Other than a couple of glitches that I have run into in the game that are surprising they made it into the game and still remain there despite being widely known, I have had basically very few issues with this game and think it is absolutely fantastic. This is quite unusual for me because of the fact that I am a very fussy gamer and I can find fault in nearly everything including games that everyone else seems to love. That's just the way that I am and it pisses some people off but then I will normally accuse them of being overly emotionally attached to a particular game and they need to chill out :)
But I just want to point out some amazing things about this game and hopefully avoid spoilers in the process.
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Wide array of enemies
The first game, Zero Dawn had a good array of enemies but in this version they went even further and added a ton more of them. Also, unlike the previously installment you do spend quite a lot of your time fighting against human enemies as well and not just trash mobs like the first one (for the most part.) Some of the human enemies you encounter in the game are actually the more difficult ones although other than very rare exceptions they can all be one-shot killed if you use stealth and a silent strike.
Skills that seem unimportant become so later
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Initially when i was looking at the skill tree at an early level, I was thinking to myself that there is no way that I am going to use all of these. I thought that there would be very few people other than completionists that ever would. Now that I am close to level 50 and think I am near the endgame, I already use almost all of them.
One of the skills in particular called "resonator blast" to enemy to me seemed really stupid at first.
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This consists of striking an opponent with a fully energized melee weapon at which point it will leave this blue circle on them that if you strike it with any arrow or other ranged weapon it will burst doing massive damage.
This seemed irrelevant at first because melee attacking enemies that are machines is almost always a bad idea since their own melee attacks tend to be their most powerful and getting in range of them is normally a bad idea. However, as I got further into the game I found that this resonator blast does so much more damage than almost any other attack that you have that it is very worthwhile including it into your attack sequence. It is also kind of fun to slow down time to make sure you hit that circle mark, which can prove to be quite challenging in the middle of a fracas.
Tons of weapons, tons of attack styles
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There is such a huge variety of weapons in this game that it is very easy to assume that you can have a completely different attack style than anyone else on the planet. There are several weapon types that I have encountered that I rarely use and other that I have never even tried and I am close to completing the main story. For example, I was never using spike throwers because I found the reload time to be crazy long compared to the hunter bows. It wasn't until for some reason that I decided to use a new one I found that I realized that this thing does MUCH MORE damage per round than any bow does. It does ridiculous damage and therefore has become one of my favorite weapons in the entire game, especially against annoying larger enemies that your hunter bows just seem to do little to no damage to.
I've never used bombs because of their range and this is a similar reason but I would imagine I am missing out on this is as well.
Basically, there is no reason for combat to ever get boring in this game because if you find that combat has become tedious that is probably largely because you keep doing it the same way. There are so many ways to off your enemies that you could do every single fight differently and never get bored.
Most wandering machines are avoidable
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Enemy locales are plentiful and a lot of them are quite near roads. At first you might be like me and just take down everything that is even somewhat close to your path but as the game progresses and you start to realize that you don't actually need the parts that they drop nor the XP that you get from killing them, you would rather avoid these encounters altogether.
The fact that once you choose you wish to avoid contact with enemies that doing so is not only possible but actually quite easy, is a wonderful addition to this game. At a certain point you are going to have specific objectives that you must accomplish and many of those objectives will result in you needing to clear a bunch of enemies from a particular place. In these instance you will need to take out all machines. I main story lines you are going to be indoors and will need to clear machines. Obviously in boss battles you have to take out the boss and their minions. Other than that, nearly every fight that you get into in the game is optional and I absolutely LOVE this.
I was reminded of old-school RPG's where encounters were based entirely on RNG and this would result in battles that would take place all too frequently. I didn't mind it at the time because we didn't know any better but thinking back to early Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy games where you would be regularly attacked by an enemy that wasn't even on the screen was became extremely annoying after a while especially when the enemies in question were well under your level and zero thought went into dispatching them.
In Forbidden West and especially as you become more and more powerful, the frequency of random-ass encounters that you can't escape from and must complete are extremely rare. This is just wonderful.
Game is huge, but most content is optional
This is not exclusive to HFW but it is becoming in the norm in open-world games. I think it is a wonderful norm because you can decide how involved you want to get in the overall world. I don't know how many quests there are in this game, a lot I am sure, but most of them are things you are in no way obligated to complete and don't necessarily give you anything that you couldn't get a version of (or better than whatever that item is) by not doing them. The early allure of getting huge amounts of XP and skill points is something that will likely draw you into doing all or most side quests right away, but honestly, you get so many skill points throughout a regular playthrough that you will power up all the skills without doing most of them.
They are fun though and none of them start to feel like carbon copies of the quests that came before. For me, I start to feel like it is time to move on from a game after 30 hours maximum, so I do enjoy that a vast majority of the content in the game is completely up to you if you even want to bother with it. This also means that you can finish the main story and then put this game on the back burner and return to it later anytime you feel like getting back into the Horizon world.
Honestly, this is one of the most perfect games that I have played at any point in my life and especially since it is free to PS Plus members at the moment, there is really no reason to not play it.
If you enjoyed Forbidden West I would love to talk about it in the comments. If you DID NOT like it, I would actually even be more interested in hearing about this because it is normally me that ends up disliking games.