Burning Shores feels like a DLC that lost the plot

I'm writing this very skeletally and pre-emptively because I'd love to be proven wrong, but just a handful of hours in I also can't help but wonder, without wading into the murky waters of the subreddit, if I'm not alone in having these early thoughts. I first wrote about Pat Riley's "disease of more" concept when grappling with why Mass Effect: Andromeda struggled to make a case for itself, and I probably referenced it in both official threads about God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon: Forbidden West as well. If I didn't mention it while discussing The Last of Us Part II, it was only because I felt an undue burden to be kind to that game in the wake of the...all that...at the time.

But, again admitting I haven't had until today much time to sink into this game, and this will be one of those Nodima moments where I'm likely writing multiple paragraphs to myself throughout the day rather than doing the sane thing and just waiting to write a full, coherent, (self-)edited statement...this thing gives me the DOOM Eternal Vibes. For now I'll set aside forgetting that activating a Valor Skill requires pulling up the weapon wheel then pressing R1. I'll set aside that there's, like, eight of those skills and using any one of them in the wrong moment means you just gotta deal with it and then do some good, quality fightin' to build enough meter to try another. I'll set aside that there's roughly a billion different permutations of weapons and armor available, alongside the many cosmetic dealerships offering dyes, face paints and whatsoever else all those icons on the compass imply.

I played the base game directly alongside Elden Ring. Gran Turismo 7 was also involved. I had a very good time bopping between those three games. If it's not in the Horizon discussion thread, it's certainly in the Elden Ring one, but I emphatically argued that neither game is a solution to or emblem of a problem with open world game design. It's just...I recently completed The Witcher 3's base campaign for the third time, playing most of it with only the main quest markers on, and while I still agree ...

Y'know, I'm just rambling around what I actually want to say, which is that the new enemies I've encountered so far really suck, they're just the most annoying versions of previously annoying enemies. The very first big fight you'll likely encounter answers the question "what if Glinthawks were exponentially more powerful, mobile and aggressive" with the short of discouraging glare a parent gives their toddler when they push another kid off the see-saw. Frozen Wilds introduced itself with a pretty wild new robot encounter as well, but the Scorcher was curious and fun, quickly revealing itself to have served a purpose in the story as well. I don't even want to learn the name of those dumb birds, nor the frog that follows about an hour later. As a devout "Zero Dawn has perfect combat" dude, this DLC so far seems determined to distill every complaint about enemy A.I. aggressiveness and player camera situational awareness distortion (is it OK if I note that could stand for PCSAD, which makes me laugh?) into a finely tuned machine of hella annoying encounters.

And the data points seem to have uniformly turned the corner from, excuse the simplification, Witcher 3 notes to Cyberpunk holos. The primary writing seems fine so far, though I feel slam dunked by Anthony Edwards into the scenario, but all the "world building" so far is excruciating.

Anyway, I'm kinda bummed out, and this is my first day I get to spend a lot of time with this new piece of a game I very much enjoyed, so I felt like I had to get all this off my chest in case I feel completely differently several hours from now. Three or four hours into Burning Shores, I just can't get over how often I find myself thinking, "this seems so convoluted."

Forbidden West is a really beautiful game the facial animation even on low level NPC's is quite astounding, but the combat was a step back it felt like I had too many tools and upgrading them was needlessly grindy. Upping the ante without improving the tools is why I waited before buying, same for the inevitable sequel.

welp, i'm back on my bullshit-

spoilers if you care about endgame stats:

whoops-

probably took 13ish hours, all told.

i really enjoyed Burning Shores! i think i'll want to play it one more time before my opinion completely settles on it, but for $20 i have very little to complain about. Frozen Wilds is probably the better of the 2 (characters/writing had a much greater impact on me).

to be clear- this content isn't changing any minds about HFW; all the design pluses and minuses are ever present so YMWV. additionally i think the storytelling here isn't their strongest- to be a bit more specific (spoilers, obvi): mind control is never a satisfying plot point, and i don't think the romance had enough time to develop into something believable. but given it's essentially a side-story, i'm not worrying about it too much.

where it really shines for me is in environment design and new riffs on existing mechanics. Post apocalyptic holo-dinosaur Universal Studios is just a friggin fun idea, a mount that can fly and deep sea dive is a hoot, being able to grapple to stunned enemies is clever solution to an annoying problem, and the Zenith weapon just feels like the devs said "Y'all seen that Fifth Element?"

also- for all the shortcomings as a character- i continue to applaud Guerilla for rooting their villains in believable narcissism- and for a DLC expansion set in cataclysmic LA- having the bad guy be a starfucker financier feels kinda right on the money.

so yeah, i'd say if you liked HFW, you're going to like this. if you're over it, this probably ain't gonna do it for ya!

