Horizon Zero Dawn sold over 20 million copies before its sequel ever launched — without a movie tie-in, existing IP, or franchise legacy to coast on. For a studio best known for military shooters, Guerrilla Games built one of the biggest new PlayStation universes of the decade.

The Horizon series now spans three games: Zero Dawn (2017), Forbidden West (2026), and Call of the Mountain (2026, PS VR2 exclusive). Each drops you into a far-future Earth where robotic creatures called machines have replaced wildlife, and a young outcast named Aloy uncovers the truth behind civilization’s collapse.

This review covers all three, ranks them honestly, and tells you exactly who should play each one — and who should spend their money elsewhere.

Why the Horizon Setting Works Better Than It Has Any Right To

Most post-apocalyptic games are grey. Ruins, rust, dead cities. Horizon went the opposite direction.

Set roughly 1,000 years after civilization falls, the world in Zero Dawn is lush, green, and teeming with robotic life. Machines that resemble dinosaurs, deer, and eagles roam open grasslands, patrol ancient skyscrapers, and charge across river valleys. Humans have regressed into tribal societies. They hunt these machines for parts. And they have no idea why any of it exists.

That mystery is the backbone of the entire series. Guerrilla built a world where the spectacle — a woman shooting a mechanical T-Rex with a bow — is matched by a genuine question: why does any of this exist? The answers, when they arrive, are genuinely surprising.

What Makes Aloy Work as a Protagonist

Aloy is an outcast by birth. Raised outside her tribe, trained to fight and survive, she’s driven by one thing: understanding where she came from. That single, personal motivation keeps the story grounded even when the stakes escalate to planetary extinction.

She’s also competent from the start. No amnesia, no chosen-one passivity. She figures things out, asks direct questions, and pushes through obstacles. That’s rarer in game protagonists than it should be.

The Machines as Enemy Design

Every machine has a real-world animal analogue and a clear ecological function. Grazers consume plant matter. Watchers patrol territory. Thunderjaws are apex predators. This internal logic makes the world feel genuinely engineered, not arbitrarily constructed.

Combat against them uses the Focus mechanic — a slow-motion targeting system that lets Aloy scan enemies for component weaknesses in real time. A Sawtooth’s belly is vulnerable to fire. Its back legs freeze with ice arrows. Every encounter is a moving puzzle, and learning to solve it quickly is the core skill the game teaches.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Game That Defined What Guerrilla Could Do

Zero Dawn launched in February 2017. It was Guerrilla’s first open-world RPG after a decade of linear military shooters. The leap in ambition was staggering. It also mostly landed.

Story and World Design

The map covers six distinct biomes — Nora highlands, Carja desert, Oseram badlands, Banuk snowfields, and more. Each tribe has its own culture, architecture, religious customs, and relationship with the machines. The world feels constructed rather than procedurally generated, which is rarer in open-world games than developers admit.

The main story runs 30–40 hours at a comfortable pace. The optional Frozen Wilds DLC adds 8–10 hours in a remote northern region with some of the game’s best machine encounters. The Complete Edition bundles both and typically sells for around $15–20 on PlayStation Store — one of the strongest value propositions in gaming right now.

The story’s third act lands hard. Without spoiling anything: the answer to “why do the machines exist” is one of the better science-fiction reveals in any game this decade. Players who hunt down the optional audio logs and data fragments scattered across the map get a significantly richer version of that story. The lore is where Guerrilla’s real writing talent lives.

Combat and the Gameplay Loop

Zero Dawn’s combat centers on a bow system with eight or nine weapon types: sharpshooter bows for precision, blast slings for area damage, ropecasters to immobilize large machines, tripcasters to lay traps across patrol routes. The skill tree unlocks silent drops, faster crafting, extended Focus usage, and melee combos.

The core loop — explore, spot a machine nest, scan weaknesses, set traps, execute — holds up for the full 40-hour runtime. On Very Hard difficulty, every encounter becomes a genuine resource management challenge. Machines one-shot you; ammunition is scarce; improvising gets you killed.

One clear weakness: human combat. Fighting enemy soldiers is measurably less interesting than hunting machines. Same weapons, simpler AI, repetitive encounter design. It’s a noticeable dip. Forbidden West addresses most of it.

Verdict on Zero Dawn

For story and world-building, Horizon Zero Dawn is a 9/10. For open-world structure, an 8 — side quests are thin early on, the crafting menus are clunky, and two or three story chapters run long. The Complete Edition is the right version to buy. Do not start with Forbidden West.

All Four Horizon Releases Compared

Here’s where each game stands across the metrics that actually matter:

A note on PC ports: Zero Dawn’s 2026 PC launch was rough — stuttering, crashes, poor optimization at release. Guerrilla patched it heavily and it runs well now. Forbidden West on PC (2026) launched in considerably better shape. Both are solid options for PC players who don’t want to commit to a console.

