even Intel’s XeSS. There’s proper support for ultrawide displays, and in every other respect Horizon: Forbidden West can be configured like a true native PC port. Perhaps the only strangeness is that Nixxes continues to use a settings launcher to configure your experience prior to the game actually starting. Personally I appreciate this option but I know for some people it can be a minor annoyance.
But what about performance?
Given some of the issues with performance in recent releases of PlayStation exclusives such as The Last of Us: Part 1, I was a little trepidatious approaching Horizon: Forbidden West. Fortunately, while relatively heavy, I did not experience any strange PC performance issues in my time with Forbidden West on PC. Settings worked just as I expected them to, though I did not see as much of a boost as I was expecting with DLSS 3 Frame Generation at only around an extra 20FPS (this may be user error as I am still relatively new to using that option). Truthfully though, the game already looked excellent on PlayStation 5 and there aren’t any new options or settings that truly let your PC scale the visuals above the console version. So while it is solid, it is somewhat disappointing not to see any ray-tracing options or additions like Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion or Screen Space Directional Occlusion, both of which were added to God of War when it came over to PC.
For those who are interested in taking Forbidden West on the go with a Steam Deck, this won’t be a great experience. Even at the “Very Low” preset” and with FSR2 set to ‘Balanced’ I wasn’t able to maintain a consistent 30FPS, especially once you get into the main open world. This is a change from the first game, which just managed to run well enough to be one of the more popular titles on the Deck when it originally launched. It isn’t just the frame rate either, the frame times are unfortunately extremely inconsistent and there are big spikes relatively often.
Perhaps your tolerance for sub-30FPS gameplay is better than mine (to be fair, we did suffer through our fair share of PAL-related horrors back in the day – 17 FPS Ocarina of Time anyone?) but I imagine for most people Horizon: Forbidden West is simply too big for Steam Deck.
As game development costs spiral and the market size stagnates, publishers increasingly need to amortise the cost over more than one platform. Microsoft has been on both PC and Xbox day and date for years now, and with Sony we are finally in a somewhat regular cadence of PC releases a year or two after their console debut (Helldivers 2 – Sony published but independently developed excepted). It is just a shame that the two years between releases didn’t see Nixxes given the scope to actually expand the game’s visuals. It makes me wonder why we are left with such a long gap between drinks, seeing as there is very little reason for someone who has played the original to pick up this version – the audience is very different so releasing the PC version earlier is unlikely to cannibalise sales to any great degree. We are left with a competent, somewhat unexciting port that does exactly what it says on the tin.
If a PC release of Forbidden West is what you’ve been waiting for you can have no hesitation in picking it up but equally, there may be no reason to double dip, especially if you played it on PS5 with its impressive array of display and performance options.
Released: March 2023
Rating: M15+
Platforms reviewed: PC
Genre: Action
Developer: Nixxes Software
Publisher: Sony