10 Video Games You Constantly Have To Defend Hating

While Horizon Forbidden West is scoring understandably solid reviews for improving upon the original PS4 blockbuster, Horizon Zero Dawn is such an aggressive exercise in style-over-substance that it's impressive it did well enough to earn a sequel at all.

There's absolutely no arguing with the fact that Zero Dawn is an aesthetically beautiful game, but one that never once manages to match the heft of those visuals with a compelling story.

Protagonist Aloy certainly has promise, but soon enough gets bogged down in a thunderously dull sci-fi word salad plot that mechanically works through its narrative by way of generic shot-reverse-shot cutscenes and forcing the player to stand around watching holographic exposition dumps.

The combat is thrilling and kinetic, but backed by a poorly presented story that's more likely to leave players mentally checked out than deeply enthralled by what's going on.

Forbidden West isn't perfect in this regard either but certainly learned some lessons from the original, which suffocated its most impressive elements underneath reams of soporific gasbagging.