Horizon Forbidden West: The Machines Deserved a Better Menu

A Tremortusk crests a ridge in the Forbidden West’s grasslands, and for about four seconds the game is doing everything right: the silhouette reads instantly as a threat class, the terrain gives you cover to plan an approach, and the weapon wheel — held down, time slowed — lets you pick a tearblast arrow to strip its cannon before it notices you. Then the fight ends, the loot screen opens, and you spend the next ninety seconds untangling which of eleven similarly named component parts you actually need for the weapon upgrade you were saving for. The combat is the best this series has produced. The inventory built to service it is fighting the same design brief in the opposite direction.

Guerrilla Games shipped Horizon Forbidden West on 18 February 2022 for PS4 and PS5, the sequel to 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn, again starring Aloy as she pushes west from the Zero Dawn game’s Rocky Mountain setting into a post-apocalyptic recreation of California, Nevada and Utah, chasing a planet-wide ecological collapse alongside returning and new machine threats. The scale is larger, the machine roster considerably more varied, and the combat design against that roster is a genuine step forward. The systems around it — crafting, inventory management, the menu structure gatekeeping both — are where the sequel’s ambition outruns its interface design.

Why the combat works: a bestiary that teaches by silhouette

Horizon’s core combat idea, established in Zero Dawn and sharpened here, is that every machine is a walking puzzle with a specific weak point, a specific elemental vulnerability and a specific behaviour pattern, and reading that puzzle correctly from a distance is the actual skill the game is teaching. A Shell-Walker’s armour plating demands a different approach from a Slitherfang’s poison-spewing serpentine body, and both demand something different again from a Tremortusk’s siege-cannon back. Forbidden West expands the roster substantially — new machines drawn from aquatic, aerial and desert biomes — and the strongest new additions, like the Slitherfang and the Tremortusk itself, read their weak points legibly at a glance even to a player seeing them for the first time, which is the hardest trick a bestiary-driven combat game has to pull off consistently across dozens of enemy types.

The tools match the ambition. The Pullcaster grapple, new to this game, lets Aloy yank down or dismantle machine components mid-fight in a way that’s both a combat tool and a traversal one, and the underwater sections — genuinely new territory for the series — introduce a whole submerged machine ecology with its own weak-point logic. Layer the returning Override system, which lets Aloy hijack certain machines to fight on her behalf, on top of that bestiary knowledge, and the combat design rewards exactly the kind of systems literacy this desk keeps arguing is the actual value in a well-built enemy roster — knowledge earned through observation converting directly into a tactical advantage.

Weapon variety reinforces the same read-and-respond design. The returning Hunter Bow and Sharpshot Bow are joined by new tools like the Shredder Gauntlet, which fires spinning blades suited to shearing off armour plating, and the Spike-Thrower, whose ground-planted explosives reward luring machines into a prepared kill zone rather than reacting on the fly. Each weapon type maps to a distinct approach rather than a numerically bigger version of the last one, so the arsenal grows the player’s tactical vocabulary instead of just their damage output — the same principle that makes the bestiary work applies to the toolkit built to fight it.

Why the crafting menu doesn’t: too many nouns, not enough verbs

The problem sits one layer up from the fight. Forbidden West’s crafting economy asks the player to track a genuinely large number of discrete resource types — machine components, plant materials, ammunition sub-variants for each weapon type, upgrade materials specific to armour tiers — and the menu presenting all of it is a dense, scrollable list sorted by category rather than by the decision the player is actually trying to make. Wanting to craft more of a specific arrow type mid-fight means pausing, navigating two or three menu layers, confirming a quantity, and returning to combat, which breaks the momentum the machine encounters otherwise earn.

That’s a design failure with a specific, nameable cause: the game gives the player dozens of nouns — component types, resource categories, ammunition variants — without enough verbs to organise them around. A crafting screen should answer “what do I want to do next,” and instead this one answers “here is everything you are currently carrying,” sorted alphabetically rather than by intent. It’s the busywork-tax problem this site has described in general terms, and Forbidden West is a clean example of it because the combat underneath the menu is good enough to make the contrast sting.

The ancestor, and the honest comparison

The bestiary-as-puzzle combat design traces back most directly to Monster Hunter’s weak-point-and-part-break systems, but the more useful comparison for the menu problem specifically is the map screen as an admission of failure — the same instinct that produces an over-cluttered world map produces an over-cluttered inventory screen, because both are symptoms of a studio adding systemic depth faster than it iterates on the interface presenting it. Guerrilla’s combat team clearly understood restraint — the machine roster teaches itself through silhouette and colour-coding rather than stat blocks — and the interface team, working against a much larger scope than the 2017 game required, didn’t get the same editing pass.

