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.

The post Horizon: Forbidden West (PC) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Almost one year after the epic play of Horizon Forbidden West and hot off the heels of the PSVR2 side game we get a meaty DLC.

Burning Shores places you into a narrative that takes place after Horizon Forbidden West.

The a singular Zenith escaped and high tailed it to an area called Burning Shores. Tracking him down Aloy meets Seyka who is there trying to find her sister and other members of her tribe that have mysteriously vanished.

Aloy sees the coincidence between Seyka’s missing sister and the Zenith that survived. Naturally the two team up to help each other out on their respective missions and they become close. Real close.

At times Seyka almost outshines Aloy. She’s not afraid to break tradition and literally do whatever she has to locate her sister and save her tribe. Even if this means breaking her cultural taboo’s.

And what of the Zenith?

Unlike other Zenith characters in the main game you’ll get to know this one real well.

Gameplay simply further expands on the goodness that Horizon Forbidden West already has and takes us through a more personal journey with Aloy and NPCs like never before in a Horizon game.

Now I did say that this DLC is meaty. It is.

There’s a lot to this area of Burning Shores and of course exploration is a must.

I found the difficulty spikes to be more of a challenge than in the main game, but fortunately you will have Seyka to help you out at times.

And it’s not just enemies that will make it difficult, the overgrown, crumbling buildings in a dystopian world, where nature has taken back the Earth has many hazards.

For DLC, Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is big. All up you can expect a minimum of 10 hours for a full play-through. To access this new DLC, if you download it, you will need to have completed the main game first, unlike Frozen Wilds which could be taken on midway.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is near-to a full game in it’s self and of course simply further expands upon the Horizon universe.

If you’ve completed Horizon Forbidden West then this is the next chapter, however if Burning Shores sounds like it’s good for you, play through the main game to get to this epic add-on.

The post Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores (PS5) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

As developers create compelling PlayStation 5 (PS5) and PlayStation 4 (PS4) games, players are building up their game libraries and eagerly searching for high-capacity add-on storage options.

Seagate has expanded its storage capacity for PS4 and PS5 consoles with their officially licensed external Game Drive — featuring 2TB and 4TB capacities, available in Australia and New Zealand.

Levelling up the company’s line of PlayStation storage for gamers, the new external hard drive offers the ultimate game vault for PS5 and PS4 storage and delivers the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.

Specifically designed and optimised with firmware to work with PS4 and PS5 consoles, these drives are lightweight and offer plug-and-play installation in under two minutes with no tools required — so players can jump into action. Connected and powered with high-speed USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB 3.0), Seagate’s add-on storage options for PlayStation consoles do not need a separate power cord, making it easy for players to play from anywhere.

Additionally, to celebrate the new Game Drive and the release of the PS5 and PS4 game, Horizon Forbidden West, Seagate collaborated with Sony Interactive Entertainment and Guerrilla to bring fans the Horizon Forbidden West Limited Edition Game Drive.

Inspired by the open world of Horizon Forbidden West, the officially licensed collectible HDD displays graphics on the exterior of the drive that highlight the strength and mystery of the Horizon Forbidden West hero, Aloy. Available in 2TB and 5TB capacities, the Game Drive gives players the power to store their library of PS5 and PS4 games.

Owners can also play their PS4 games right from the drive.

The new drives include a three-year limited warranty giving players peace of mind. The Horizon Forbidden West Limited Edition Game Drive will be available to purchase at retails from 29 April , 2022.

Seagate’s Game Drive for PlayStation consoles 2TB is available now while the 4TB will be available in June 2022.

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The adventures of exiled Nora huntress and saviour of her people, Aloy, continues as she journeys to the Forbidden West.

Amsterdam-based first-party Sony studio Guerrilla Games invites players to return to a post-apocalyptic future in Horizon: Forbidden West. The follow-up to the 2017 action/adventure RPG, Horizon: Zero Dawn has players, once again taking on the role of Nora huntress, Aloy.

Set in the future after a cataclysmic event wipes out life on planet Earth, Aloy’s world is one whereby nature has reclaimed the planet and a new human civilisation grown from the ruins of the past. Set thousands of years into the future, the developers have suggested that Aloy’s adventures are set in a post-post apocalyptic future.

The beginning of Horizon: Forbidden West summarises the event of its predecessor, so there is no immediate need to play the first game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, to enjoy this sequel. That being said, the first game and its DLC expansion, The Frozen Wilds, are very good and worth experiencing for yourself.

