Horizon Forbidden West™ Complete Edition — レビューGuerrilla Games' lush action RPG expands the hunting loop with intricate mechanical beast dismantling and weapon switching across a vibrant, visually stunning open world in this Complete Edition.

The first time this game truly grabbed me, I wasn't fighting anything. I was walking toward a sunlit jungle shrine, an old monument half-swallowed by tropical growth, while tribespeople nearby kept murmuring among themselves and the wind moved through the vegetation in slow, rolling layers. In that moment something clicked. The best thing about Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition isn't how big its world is. It's how much that world has to say. You can stand perfectly still and it keeps happening around you.

Distant ruins, vines climbing up close, the cold hard silhouettes left behind by a vanished machine civilization, all of it colliding with the warmth of primitive tribal life. The combination is strange. And it's precisely that strangeness that gives the game its hooks, the moments you actually remember. There is, of course, plenty of louder spectacle waiting later: bigger fights, more outrageous set pieces. But the reason I was willing to pour dozens of hours in wasn't the noise.

It was this peculiar ability to grow a sense of lived-in life back out of a post-apocalyptic ruin. A world where civilization died but the planet kept turning, kept rebuilding itself into a new ecological cycle. That tension, between an ending and a fresh beginning, is the quiet engine under everything that follows. Across the next several thousand words I'll dig into how its story, sound, visuals, combat, content, and overall package hold up, and where the Complete Edition earns your time and where it asks for patience first.

The most compelling part of this game's story still isn't the suspense of its main plot. It's the world that plot lives inside. After human civilization collapsed, a machine ecology rose up to claim the surface, and the relics of the old age get reinterpreted by the people of the new one. That setup is a strong hook, and it remains the single most magnetic idea here. You drift between beach ruins, watching tropical growth devour the wreckage of a lost world, and it becomes very easy to understand why so many players stay fascinated by this place.

A World You Read Like a Novel

There's a particular kind of viewing pleasure to it, almost like reading a science-fiction novel built around the archaeology of a dead civilization, except you're the one walking inside and physically turning the pages. The ancient-ruin puzzle questlines lean directly into this. You decode fragments of the old world, piece together how the machine ecology actually began, and slowly assemble a picture that the game never just hands you in a cutscene. It trusts you to look, and that trust is rarer than it sounds in a genre that usually over-explains itself.

That trust pays off because the environmental storytelling is doing real work. A toppled antenna array, a faded corporate logo, a sealed bunker door, each is a sentence in a larger account of how everything ended. The game shows you the world first, then lets understanding arrive on its own schedule, and the satisfaction of a theory clicking into place is entirely yours. For players who enjoy assembling lore from context rather than exposition, that patient, layered approach is genuinely satisfying, and it's the part of the narrative I found hardest to put down. The world doesn't lecture you; it leaves clues and waits, confident that a curious player will follow them all the way down.

Aloy's Mission and the Epic Mainline

The main thread, Aloy's personal mission and the larger drive to save the world, still carries a real epic weight. The central quest to recover the GAIA subsystems holds the big moments together. It's the spine that lets the game stage its grand confrontations, its sweeping reveals, its moments where the stakes visibly tip from personal to planetary. When the game wants to be a blockbuster, this mainline is what makes the spectacle land instead of feeling hollow, and it does land more often than not.

Around that spine, the tribal-diplomacy side content adds welcome texture. Working through the friction between the Oseram and Tenakth tribes gives the world a social dimension that the lore alone can't supply. These aren't just side errands; they're the conversations that make the setting feel populated by people with their own histories and grudges, not just a backdrop for one hero's journey. They keep the world from feeling like an empty diorama you happen to be crossing, and the best of them rival the mainline for sheer character. By the time you've untangled a few of these disputes, the Forbidden West stops feeling like scenery and starts feeling like somewhere people genuinely live.

Where the Grip Loosens

If we talk purely about the narrative itself, though, it doesn't sustain the same intensity in every stretch. The press response to the story was never fully unanimous, and that's fair. This plays less like a tale that makes you slap your knee every chapter and more like a steady, complete, perfectly watchable blockbuster mainline. It's reliable rather than electric, and that distinction matters when you're judging memorability.

