In total, my PS5 showed 110 hours logged in Horizon Forbidden West. For starters- it's remarkable to me that I was willing to spend that much time in an open-world game to begin with. I find myself avoiding large open-worlds entirely these days, but it's a testament to Guerilla that I wanted to see as much of the world that they crafted as I could.

On the other hand, I wish I could say that all of my time with HFW was stellar. Burning Shores really reminded me of why I started to sour on the Horizon formula late in my playthrough and while it brought many welcome additions, I think Guerilla has a tall task ahead of them to bring some innovation to the next Horizon game.

My main complaints are with the game's combat, something that on the whole, I felt was a downgrade from Zero Dawn, despite the plethora of new options. Aloy just doesn't feel as strong as she did late game, and being stun locked, dazed, blown away by various machines, sometimes into another attack, really, really became tiresome, even when you're facing down a regular group of mobs.

I think Horizon at this point too suffers from a beautiful world that I could look at for hours, but very little actual substance on the ground- and I think that's Guerilla's big challenge: they've made the world too big and too beautiful and set themselves on a trajectory to top that again, when I would love to have less in a FW follow up.

I'll briefly say that, the one thing that kept me coming back is Aloy's story, and even though there's little overall development, I feel hard pressed to say that I'm not interested in seeing how everything concludes as well as Aloy's developing relationship with her allies.