Horizon Forbidden West™ Complete Edition Review Summary

Stunning graphics, engaging combat, and a strong story shine, but it's slightly weaker than its predecessor with bugs and Aloy spoiling puzzles.

Stunning Graphics and Visuals: The game consistently receives high praise for its visual quality, including graphics, character models, lighting, textures, weather effects, and art direction. The Decima engine is highlighted for delivering a beautiful and optimized experience.

Engaging Combat and Mechanics: Combat and mechanics are described as engaging, fun, and improved from the first game, with many machines, skills, weapons, and tactical use of the environment. Side quests are varied and not repetitive, contributing to overall enjoyment.

Strong Story and Characters: The story benefits from visual storytelling, cinematic set pieces, and more lively dialogue, with well-developed characters like Varl and Gaia. The lore is enriched through dialogues and notes, and older characters are remembered fondly.

Beautiful and Explorable World: The open world is praised for its beauty, variety, and exploration opportunities, including interesting locations like caves and tactical environmental interactions. Collectibles are plentiful without border walls.

Cool New Machine Designs: New machine types look cool and are well-designed, with favorites like Slitherfang. However, some note a slight design downgrade from HZD.

Weaker than predecessor: The combat, mechanics, story, and character development are widely considered worse or too similar to the first game, lacking meaningful improvement.

Bugs and crashes: Multiple game-breaking bugs, crashes, and a blue screen issue on PC severely harm the experience, with some occurring early on.

Aloy spoils puzzles: Aloy frequently talks over puzzles, spoiling solutions, and her dialogue is excessive and annoying, which frustrates players.

Story is boring: The story is consistently described as boring, bland, and uninteresting, failing to draw players in.

Aloy is annoying: Aloy is often described as annoying, arrogant, and self-centered, always refusing help, with an inconsistent and shallow personality.

Combat system praised: The combat system is generally praised for working well, with good graphics and mechanics. Players enjoy the variety of weapons, elements, and combos.

Open world design: The game is described as an open-world adventure with a huge map, many activities like collectibles and caves, and side quests. However, some find it very linear with little variation.

Climbing system criticism: Players note climbing is present but often linear and restricted to designated points. The system is criticized for being tedious until late-game flight is unlocked, with visible climbing paths only via scan.

Skill tree issues: The skill tree includes valor surges and ult bonuses, but many players feel some perks should be base abilities and that the tree has many useless or overly long skills. Passive upgrades like '2% melee damage' are seen as lazy.

Machine overriding requires parts: Overriding machines after completing cauldrons requires rare machine parts, which some players find frustrating and restrictive. This is a repeated complaint.

Severe FPS drops in areas: The game experiences FPS drops as low as 10-30 FPS on low settings at 1080p, and drops to 35 FPS in certain areas despite configurations targeting 90 FPS. Some players note drops especially in the DLC main city.

Poor optimization on PC: Many reviews label the game as poorly optimized for PC, citing issues even on powerful hardware (e.g., RTX 5060 only gets 40+ FPS). The game also suffers from underutilization of GPU and constant frame drops.

Graphics bugs and visual glitches: Players encounter graphical issues such as face texture detachment, blue filter rendering corruption, flashing lights, blurry bugged faces, and black/flickering faces when Nvidia Reflex+Boost is enabled. These detract from visual experience.

Excellent graphics and visuals: Despite technical issues, the game's graphics, animations, and visuals are praised as outstanding. The DECIMA Engine is described as beautiful and lightweight by some users.

Performance issues on Steam Deck: The game runs poorly or is not supported on Steam Deck, with optimization issues specifically noted for this platform. Users report it either runs poorly or is outright unsupported.

Play the first game instead: Many reviewers suggest playing the first game instead, as this sequel suffers from poor writing, story issues, design regressions, and is not an improvement. They feel the original is a better experience.

Avoid due to performance issues: A large group of reviewers strongly advise against buying due to severe performance issues, including stuttering and unplayability on PC. These problems make the game frustrating and not worth the purchase.

Only worth on sale: Multiple reviews indicate the game is not worth full price, only being acceptable when purchased at a significant discount. This reflects a general sense of low value for the cost.

Only for combat and graphics fans: Some reviewers see value only for those focused on combat, graphics, and open-world gameplay, but not for story or characters. They recommend buying only on sale if at all.

Tips for playing efficiently: A few reviewers offer specific tips: play on easiest difficulty, focus on main story, skip side content, and prioritize certain items. This suggests the game has padding or difficulty balance issues.

Community fair range: $25.00 - $40.00.

Game completion: 80.0h.

Story completion: 25.0h.

Endgame: 10.0h.

The game starts slowly with a tedious story and unlikable protagonist, but becomes fun once the main narrative picks up around 20 hours in.

Reported time to anchor: 20h.

Friction: tedious repetitive side content; boring story and characters early on; annoying and poorly written protagonist at start; frustrating combat with overpowered enemies and slow healing; excessive grinding for gear upgrades.

Visual Wanderer: Slow, exploratory: takes time to enjoy scenery, often uses photo mode, climbs viewpoints, and wanders off the beaten path. Motivation: Aesthetic immersion and the joy of discovering a beautifully crafted world. Stance: buy.

Tactical Hunter: Methodical and strategic: plans attacks, exploits machine weaknesses, uses varied weapons and abilities, and enjoys mastering combat mechanics. Motivation: The challenge and depth of combat, including positioning, weak point targeting, and skill synergy. Stance: buy.

Lore Devotee: Story-driven: focuses on main and side quests for narrative, reads collectibles, and engages with character arcs. May skip grind to progress the plot. Motivation: Emotional engagement with the sci-fi narrative, worldbuilding, and character development of Aloy and others. Stance: sale.

Game performance varies by hardware tier: higher-VRAM/ RAM Windows cohorts mostly report smooth, high-FPS gameplay with only minor issues, while mid-range and lower-end setups see more frequent stuttering, crashes, or mixed experiences.

Windows 12-15GB VRAM / 16-31GB RAM: positive. Most users report good performance and smooth gameplay, though some mention occasional crashes or optimization quirks.

Windows 8-11GB VRAM: positive. Majority of players experience good frame rates and optimization, but a few report stuttering or FPS drops in DLC areas.

Windows <8GB VRAM / 16-31GB RAM: mixed. Many players achieve smooth performance with some graphical tweaks, but a notable minority face crashes, texture issues, or unoptimized behavior.

Steam Deck: The game on Steam Deck requires tinkering: users must enable Proton Hotfix, adjust graphics (lower settings, FSR, frame gen), and accept occasional crashes (2 per 12 hours) and audio issues. It is playable but not seamless.

Linux and Proton: The game is largely playable on Linux/Proton with many users reporting flawless performance. However, notable Linux-specific issues exist: recurring audio problems (sometimes unresolvable) and occasional crashes. A few users require tweaks like Proton Hotfix or a specific Proton version. Overall, the experience falls into the 'Minor Tweaks' category as most can get in and play, but the audio and crash issues prevent a perfect score.

Monetization: User reviews contain zero evidence of microtransactions or predatory monetization. All financial references are limited to the one-time purchase price of the base game and the optional Burning Shores DLC, which is standard paid expansion content. No complaints about pay-to-win, loot boxes, currency obfuscation, or FOMO-driven shops were found. The game is widely praised for its quality without any mention of monetization issues.

External guides: The user reviews indicate a significant dependency on external sources like walkthroughs and wikis to overcome unclear quest progression, hidden mechanics, and missable content. While some complaints mention grindiness and bugs, the core issue is the game's inadequate explanation of its systems and objectives, placing players in the 'Student' tier of the Wiki Tax scale.