Watch nearly 20 minutes of ‘Horizon Forbidden West’ PS5 gameplay

Horizon Forbidden West is due to hit the PlayStation 5 and PS4 in the second half of 2021, and Guerrilla Games is warming up the hype train. Today’s State of Play live stream was dedicated entirely to Forbidden West, showing 19 minutes of PS5 gameplay and details direct from developers. There was no further information regarding a release date.

Horizon Zero Dawn landed in 2017 exclusively on the PlayStation 4, and it quickly became one of the platform’s best-selling games. It introduced a vast, futuristic universe filled with animal-like machines, tribal human societies and rogue AI, and it marked a shift into open-world, role-playing mechanics for Guerrilla Games. Before Horizon, the studio was best known for building the Killzone franchise.

Zero Dawn dropped the protagonist, Aloy, in post-apocalyptic versions of Utah, Colorado and Northern Arizona, with rich forests, deserts and snowy mountain ranges for her to explore. Forbidden West takes Aloy to the Pacific Coast and introduces underwater gameplay. Ashly Burch returns to voice Aloy, while Lance Reddick is back as Sylens. In Forbidden West, Aloy is on a mission to uncover the source of a red-tinged plague spreading across the land.

The fresh gameplay shows off deep-sea mechanics, new environments and enemies, combat scenes, and new machines, such as the Tremor Tusk — a massive, mechanical mammoth. Aloy even rides around on a velociraptor-type robot for a while. She uses a smoke bomb, slingshot, bow, staff, grenade launcher and holographic parachute to battle the mammoth and other robots. Not bad for 20 minutes of work.