Exploring a Spectacular Boss Fight: Debunking the Myth of Its Lack of Danger

This article contains a major spoiler from Horizon Forbidden West's Burning Shores expansion. If you haven't played the game yet or aren't there yet, we invite you to come back to the home page.

Horizon: nearly 33 million games sold for the Guerrilla license

Slightly overshadowed by the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Zero Dawn is yet very far from having been a failure. Enhanced by the Decima engine, the title featured Aloy, an outcast from the Nora tribe. This one is not quite like the others and realizes this when finding the Focus, a small tool allowing him to see things that the eyes cannot perceive alone. Intrigued, she ends up being reinstated and explores the world to find out why some of the strange machines populating the world have become extremely aggressive.

Dynamic and technically very successful, the title only fishes for fear of heights, incorporating a colossal number of items to collect, points of interest and side quests. An excellent first attempt for a studio previously accustomed to FPS. Less than five years later, Guerilla Games made a remarkable comeback with Horizon: Forbidden West, which pushes the PS4 to its limits and which offers strong arguments to the PS5. Focusing on the West Coast of what was once the United Statesthis new opus confronts Aloy with her new responsibilities and what she discovered in the first game.

His objective is to understand where this strange technological plague comes from which is spreading and killing everything in its path. A visual and commercial success, this second game was, like the first, very well received for its beauty, its spectacular fights without downtime and its dynamismwhile displaying a clear progression in staging and narration. Also like the first opus, Horizon Forbidden West was equipped with an expansion called Burning Shores. It adds new areas to explore, a new main quest and new enemies.

From there, we're going to get into the spoiler part, so if you're still here, you know what to expect.

See Horizon Forbidden West PS5 on Amazon

An ultra-impressive boss that will delight video capture fans

Among these enemies we find bosses, and among these we find Horus, a gigantic machine which offers an unprecedented spectacle, which some do not hesitate to compare to creatures from Shadow of the Colossus. This is quite simply the final boss of the expansion, and Guerrilla wanted to go all out. The combat begins with a short approach, after which you have to aim at a specific area while missiles fall on us.

Subsequently, offensive robots are deployed, and we must get rid of them while Horus moves in all directions. This done, you still have to climb the gigantic colossus to continue the fight before finding yourself face to face with the beast, trapped on the beach between two mechanical tentacles. The staging is very impressive, but one thing is certain: with a little preparation and the right equipment, Horus is much more impressive than aggressive. It is everything that surrounds the boss himself that offers a breathtaking fight, which does not leave the player alone.

Players denounce the lack of challenge, but what is it really?

Falling is risky, missiles must be avoided as do machine gun bursts but, overall, this is a fairly manageable encounter if you exercise a little caution. On X (formerly Twitter), a player relayed a capture from the moment Horus gets into position so we can move on to the escalation phase. And suffice to say that the sequence presented did not please him:

A boss fight so intense that you have time to wander around because you're in little danger.

Obviously, there were many comments. We can thus read things like “how did we go from Shadow of the Colossus to this in the video game“, or “interactive movie“, or “western open world games are just theme parks“. But others point out that this is not at all the best boss fight of the generation, nor even the most interesting boss fight in the game. Other players even point out that the video shows a sequence where the boss was hit at his weak point, and that it is about pacing management allowing Aloy to move and prepare (with a moderate risk) following the confrontation. The fight indeed lasts 25 to 30 minutesand it was unthinkable to associate such a duration with staging and rhythmic sequences without offering breathing space here and there.