It's a good week for gamers. In addition to the free, fun and fantastically odd Spider's Thread expansion for the brilliant Ghostwire: Tokyo, one of my favourite PS5 games (it's also available on Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X), the Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores mission is just days away: it drops on 19 April.
Burning Shores takes place immediately after the end of Horizon Forbidden West, so you'll need to have completed the main game first. You can then travel to a very dangerous new region, meet new and interesting people, and of course beat the crap out of some giant robot monsters. To say I'm excited about this would be an understatement.
To help hype the launch, Sony's made a new trailer – and as you can see, the big boss is even bigger and scarier than it seemed in previous trailers.
Is Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores available for PS4?
Sadly not, and as this most recent trailer demonstrates, it's because the PS4 just doesn't have the horsepower for the things Guerrilla Games wanted to do in the expansion. The graphics are incredibly detailed, and putting a ruined LA on screen – the "burning shores" of the title – is pretty demanding in terms of hardware. That Metal Devil boss battle in particular looks like it'll make my PS5 run hot enough to make toast.
Unlike the Ghostwire: Tokyo DLC, which is free, this upgrade comes with a price tag attached: £15.99 in the UK and $19.99 in the US. That's the same price as the Frozen Wilds DLC for the previous Horizon Zero Dawn game (and if you haven't played Zero Dawn you should: it's great, and included for both PS4 and PS5 in PS Plus Extra and Premium). That expansion added about 8 hours of gameplay, so it's likely that Burning Shores will be similarly long.
Pre-orders are open now in the PlayStation Store and come with a bonus outfit and weapon, the Blacktide Dye Outfit and the Blacktide Sharpshot Bow. Both will be available from in-game retailers.
I'm really looking forward to playing this: as someone who hasn't yet been tempted by PSVR 2 and Horizon: Call of the Mountain, I haven't seen Aloy since the end of Forbidden West. Hopefully in this expansion she'll be a little less talkative: one of the very few flaws in the main game was Aloy's tendency to state the obvious far too often. And I'm going to try very hard not to cry when I meet Sylens again, presumably for the very last time: the brilliant actor who played him, Lance Reddick, passed away just last month.
