Horizon Zero Dawn: The Forbidden West is a sequel, and it feels like one. While the central storyline started in Horizon Zero Dawn is well-covered and well-pursued by this sequel, The Forbidden West, the second game has so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of it all, and yet it has a weirdly vacant, empty world in which all of it is happening.

For all that, I enjoyed my time with Aloy and company (and it is “and company” in a very wanna-be Mass Effect way).

The Forbidden West is slightly upgraded in terms of graphics and assets, and the overall effect is breathtaking. The Forbidden West is a very pretty game, even moreso than the remastered edition of the original. The new settings, including caves, underwater, underwater caves, swamps, and seashores are all beautifully and artfully designed and decorated, and running around inside them is a source of delight if you’re the sightseeing type.

The central storyline restarts with Aloy trying to track down a surviving copy of the GAIA files, the only AI capable of restoring the globe-spanning and now slowly decaying terraforming system. This leads her westward to locations where she can supposedly find one. As one expects, she does find one, but there are complications which involve adventures to all corners of the map to find other, missing parts of the system, which in turn lead to running into one or two Big Bads, with the usual plot complications of double-crosses, underhanded schemes, and hidden agendas all leading up to the big reveal, the boss battle, and the bigger reveal leading up to the next game; the usual mass of Plot that follows around any open-world game this big. There are more than a few laugh lines, wham lines, and just outright tearjerking to keep it all moving along.

And yet, there’s something weirdly empty about The Forbidden West. The first game [spoiler alert if you haven’t played the original Horizon Zero Dawn game] had four tribes: The Nora, the Carja, the Oseram, and the Banuk, and there were relationships from a century-deep backstory between these groups that carried plot and motive. The Carja were everywhere, the military heavies of the game, still recovering from a civil war which left rebel camps everywhere, the Oseram had divided feelings about the Carja, and so on. The core NPCs, such as Vala and Erend, had reasons for disliking the other tribes, and even individuals in the other tribes, but they also recognized the value of trading or learning from them. HZD’s setting felt alive, like things happened in it even when you weren’t paying attention.

There’s very little of that in The Forbidden West. The tribes of The Forbidden West don’t interact very much at all. The Carja and Oseram have a trading district on the north-east corner of the map, so you can visit them. The Oseram have a tradition of digging out the ruins of the past, “delving,” so you run into them in The Forbidden West quite a bit. The other tribes: the Tenakth, the Utaru, and the Quen, barely interact at all. They’re all depicted as xenophobic; Aloy, as is required of the main character, impresses them and gains their trust by plot complications that lead to her saving this city or that person or that tribe. But it definitely feels static; the world doesn’t change around you unless you’re the one making the change.

On the other hand the game is overflowing with “things to do.” The original game had a simple skills tree, some vaguely annoying crafting (“Collect three owl feathers and bring them, and I can make you a bigger pouch for your healing potions”), and a little mini-game in the form of the Hunter’s Training Grounds to help you upgrade your weapons and learn a few tricks.

The Forbidden West ratchets this up to 11, with an in-game mini board-game called Machine Strike, a sort of chess-means-Warhammer; an updated melee system with combo moves as complex as anything ever seen in Mortal Combat; “Melee Training Pits” that parallel the Hunter’s Training Grounds where you practice your melee skills and earn new upgrades; more Hunter’s Training Grounds; two different kinds of “blueshine” (here “greenshine” and “brimshine”); a massive and complex skill tree of skills trees; two different potion systems (potions and food); a complex crafting system involving a lot more collecting and doing, a lot of new weapons and weapon types to master; a brutal machine combat endurance arena for more earning of legendary weapons; a “valor” combat effectiveness score; a racing game… it was just too much game. I never finished the melee pits, never played more than the tutorial game of Machine Strike, did only one race, didn’t finish the last Hunter’s Ground, never mastered the new shields technology, all because they were just distractions from Aloy’s story.

On the third hand, the lore of the game manages somehow to be pathetic in both senses: invoking only a sense of horrified pity and sadness for the world before, and so skimpy and lifeless that it really doesn’t move you very much. You find the usual lost cell phones with last messages on them, or advertisements, or reminisces. The map is almost the same size as the original game, but it feel bigger, with two different valleys full of dead machines, on both sides, from the Last Battle of the California Salient, so you find a lot of flight recorders with last words of pilots or passengers just before they went down. Yet it doesn’t quite add up to the emotional impact of the few stories in the First Bunker of HZD, the one where Aloy found her focus, or the story told as you delved GAIA Prime.

One thing that really annoyed me: in settlements and cities the lines given to NPCs were fewer and more repeated, and it got old very, very fast. Worst, the lines about one rebel leader that you heard over and over were still being repeated at the same time you were being thanked for doing the defeating! Plus, the whole “Elizabeth Sobek is God and Aloy is Jesus” (“For the goddess so loved the world that gave her only manufactured daughter”) thing kinda got both more obvious, and less worthwhile, as the plot progressed. Also, oddly, they decided not to voice the kids at all. Children are everywhere in the settlements, but you never hear them; I guess they were less plot-relevant than the incessant praise from the adults.

I don’t use “fast travel” because it feels like cheating, like teleporting about in a world where foot travel is the most common way of getting anywhere. Unlike HZD, The Forbidden West has four or five points where you have to carry something precious from one end of the map to the other and you can’t afford to stop, but you still get XP if you strike an animal with your robot horse. The sound effects include a sickeningly meaty thud and sometimes a crunch. It’s awful to hear that several times during your desperate flight, but it’s even more grotesque that as you’re doing so the game announces +35XP - Wildlife Kill. I must have gotten over 150XP just from trampling birds, foxes, mice, and other beasties on each ride.

Horizon Zero Dawn felt like a world in which an important story was being told in a richly designed and carefully crafted world. The Forbidden West feels much more like a stage on which Aloy is an expression of the player’s desire to be the main character with a standard set of plot points along the way. Each member of your team has a loyalty mission but they don’t accompany you otherwise. It seems like not pursuing the loyalty mission would not change the outcome. And with all the side-stuff going on, it’s hard to know if any of the props on that stage are a Chekhovian gun.

Still, you get to hang out with Vala and Erend, meet new friends, and even recruit an old enemy, to your side by the end. You can stick to the main story, and even do the satisfying side quests and even most of the errands, and do just enough of the “activities” to keep your weapons sharp, and you can finish the game without having to do all the silly extras that have been shoved into this overstuffed glinthawk.

I liked it enough that I will be playing the sequel, if and when it comes out. I do want to know how it all ends.