Horizon Forbidden West is a crucial part of Sony's PlayStation strategy

The new Horizon game is Sony's first major release Image Credit

Horizon Forbidden West occupies an important role in Sony's PlayStation strategy.

The highly anticipated new edition in Sony's Horizon video game franchise was published on Friday, and early reviews indicate that it will be another great PlayStation blockbuster.

The sequel to 2017's Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West, received an 89 on the review analysis website Metacritic. Bloomberg deemed it "amazing" and a worthy sequel to the original that is bigger, better, and more gorgeous. The action-adventure game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world filled with feuding tribes and robotic dinosaurs.

This new Horizon is Sony's first major PlayStation release in 2022, and it follows the company's policy of creating blockbuster exclusives that can only be played on Sony platforms. While Microsoft has mostly focused on its Game Pass subscription service and releases all of its games across various platforms, Sony has taken a more traditional strategy, depending on franchises such as Horizon to help sell gear such as the PlayStation 5.

This new game, however, will be available on both the PlayStation 5 and the PlayStation 4, an uncommon step 16 months into the new console's history that could be inspired in part by the current chip shortage. Since the PS5's release in November 2020, Sony has sold over 17 million units, but they've been hard to come by. Desperate fans have resorted to paying big sums to scalpers or rapidly scrolling Twitter to see whether stores get new supplies.

Horizon is one of Sony's newest video game series. Horizon's environment was first conceived a decade ago while the company's Guerrilla Games studio in Amsterdam was finishing up the newest edition in its Killzone series. Horizon is a vibrant, colorful open-world role-playing game, whereas the Killzone titles were gloomy, bleak shooters. The first installment was a critical and commercial success on PS4 and was published in 2020 for PCs. Horizon Call of the Mountain, a spinoff for PlayStation's next-generation virtual reality headset, was announced earlier this year.

Sony has shown evidence of releasing more titles that can be played on many platforms in recent years. It has ported several older PlayStation games to PCs, as well as MLB The Show, a baseball game, Microsoft's Xbox One, and Nintendo's Switch. Bungie Inc., the creator of Destiny, was purchased by Sony earlier this month for $3.6 billion, with the promise that the company's games will continue to be available on a variety of platforms. According to Bloomberg, it also wants to release a subscription program, code-named Spartacus, to compete with Xbox's Game Pass.

Horizon Zero Dawn sold more than 20 million units, according to Sony, creating high hopes for Forbidden West. Amine Bensaid, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, said he'd be astonished if the game "doesn't outperform its predecessor."

God of War Ragnarok, another blockbuster from Sony, will be released later this year.

h/s

Read More: God of War Full-screen mode, the developer says it's quite exclusive.