Sony Group Corp. released the highly anticipated new entry in its Horizon video game franchise on Friday, and reviews suggest it’s primed to be another big PlayStation hit.
Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn, earned an 89 on the review aggregation website Metacritic. Bloomberg called it "fantastic” and a worthy successor that’s bigger, better and more beautiful than the original. The action-adventure game is set in a post-apocalyptic world full of warring tribes and robot dinosaurs.
This new Horizon is the first big PlayStation launch of 2022 and reflects Sony’s strategy of releasing blockbuster exclusives that can only be played on its consoles. While Microsoft Corp. has focused largely on its Game Pass subscription service and releases all of its games on multiple platforms, Sony has stuck to a traditional approach, relying on franchises like Horizon to help sell hardware like the PlayStation 5.