THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE BURNING SHORES DLC. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
Ever since the first game from the Horizon Series had launched, it’s been performing amazing, and it keeps getting better every time we return to it. Horizon Forbidden West was one of the brilliant sequels in the series in almost every way – a bigger world with so much space, the visuals, new machines, interesting side quests, new casts, and so much more. The improvements they made over the first game was unbelievable. To make it more better, Guerrilla Games has released a new DLC for the sequel – The Burning Shores, that remains more or less the same but added enough content to satisfy and also an idea where the third game could be going as well.
The Burning Shores starts where the events of the main game ended, Sylens entrusts Aloy with an crucial task – to track down the last Zenith member, Walter Londra that escaped when everyone were busy fighting the other members of Far Zenith. He was last spotted in a location called Burning Shores which basically takes place in Los Angeles. Aloy on her arrival in the Burning Shores, gets attacked in the sky by the defense tower of the Zenith and crash lands and is confronted by Seyka, member of the Quen tribe.
Both together has to disable the Zenith Tower at Starlight Rise (Londra’s headquarters). This new character, Seyka, will be your ally for the 5 main quests and all 5 of them are having good time for completion. You’re looking at around 3 – 4 hours for the completion depending on your pace, and this is just the main quests. The story takes you to some fantastic locations but however, the story is just focused to certain locations in the Burning Shores. The Map size is 33.33% of the main game map and out of that 33.33%, 70% of the map feels underutilized as the map features – dense forests, open water, flowing lava, ruins to remind you this once was Los Angeles.
The Side quests are spread across the map, but I feel like they should have taken advantage of the whole map and either added more quests or could’ve spread the missions over the entire map to showcase the whole map. But once you’re done with the 5 quests, you could mount Waterwing (Yeah, it’s a new machine that can fly in Sky and dive in Water, so you don’t want Sunwing anymore) and fly to other locations and just take-in the updated Visuals of the Forbidden West and have fun.
Coming back to the story, on reaching the Starlight Rise, they find out Londra has captured the missing Quen crew that Seyka is looking for, as in that crew, her sister is present, and they find data on a project called ‘MSP’ and a trail that leads to the Metal Devil, Horus. Underneath the Horus is a ruin, and you find the captured Quen at the camp only to find out that they willingly joined Londra and sees them as a God who promised them Ascension. They discover that Londra is using Horus to build a rocket to take flee this planet and in order to take off in the rocket, he salvaged experimental Nuclear Booster Engines from the Starlight Rise and if he ends using it, it’ll disrupt the Burning Shores and it’s surrounding lands.
The leader of the ruin, Zeth, whose name they’ve been using to enter the Ascension Hall, kills him and find out that he has taken those selected Quen with him to an abandoned amusement park to prepare for the journey. Aloy and Seyka infiltrate the amusement park and comes across the Londra’s AI, Nova, who has been working with him for 1000+ years, and Nova explains that Londra intends to take handful of Quen and the genetic library (DNA samples of other Quen’s) and build his own colony or planet far away from the threat of Nemesis. To make sure his followers don’t betray him, he uses the cancelled MSP Project (Mind Suppression Protocol) to brainwash them into his loyal followers.
Nova then requests Aloy to kill her (delete her) as Londra’s been using her as slave by tweaking with her personality matrix however he wants. In return, Nova deactivated all security protocols for them to make their way to Londra who has no idea that they’re coming for him. They find Londra seducing Seyka’s sister Kina and Seyka intervenes who flees to the bunker underneath the great Hollywood sign. Londra activates the Horus to keep it from overhating, it had a cooling system installed which Aloy and Seyka destroyed and then the big boss fight takes and it’s good.
Big fight takes place and few minutes later Aloy infiltrates the Horus and kills Londra and before the Horus would explode and get destroyed in pieces, Aloy scans the Londra implant and sends all the data to Sylens and then Seyka helps Aloy escape the Horus. Aloy meets Seyka at the Fleet’s Camp and helps the Quen make contact with Alva so they can co-ordinate together to reunite their fleets. Seyka asks Aloy to meet her at the beach where they first met and then they talk and then you’re presented with three options – Either Kiss Seyka, Aloy will say it’s too much for her, and Aloy not ready for it. You can select any of this option as the Kiss Seyka is optional, but if you did select it, it basically confirms that Aloy is a Lesbian and likes Seyka.
After that, you meet Sylens back at the base, and after he decrypted some files from the data, he says he found list of companies from 21st century that were working on experimental weaponry from the 21st century and might be a key in defeating the Nemesis.
Coming back to our review after that whole synopsis of the whole DLC, the Horus is indeed now awake and we’ll likely meet more of them in the sequel of the Forbidden West. The scale of the Horus is impeccable and now it does explain why the DLC was exclusive to PS5 as it won’t be able to run on the PS4 or they might’ve to make a smaller Horus for it run on PS4 which would be very funny if they actually did. The story of the whole DLC is developing Aloy’s character while also dealing with the threat. There are new collectibles to hunt, Relic Ruins to search, new machines to be killed, and few Cauldron to infiltrate.
There are machines introduced such as – Waterwing (which can dive under water and fly in the sky), Bilegut (based on Frog or toad, can steal your resources by sticking its tongue on Aloy), and Stingspawn (smallest machines in the franchise, produced by Bilegut, comes out from the Stingspawn eggs by Bilegut). Then are also new weapons and outfits on offer with also a range of new skills as well. Six new valor surges to give you advantage in a tight combat. You can now shoot while gliding, drop shields, and apply elemental damage with your spear.
You can now grapple on the knocked down enemy and if you can time the button correctly, you can apply Resonator energy which if you shoot will result in big damage. These new skills and new gameplay mechanics is sure to add more fun to the game and making the life of machines a living hell.
In the end, the Burning Shores is great, just like the Frozen Wilds DLC for the Horizon Zero Dawn, Burning Shores just expands by giving you new map with open space and new weapons to create chaos in the world of Horizon. However, what I didn’t like about the DLC as I mentioned earlier is how less the whole map was utilized. On that they should’ve work and the story feels like there was more story to be told. However, this expansions continues Aloy’s story after the Forbidden West and sets-up things for the upcoming Horizon 3 which should come out somewhere around the year 2026 – 2028.
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