Horizon Forbidden West

Just completed it.

I’d say that the first half, or a little more, is fantastic. But then for me it went downhill with repetitive combat and annoying niggles like having to wait to scan every enemy. Melee is also poor.

It picked up right at the end though.

But those boss fights at the end go on, and on, and on. There’s so many easy ways to land hits on them, over and over.

Beautiful looking game. Shallow gameplay, but beautiful.

Sucker Punch are far superior when it comes to 3rd person gameplay.

Sigh. I am finding this a very frustrating game. It seems to actively want to make exploration boring and pointless. I keep exploring and every fucking place I go says “thanks for trekking 5 minutes to get here, you don’t have the tool so fuck off.”

It is so common and annoying, I don’t remember the first game being so wasteful of your time.

There is usually a fast travel point near things that are gated off so you can get back there fairly easily when you unlock the right gadget but, yes, actually being arsed to go back is another thing entirely.

Yeah, you're not really missing much in those locked off areas. Presumably meant to tickle that part of your brain that goes "ooooh, I'll come back here later", but that didn't trigger for me and I can't be fucked any more after trying a couple out.

I've got all of the gadgets now and off to the far west of the map. Think I'm at the point where I'll just crack on with the story. Has been a fairly enjoyable game, but just way too fucking big.

Turn on easy loot, bro. Life’s too short for that shit.

Loot is annoyingly arse about face. Surely shooting something off would destroy it? Like the skill is leaving it *on* the robo-dino while you’re killing it?

And then all of the upgrade paths are blocked because ballsac webbing is destroyed *when* you shoot it.

Fucking bellowbacks.

Got the Plat.
Not that keen on the direction the story took. On to Elden Ring, but I kind of want something little to play through.

Aye. Nice thing is that the gf is visiting her folks this weekend so I've basically got 3 days free to just sit on my arse and die repeatedly.

I’ve found Elden a total departure from HFW.

Although at first I was comparing it, and it felt like massive downgrade graphically or at least technically. The frame rate still hurts me compared to HFW.

But now I’m 7 hours in, ER is relaxing more often than not. You can just wander and chill.

Although totally different style, combat is so much better in ER than HFW, or any Assassins Creed game too.

The ps5 upgrade is free for horizon, I assume that also applies to the disc version.

The upgrade version is the same as the retail.

Ha, that really is a unique way of getting people to buy a more expensive version. When I say unique I mean cuntish.

I went back to the store and got the same person. Asked them to price match the shop next door, as I’d rather at least give some money to the business I later sell the game to. She wanted me to find their store page on my phone with the price but also showing they had it in stock, and I was like…. (fuck this sounds complicated) It’s okay, I’ll go buy it from them.

Sony are so organised with this that it doesn’t even start installing the PS4 version at all, it’s automatically paused.

So far I’m finding the Changed-For-No-Reason UI to be annoying, but haven’t made it far enough in make a judgement. I’m a bit surprised they haven’t designed the game to give you any “fuck, that looks amazing” moments in the early game. The big snake was pretty good I guess. Looks like they were very focussed on working with motion capture actors who were directed to move their arms around a lot.

Patches may have smoothed it out, but performance had some odd graphical weirdness going on when I last played it, and it’s not a particularly twitchy game that requires reflexes, so quality was better for me.

Not tried it since the patch/elden ring but quality was unbearable. Same issue with Dying Light 2. I'm probably spoilt with high fps on PC and going back to 30 is very jarring   Is FW even 30 on quality ?