That's not a large problem, but it does affect how much of the story sticks. You'll keep wanting to know what's going on with the world, yet you won't necessarily feel equally excited about every individual beat of progression. Some chapters coast. Some reveals land softer than they should. The momentum dips, then recovers, then dips again, and the rhythm never quite reaches the white-knuckle consistency of the genre's best.

Is that fatal? Not at all. Especially in a game whose primary drivers are exploration and hunting, the story only needs to do one essential job: keep feeding you new understanding of the world. As long as the worldbuilding keeps offering fresh interpretation, the narrative has already completed its most important task. The plot is the steady current; the world is the ocean, and the ocean is what you remember when the credits roll.

The sound design and score are clearly accomplished, and more importantly, they know how to serve the scene. The metallic feedback when a machine moves or strikes is a crucial part of what makes this combat system work at all. The reason you stay tense while removing parts and searching for weak points isn't only the system's complexity, it's that the audio gives you clear, legible cues for danger and for hits. On that level, the game does solid, dependable work.

Sound That Makes Combat Readable

The long-range weak-point loop leans on audio harder than you might expect. When you connect with a weak point, the sound confirms it instantly, and that confirmation is half of what makes the hunting feel precise. You're not staring at a damage number; you're listening for the crunch that tells you the component came loose. The elemental and trap mechanics get the same treatment, with each element carrying its own sonic signature so you can track a chaotic fight by ear as much as by eye, even when the screen is too busy to parse visually.

This is where the audio earns its keep. In a combat design built around reading machines and reacting fast, clear sound cues aren't decoration, they're information. The metallic weight of these creatures, the way their movements telegraph through audio before you even see them, all of it tightens the feedback loop that makes the fights satisfying. It's sound design doing structural work, and it does that job without ever drawing attention to itself. Turn the volume down and the combat genuinely gets harder, which is the surest sign the sound is pulling real mechanical weight rather than just decorating the scene.

A Score Like a Stock Base

The music, by contrast, plays more like emotional seasoning. During exploration it never hogs the spotlight; when a fight breaks out it pushes the pressure up; and as the story advances it knows when to pull back and when to let loose. This isn't a soundtrack that crams melody into your ears at every opportunity. It's more like a stock base in cooking, something you might not single out for praise day to day, but the instant it's missing you immediately feel that something's wrong.

The reason I only give this a 7 isn't that it's bad. It's that my memory of this dimension simply isn't as strong as it is for the systems that came before it. The problem isn't quality, it's distinctiveness. The audio reliably holds the overall experience up, but it never quite gets strong enough to single-handedly carve a particular fight or a particular journey permanently into your brain.

Within this game, that's already enough. The sound supports everything around it with real competence, and nothing here ever feels cheap or phoned in. It just hasn't reached the point of being something you have to rave about. It's the quiet, reliable foundation the rest of the experience stands on, and a 7 reflects exactly that, excellent at its job, short of iconic.

Some games treat their visuals as a backdrop. Others make the visuals the reason you keep moving forward. Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition lands firmly in the second camp. It doesn't just pile on detail for its own sake. It uses natural landscape, machine creature design, and ruin architecture to show you the worldview first, then lets you understand it gradually. The picture comes before the explanation, and that ordering is deliberate.

Civilization Died, the World Didn't Stop

Picture Aloy standing on a rock, with vegetation-covered machine ruins and volcanic terrain stretching out behind her. The visual combination is direct and unmistakable: civilization died, but the world didn't stop. This is the game's signature frame, and Guerrilla Games returns to it constantly because it encodes the entire premise in a single glance. Cold industrial wreckage gets wrapped in living green; a dead age gets recolonized by a new one.

What makes it work is restraint mixed with confidence. The art direction never lets the spectacle drown the legibility. You always know where the old world ends and the new ecology begins, because the contrast is composed rather than cluttered. Each biome reads as a chapter in an environmental story, and the consistency of that visual language across dozens of hours is part of why the world feels coherent instead of like a theme park of disconnected zones. The palette shifts as you travel, from sun-bleached deserts to drowned coastlines to volcanic highlands, yet the underlying grammar of ruin-meets-regrowth stays constant, so every new region feels like a fresh verse of the same song rather than a random reshuffle of assets.

Scale That Rewards Height

The advantage gets amplified the moment you start riding a flying machine, soaring over mountain ranges, snowfields, and canyons. From up high, looking down, the layering of terrain, the gradients of color, and the relationship between machine constructs and natural environment all become crystal clear. It's good-looking, and it's good-looking in a way that holds up to repeated viewing rather than wowing you once and fading.