Traversal grew up too, mostly without the menu problem

Climbing, restricted in the first game to marked yellow handholds, opens up considerably here — rock faces and ruins offer more freeform routes, and the Shieldwing glider, unlocked a few hours in, gives Aloy an actual aerial traversal option for the first time in the series. Combined with the Pullcaster’s grapple points, moving through the Forbidden West’s vertical terrain has real texture to it, closer to a genuine climbing puzzle than the first game’s more binary handhold system. Notably, this is one system where Guerrilla’s interface instincts hold up: the glider and grapple points are contextual prompts rather than menu-mediated choices, which is exactly the kind of verb-first design the crafting screen needed and didn’t get. Underwater traversal, entirely new to the series, adds a third movement mode with its own creature threats and breath-management tension, expanding the world’s usable volume in a way the original Zero Dawn map never attempted.

Side content and the open world’s actual texture

Away from combat, Forbidden West’s world design deserves separate credit: the Utah desert canyons, the flooded ruins of a submerged Las Vegas analogue, and the coastal biomes each carry distinct visual identity and distinct machine populations, avoiding the trap of an open world that reads as one biome repeated with new paint. Side quests built around the Tenakth tribe’s internal politics and the Utaru’s ecological knowledge give the world’s factions genuine texture beyond fetch-quest structure, even if the main crafting complaint above shadows the experience of engaging with any of it at length. The rebuilt settlements scattered across the map each carry their own visual language tied to which sub-tribe controls them, giving the open world a sense of political geography that the first game’s more uniform Nora and Carja territories rarely attempted.

The performance carries the story past the interface friction

Ashly Burch’s performance as Aloy remains the throughline holding the narrative together across a story that spends real time on grief — Aloy’s processing of Rost’s death and her own origin as a clone of the scientist Elisabet Sobeck, both established in the first game, resurface meaningfully here as she confronts the Zeniths’ technology and their view of what her existence means to them. The returning cast, including Erend and Varl, gets more room to breathe against the expanded tribal politics of the Tenakth, and the new characters introduced for the Forbidden West setting are performed with enough conviction that the story’s ambitions rarely feel undercut by the acting, whatever friction the menu introduces around engaging with the systems underneath.

Guerrilla also released Burning Shores, a PS5-exclusive expansion, in April 2023, sending Aloy to a flooded, overgrown Los Angeles in pursuit of a rogue Zenith operative — a smaller, more tightly scoped addition that mostly avoids introducing new crafting complexity on top of the base game’s already dense systems, which reads as a tacit acknowledgement of exactly the problem this review is describing.

The verdict, and where to play next

Horizon Forbidden West is worth playing for a machine bestiary and combat system that rank among the best in the genre, legible enough that the teaching curve rarely frustrates and deep enough that late-game encounters against multiple machine types at once remain a genuine tactical puzzle. The crafting and inventory layer wrapped around that combat is the honest weak point, and it’s worth going in knowing that the menu friction is a real cost rather than a minor annoyance, because it recurs every single time the excellent combat underneath it stops.

Anyone drawn to the pure bestiary-puzzle appeal should also read the crafting menu piece for the general case Forbidden West illustrates so specifically, and anyone finishing this game hungry for a tighter interface built around the same resource-management instinct should look at how much smaller, better-scoped crafting systems handle the same problem with a fraction of the noun count. Play it on PS5 for the frame-rate headroom the combat’s escalating machine counts genuinely benefit from, and budget real menu time alongside the combat time — the honest way to enjoy this game is to accept the crafting screen as a toll booth on the way to something excellent, rather than expect it to disappear.

Spoilers below

The central plot follows Aloy’s discovery that GAIA, the terraforming AI from Zero Dawn, has fragmented across the Forbidden West, and much of the game is spent recovering GAIA’s sub-functions from rival factions and a new antagonist faction, the Zeniths — a group of surviving pre-collapse humans whose advanced technology outclasses anything the tribes possess. The climax reveals the Zeniths’ plan to seed a new world with their own consciousnesses at the expense of the current population, resolved through a confrontation that leaves GAIA’s restoration incomplete and sets up the DLC expansion and eventual sequel’s continuation of the terraforming crisis rather than closing it definitively within this entry.