I liked it, but I main lined it and dropped it, just like the main game. The first horizon was one of my favorite games of the PS4 generation, the setting and backstory was incredible to me and I ate it up. Forbidden west never got away from the fact that a sequel wasn’t needed or called for, and it’s content bloat made the whole of it less likable for me. In addition to that, the revisiting it with Burning Shores reminded me of one of my biggest complains about the series as a whole: the action is diminished due to its animation priority in a setting that needs more speed than it allows for. Fighting in this game can be thrilling, but then can come so a sudden stop when you get knocked over, then beaten into a game over before you even get up from the initial hit. Same with the platforming, where the climbing and jumping constantly feels like a suggestion instead of an input. After the 5th time I fell to my death while doing a simple, set-piece climbing section at the end, I damn near gave up. It was dumb luck that I made it and finally hit a checkpoint the last try.

I love Horizon. I really do. And while forbidden west wasn’t as strong as the first game, I don’t think it’s bad in any interpretation of the word, but the controls just killed my enthusiasm and this DLC didn’t fix the issue. I really, REALLY hope there is a control overhaul for the third game.

I'm cautiously optimistic on the DLC.

I did not like the original Horizon AT ALL. Actually, I take that back, I enjoyed the storyline for the most part, but could not stand the actual combat. I'm not sure what changed between that and Forbidden West, but Forbidden West was up there with Elden Ring as my GOTY. I found myself enjoying the combat for the most part (I played on a lower difficulty though, so maybe that's why?) and was all in on the sequel's crazy sci-fi story.

Although, it's been a while now since I finished it up, so I'm just hoping the controls come back to me if I do hop in on the DLC.

I also hated those birds so much in the beginning.

Finished the story yesterday, along with most side missions. It was a nice addition to a base game that grew way too bloated for me. Thankfully you don’t need to use every ability in your possession to get through the game, because once again there were at least 4 weapons I didn’t use even once, not to mention the dozen different alternative firing methods and whatever else that’s squeezed into those five skill trees. I really hope they’re able to tighten things up for whenever the third game comes out.

If you read my review of Forbidden West, you'll find a man who enjoyed himself quite abundantly yet struggled to figure out why that spark of joy he felt during Zero Dawn never quite resurfaced. In the months since the game's release, if I've found any words to explain that feeling it's these: the Horizon franchise has a bloat problem.

That extends from everything, from the story it's telling to the graphics it's presenting to the gameplay it's offering. Each piece of the puzzle has become so layered and intricate that I can't help but worry abundance has overtaken coherence in the design philosophy of this franchise.

Speaking strictly in terms of gameplay, Burning Shores honestly doesn't offer much. Its new enemies only serve to emphasize the combat's flaws, as they all either fly or jump astronomically while delivering area of effect elemental attacks that seem to coat the entire play field. For the eleventeenth time I can't stress enough that I find Zero Dawn, as well as its DLC Frozen Wilds, at the peak of its powers playing on Ultra Hard. I am definitively NOT a "hard mode guy", but for me that game just WORKS.

Forbidden West, with its density of mechanics and an armory intent on quadrupling that density, mucked up the bullseye Guerilla Games had hit previously. Burning Shores doesn't even pretend to acknowledge that criticism, instead doubling down with even more new mechanics. Paired with new enemies that, again, are purely pieces of shit that can get wrecked, by far the greatest sin this DLC commits is something I never thought I'd say about Horizon: I just wanted the combat to be over with.

In other words, I played on Normal, and I sometimes fantasized about Easy.

That being said, the DLC is so short and ultimately lacking in normal combat encounters it never came to that. Still...in comparison to Frozen Wilds, it's odd that Burning Shores ultimately amounts to a boss rush, shoehorning tried and true boss mechanics into a game that was always about improvisation on an open battlefield. The worst of these is the pair of final bosses, who in tandem do a titanic job of kneecapping one of this franchise's great terrors. Turns out, it's just a bunch of glowing red dots - some world eater.So why three stars? Despite a brevity that's honestly shocking considering how laborious Forbidden West's storytelling could be, the new characters are interesting and/or likable.

Complaints that everything moves to fast are warranted, because without the pull of goofing around on side quests and taking on machines just because they're there to be fought this story can be completed in what feels like three or four hours. This means we get an older style of video game story, with characters asking players to fill in some blanks in terms of their hows and whys. In terms of gameplay (or trophies) this also means you'll encounter plenty of vendors with new equipment, strangers with new tasks they can't handle on their own, even a new cauldron to delve into...but nothing about the DLC motivates the player to care about these things. Even a special new weapon introduced by the story can be entirely ignored - it's all so much, and for what?

As for where that ultimately takes us...which is controversy of the most inane order...the player is met with perhaps the first choice they can make for Aloy that has some actual stakes to it. Granted, it's the final moment of a DLC, so there's no use presuming which if any Guerilla will choose for themselves in the inevitable third part of this story, but I understand the impulse. This is a DLC with an extended nod to The Last of Us Part II's museum scene, after all - it's fan service, clunky and enthusiastic as this sort of thing tends to be.I made the choice that felt right for Aloy. Others will make the choice that feels right for their Twitch streams. Others won't even play the game and hate it on misguided principles. To which I say that's a real shame, because there sure are lots of concrete reasons to be worried Horizon as a franchise is a little lost at sea.