Riding a machine mount isn't just a traversal convenience here; it's a visual delivery system. Gaining altitude reframes the whole map as a composed landscape, and the engine handles those long draw distances with real confidence. It feels like a high-budget science-fiction road movie, where every stretch of terrain reminds you this isn't an ordinary post-apocalyptic wasteland but a place that has already entered a new ecological cycle. The scenery isn't filler between objectives. It is, frequently, the objective, and there were whole stretches where I stopped chasing markers just to climb something tall and look. The game keeps earning those pauses, because the view at the top is almost always worth the climb, and the engine rarely stumbles in delivering it.

The Hardware Catch

The problem is that this visual impact leans on platform and hardware conditions. Press coverage noted that stability and optimization experiences vary across different platforms and configurations, and that's a real-world caveat, not a theoretical one. If your setup can't run it smoothly, even the most beautiful vegetation and lighting get discounted by a stuttering frame rate. Gorgeous foliage means little if it's hitching.

How serious is that? It depends on your machine. For players running at high resolution with high settings, this game genuinely delivers; the fidelity is among the best you can find in the open-world space. For people whose configuration sits right on the edge, it may not feel as effortless, and the experience can swing from breathtaking to merely fine depending on the moment and the load.

So I'm willing to give it a high score, but not a perfect one. The ceiling here is extraordinary, and on the right hardware the game is a showcase you'll want to screenshot constantly. The floor, though, is conditional, and a visual experience this dependent on your specific setup can't quite claim flawlessness. It's a near-elite presentation with an asterisk, and that asterisk is the only thing standing between a great score and a perfect one. If you have the rig to drive it, treat that asterisk as a footnote; if you don't, treat it as a warning, and plan to spend some time in the settings menu before the world looks the way these screenshots promise.

Combat in this game isn't simply about feeling powerful. It's more like picking apart a lock with a lot of steps, one that gets more addictive the deeper you go. For the first few hours you'll be busy. Genuinely busy. You're reading enemy body parts, thinking about elemental counters, switching gear, setting traps, and deciding whether this particular shot is going for raw damage or for prying a component loose. Once the rhythm settles, the flavor comes through, and you start to understand that long-range hunting is the real core joy here.

Hunting, Not Brawling

Imagine pulling a bow on a beach against a towering machine. That scene captures the whole temperament: it isn't a head-on slugfest, it's observation paired with precise commitment. You watch, you wait, and then you act. The long-range weak-point system is the heart of it. You aim at a specific part on a machine, knock a component free, and suddenly the whole encounter reshapes around the opening you just created. One good shot can turn a terrifying foe into a manageable one, and chasing that single perfect opening is the loop you keep coming back for.

When you line up a shot on a red-lit machine in the forest, the tension doesn't come from a health bar. It comes from the question, did I hit the right spot? That distinction is important. It takes the repetitive enemy-clearing common to most open worlds and forces it into something closer to a hunting film. Every encounter becomes a small puzzle of positioning, timing, and target priority, and solving it feels earned rather than automatic. Miss the part you were aiming for and the whole plan shifts; nail it and you feel like a sniper who just rewrote the fight in a single motion.

Depth That Stacks

The elemental-counter and trap system is where the depth really shows. Fire, ice, electricity, acid, each opens a different line of attack, and pairing those elements with well-placed traps turns a fight into a multi-step plan you assemble on the fly. Then rapid weapon switching lets you swap bows, ropecasters, and spears to match the situation, and that constant reshuffling is exactly what produces the sensation of picking a complex lock. You're never just mashing one approach, and the fights that go best are the ones where you chained three or four tools together without ever stopping to think.

Beyond combat, the traversal depth is generous. Free climbing and gliding open the map vertically instead of leaving it a flat field of fast-travel dots, and the underwater movement system extends everything into a third dimension beneath the surface. Stealth, exploration, mounts, underwater movement, none of these is novel on its own, but stitched together they keep the map from being a checklist of points you sprint between. The world becomes something you actually navigate, with hidden routes up cliffs and submerged passages that reward the players who treat the terrain as a puzzle rather than an obstacle.