Horizon Forbidden West Is the Better Game. Zero Dawn Will Hit You Harder.

That sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t.

Forbidden West improves on Zero Dawn across almost every measurable dimension. The map is larger and denser. Aloy can now swim freely, glide with a wingsuit, and climb nearly any surface. Machines are more varied, more aggressive, and more creatively designed than in the first game. The human combat got a real overhaul — new melee combos, finishing moves, enemy AI that actually pressures you. The skill tree expanded into six separate branches instead of three.

What Forbidden West Does Better

The Burning Shores DLC is worth calling out specifically. A PS5-exclusive add-on set in a flooded Los Angeles — rendered at 60fps with ray-traced reflections — it features a fully erupting volcanic island and an underwater downtown LA. Some of the most visually ambitious level design on PS5 hardware lives here. At $20, it’s the best value in the Horizon catalog for players who already own Forbidden West.

The antagonists are also the series’ most interesting. The Far Zeniths — a group of enormously wealthy humans who fled Earth before the collapse and are now returning — carry a menace that the machine-worshipping cults in Zero Dawn never quite matched.

Why Zero Dawn Still Hits Differently

The original mystery is tighter. The series’ biggest reveals all land in the first game. By Forbidden West, you’re building on a known foundation. That’s not a flaw — the storytelling is still strong — but the sense of discovery is fundamentally different when you already understand the world’s rules.

Zero Dawn is surprising. Forbidden West is satisfying. Both are worth playing. The order matters.

Three Mistakes New Horizon Players Keep Making

1. Starting with Forbidden West. The story picks up directly after Zero Dawn’s ending. Character relationships, previous events, and why certain locations matter are not adequately recapped. Five hours of confusion before the world opens up properly. Play Zero Dawn first. There is no shortcut.
2. Dropping the game in the first two hours. Zero Dawn opens with a long prologue called the Proving — roughly 90 minutes before the real open world unlocks. Players who judge the game on this sequence miss everything that makes it special. Push through to the first Cauldron dungeon. That’s when the design intent becomes clear.
3. Skipping the lore collectibles. Both games scatter audio logs, text files, and data fragments across the world. They’re optional. They’re also where the best storytelling lives. The history of GAIA — the terraforming AI at the center of everything — is told almost entirely through these fragments. Players who find them think the story is brilliant. Players who skip them think it’s merely good.

One additional mistake specific to Forbidden West: buying Burning Shores before finishing the main game. It’s a direct narrative sequel to the game’s ending. Opening it mid-playthrough spoils the final act completely.

Who Should Skip Horizon Entirely

If mechanical challenge is your priority, play Elden Ring instead — Horizon on Normal is forgiving enough that most combat can be brute-forced. If branching dialogue and moral consequences are what you want, The Witcher 3 does that far better; Horizon is a linear story you experience, not shape. For the best PS exclusive open world with pure action focus and tighter pacing, Ghost of Tsushima (~$40, PS4/PS5) delivers a more focused 30-hour experience with near-flawless execution. Horizon is built for players who prioritize a rich world and a satisfying mystery above all else — if that’s not you, the alternatives listed above are stronger fits.

Questions First-Time Horizon Players Actually Ask

Do I need PS Plus to play Horizon?

No. Both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West are single-player only — no online component, no subscription required. Zero Dawn was offered free to PS4 owners through PlayStation’s Play at Home program in 2026. Check your library before buying; you may already own it.

Is Horizon Call of the Mountain worth buying a PS VR2 for?

Not on its own. The PS VR2 headset costs $549.99, and Call of the Mountain is a linear 8–10 hour VR experience. The Tallneck climbing sequence is genuinely the best single showcase moment on PS VR2 hardware, and the machine encounters demonstrate what immersive-scale combat can feel like in VR. But it’s a hardware demonstration more than a full game. If you already own PS VR2, it’s worth $60. If the headset purchase depends on this title, wait.

PS4 or PS5 version of Forbidden West — does it actually matter?

Yes, meaningfully. The PS5 version runs at 60fps with ray-traced reflections and DualSense haptic feedback that translates machine impacts, weather effects, and surface textures directly into the controller. The PS4 version is capped at 30fps. If you own both platforms, the gap is noticeable enough to matter. Buy the digital PS4 version if that’s your only option — it qualifies for a free PS5 upgrade — but do not pay twice.

Guerrilla has confirmed the Horizon franchise continues beyond Forbidden West. A third mainline entry is expected, and a TV adaptation has been in development long enough that concrete news feels close. The series built its audience one mechanic and one mystery at a time, and there are clearly more mysteries left to unpack.