During the first game, the secret of Aloy’s birth and the cause of the world’s destruction was revealed. Aloy is a clone of the leader of the Zero Dawn project. The project was devised to create an AI system called Gaia, to repopulate the Earth after a global extinction event caused by out-of-control self-replicating military robots. The plan was for AI subsystems to attack the robots, terraform the planet and reintroduce plants and animals before releasing humans back onto the surface.

Things didn’t go to plan resulting in malevolent robotic creatures that roam the world and a malfunctioning AI subsystem called Hades bent on destroying all life. At the end of the first game, Aloy defeats Hades’ forces, but the AI is captured by Sylens, Aloy’s enigmatic mentor.

The world-building and Aloy’s secret origin dealt have been dealt with by the first game. This leaves Guerrilla Games free to further develop the rich cultures and environments without the need for exposition.

Forbidden West starts some months later, with Aloy now famous and the Saviour of Meridian, one of the big cities in the first game. Between games, Aloy has been learning about the old world as she seeks a backup of Gaia. The terraforming AI is required to finish replenishing the Earth as across the land, a red plant, called the blight, is destroying crops, killing animals, and making people ill.

When Sylens contacts Aloy, once more, he sends her on another quest, this time into the Forbidden West, to locate a rumoured location of a Gaia backup. of course, the Forbidden West is fraught with its own mysteries.

Whilst the first game explains what happened, it doesn’t really explain why. Although the plot does telegraph itself somewhat, there’s still enough intrigue and WTF moments to keep the story exciting for this sequel. The game also continues to introduce new tribes, like the inhabitants of Plainsong who worship the robots that previously sowed crops for them to eat, but now only serve to spread the deadly blight.

Horizon: Zero Dawn was a love it or hate it game, and I see Horizon: Forbidden West being the same. The epic world-building, a vast plot, and sweeping vistas distils down to a standard mission-based open-world game with hunting, crafting, melee, and ranged combat. The game definitely takes a leaf out of the Ubisoft school of game creation with the open-world mechanics that Sony games have used in everything from Spider-Man to Days Gone.

But, if it works, why fix it?

Forbidden West may be more of the same, but everything is bigger and more refined. As before players have a map that is slowly revealed as it is explored or unlocked via climbing to the top of the gigantic roaming “tall-neck” robotic creatures. As well as the main quest mission, there are side-missions, salvage contracts, errands, and other activities to discover. There’s a lot to do and huge new environments to explore.

The climbing is more prolific and Aloy has a grapple called a pullcaster for pulling certain objects and latching onto grapple points. Early on Aloy unlocks the shieldwing, a device that can be used to glide down from a height. There are new enemies, both human and robotic, and Aloy has a few more weapons at her disposal as well.

Hunting, salvaging, and gathering are still a big part of the game, like with its predecessor. This time, however, a full inventory means that scavenged items are transported to Aloy’s stash rather than having to be left in the field. Doesn’t make sense from a logical point of view, but makes gameplay a bit easier and more fun. The hunting/gathering mechanic also means that potions, ammo, and other consumables can be easily replenished by spending a few minutes looking around. Crafting is a big part of the game, as well as upgrading outfits and weapons.

As you’d expect, completing tasks and defeating the robots gains XP which can be used to attain skills via a series of skill trees broken down into specialisations. Key among these are valor boosts which grant Aloy special temporary buffs.

Horizon: Zero Dawn was, and still is, a great-looking game. Forbidden West ups the resolution for PlayStation 5 owners and increases the number of incidental animations and lighting effects, bringing Aloy’s world to life with even more clarity. PlayStation 5 owners also get to choose a graphics mode that favours resolution, at a lower frame rate, or favours performance over resolution. Even on the performance setting the visuals look stunning.

The character models and animations look particularly good, as do the animal-like machines that Aloy must confront. You can see incredible detail right down to the tiny hairs on characters faces. But it’s the breathtaking world that really shines. It’s difficult to explore the mesh of familiar, but ancient, ruins and the new world that has grown on top of it without stopping and switching to photo mode all the time.

The look and feel of the game, as with its predecessor, does have an air of the famous sci-fi comic magazine Heavy Metal about it. It’s an epic adventure rich with the cultures of the post-apocalyptic tribes all trying to make sense of the relics of the past.

All in all, Horizon: Forbidden West cements Aloy’s adventures as a pillar of the PlayStation game catalogue. The story, setting, and gameplay are epic; almost overwhelmingly so. If the first game didn’t quite get the recognition it deserved, this sequel should correct that. What a game to start 2022 with.

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