The Early Wall

There's a real cost, though. So many systems means the early learning load runs high, and at times it can feel like the game is dumping too much information on you at once. There are menus to parse, mechanics to internalize, and a combat vocabulary to memorize before any of it becomes second nature. The ranged hunting loop that eventually defines the experience is buried, at first, under a pile of tutorials and overlapping options.

Does that hurt? It does. Plenty of players will feel the friction of those first hours, where the dismantling fantasy hasn't clicked yet and the interface seems busier than it needs to be. The long-range hunting loop that eventually defines the experience is buried, at first, under tutorials. The onboarding asks for patience, and not everyone will be in the mood to grant it. This is the single biggest barrier between the game and a wider audience, and it's worth knowing about before you bounce off the opening hours.

Is it fatal? Not quite. Because once you're past the learning curve, the feedback loop, where every dismantling feels more rewarding than a plain takedown, pulls you right back in. The long-range hunting that drives the whole experience finally clicks. The moment you stop thinking about which button does what and start thinking about which part to take off first, the game blooms. That payoff is worth the climb, even if the climb is steeper than it should be, and it's the reason this dimension earns the highest score of the bunch. Few open worlds make their combat this much of a craft, and fewer still make mastering it feel this good.

This game understands a dangerous rhythm: you only meant to head to the next quest marker, and half an hour later you're still on the road. You spot an outpost and want to clear it on the way. A collectible pops up at the roadside. One more turn, and maybe a fresh exploration lead appears. Its content volume doesn't intimidate you with a bloated quest list; it steals your time a little at a time, through the constant temptation of just a bit further.

The "Just a Bit Further" Trap

Picture sprinting through sunset wilderness toward a towering long-necked machine on the horizon. That image captures the game's whole temperament: there's always something on the map more worth detouring for than the destination itself. The rebel-outpost clearing objectives feed this perfectly, dotting the landscape with strongholds that beg for a quick stealth approach you didn't plan on taking. The pull is gentle but relentless, and it works precisely because each detour is short enough to feel free and rewarding enough to feel worthwhile.

The Complete Edition makes the buffet even larger. It folds the main game together with the extra content, and the Burning Shores expansion adds an entire story region with new enemy types and fresh terrain. The result is a package that's unambiguously generous in scale. Whatever pace you set for yourself, the game always has one more thing dangling just off your route, and that "one more thing" is the engine that quietly devours your evenings. You sit down meaning to play for an hour and look up to find three have vanished, which is either the highest compliment or the sternest warning, depending on your free time.

A Buffet for Completionists

Side quests, outposts, hunting challenges, gear progression, map exploration, all of it keeps handing you things to do. The Burning Shores hunting challenges in particular reward mastery, throwing high-difficulty timed hunts at you that test how fluent your dismantling combat has become. For players who love clearing maps, building gear, and scrubbing every corner of the world clean, this is almost a buffet. The portions are huge. You will leave full, and probably a little dazed at how the hours added up.

That breadth is the Complete Edition's clearest selling point. The central GAIA-recovery mainline gives you a backbone, but the surrounding sprawl is what justifies the "complete" label. If your idea of a good open world is a long checklist you slowly and satisfyingly empty, the game keeps that list stocked for dozens of hours. There is, simply, a tremendous amount to do, and most of it is built to a consistent standard rather than thrown in as filler. Even the smaller activities tend to have a hook of their own, which is more than a lot of bloated open worlds can honestly claim about their map clutter.

When Volume Becomes Obligation

Of course, more content doesn't mean the pace stays good forever. Once an open world is built this thick, repetition is a cost that's very hard to fully avoid. The ancient-ruin puzzle questlines and the endless outposts blur together if you binge them, and the structure starts to reveal its formula. The seams that were invisible in the first ten hours become visible by the fortieth.

The problem is that during certain stretches you'll feel like you're not discovering new things but completing map obligations. The experience slows down. What started as curiosity hardens into duty, and the difference between exploring and grinding gets thin. That shift isn't sudden, but it's real, and it lands hardest in the mid-to-late game when the novelty of the systems has worn off.

Is that fatal? It depends on whether you're built for this kind of game. If you enjoy checklist-style progression, it's deeply addictive, and the sheer quantity becomes a feature rather than a flaw. If you value a continuous stream of fresh stimulation instead, the mid-to-late stretch may leave you a little fatigued. The content is enormous either way; whether that enormity reads as a gift or a chore comes down entirely to your appetite, and you should be honest with yourself about which one you are before you commit.