Horizon Forbidden West: 10 Best New Gameplay Abilities

10. Improved Climbing & A Grappling Hook

Although Horizon: Zero Dawn was a fantastic game, there was one major problem with it: the climbing mechanics.

If you cast your mind back to when Zero Dawn released, you'll remember that it came out around the same time of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Many people got both games at the same time, and if you played Breath of the Wild first, it was hard to go back to Zero Dawn's climbing.

See while Breath of the Wild promoted a go anywhere mechanic with the ability to climb on pretty much any vertical surface you can think of, Horizon instead relied on the 'Uncharted' style of climbing, where specific handholds were peppered on cliff faces for you to traverse. If you wanted to see what was over a particular mountain, you could only do so if the game let you.

In Forbidden West, Guerrilla has put a great amount of time into improving the climbing abilities of Aloy. There'll be many more opportunities to climb things in general with multiple possible routes, Aloy is much more nimble and can leap higher, and they've also given Aloy a brand-new tool called the Pullcaster which is basically Batman's grappling hook but made of machine parts.

In the gameplay footage we've seen, been able to clamber around the environment with this increased speed gives an exciting new dynamic to combat, with an increased emphasis on verticality.