How to help Aloy become a Machine Master in Horizon Forbidden West?

HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST is an extremely deep game with limitless options for customizing your beast-slaying experience. Perhaps one of its most intricate facets involves upgrading Aloy by unlocking a dizzying number of skills spread across six different skill trees. Below, we outline our personal pick for an incredible melee-focused build while pointing out critical alternate buffs that may be worth the investment. There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to skills in the Forbidden West, so let’s get right down to it.

Horizon Forbidden West Guide: Help Aloy become a machine master

In Horizon Forbidden West, Aloy is on a mission to save the Earth once again – and the stakes have never been higher. But, without a guide to point you in the right direction, the amount of things to see and do in the dangerous Tenakth tribe lands can be overwhelming.

Horizon Forbidden West will be familiar to anyone that played the previous game, but a lot of the mechanics and activities have either been refined to give more meaning and reward to your achievements, or expanded to include more strategy and puzzles.

To cover everything, we’ve split this Horizon Forbidden West guide up into three sections: systems, items, and story.

Systems guides will deal with the core mechanics of Horizon Forbidden West, helping you to make sense of what Aloy has available to her and how to use them to your advantage. This is where you will find the best ways to build your character and tricks you need to know.

Next, the items guides will cover the plethora of things you can find throughout the Forbidden West. The collect-a-thon aspect of Horizon has been made more difficult – you can no longer buy maps to easily get markers for everything – but much more rewarding. This is where we’ll go over the most powerful gear too.

Finally, we’ll also go over some of the story missions in Horizon Forbidden West. Some of them aren’t as straightforward as others, and no one likes getting stuck on a tricky puzzle when they’re engrossed in a great story.

HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST SURPRISING MELEE BUILD

Horizon Forbidden West is marketed and sold as a game focused on ranged attacks with Aloy’s trusty bow, but, in our playthrough of the campaign, we were surprised by just how effective our heroine’s melee attacks truly were. The series’ developers at Guerilla Games spent lots of time trying to make melee better in the second installment, and they largely succeeded in doing so.

Whether we were squaring off against human or beast, the loop of charging our staff and unloading a powerful heavy attack did monstrous amounts of damage even against late-game bosses.

Given this discovery, we decided to go all-in on melee for a single build just to see how it played. But, because we were going to be fighting up close and personal with most of our foes, we split our attention towards the health-focused Survivor tree too. As it turns out, creating one of the game’s most surprisingly good builds involves dumping almost all your points into these two trees while occasionally making sure your ranged buffs are being taken care of in the Hunter tree.

As long as you complete a moderate amount of side quests and Rebel Outposts in addition to narrative missions, you’ll be able to nearly max out these two combat styles midway through the campaign.

The best melee build in Horizon Forbidden West involves dumping all your points into Warrior and Survivor.

The end results for doing so are truly awesome. You’ll be whacking down the game’s toughest monsters in just a few hits, and you’ll have access to some totally broken Valor Surges that emphasize those strengths even more. Here’s a summary of what you can expect:

Resonator attacks that shred opponents and still make use of long-range strategies.
Massive amounts of melee damage with additional buffs when health is low.
You’ll knock down machines often and will be able to kill them instantly with a Critical Strike.
You’ll almost always have plenty of healing berries and can gather more instantly.
Valor Surge – Toughened vs Melee Might: Based on the combat condition, you can choose to give yourself temporary unlimited health or one-hit melee kills with ridiculous damage.

Playing Forbidden West from a melee perspective will no doubt look and feel different from the footage you may have seen during past gameplay trailers, but it’s absolutely viable if you don’t feel confident in your precision behind a bow. It may seem like a risk to have such a lopsided build, but it can also serve as a relentlessly powerful strategy for newcomers.

Machine Master

This tree is all about hacking and manipulating machines to your advantage. Again, this tree is more niche, but you’ll override a machine sooner or later – either to use as a mount or as a combat partner – so you may as well be prepared.

Mounted Damage: take less damage while mounted.

Lasting Override: machines stay overridden longer.

Machine Damage: overridden machines deal more damage.

Heavy Lifter: move faster while using a heavy weapon. This applies to big guns such as laser turrets. You’ll be thankful you grabbed this skill when trying to use the powerful weapon you separated from a Slitherfang or Thunderjaw.

MACHINE MASTER SKILL TREE

That being said, machines are a huge part of Horizon Forbidden West and the Machine Master skill tree is the best place to look for upgrades to Aloy’s Override mechanic and overridden machines themselves. If you need a helping hand in a fight, keeping an eye on the upgrades this 26-option skill tree offers is a good idea.

Mounted Defense
Lasting Override
Machine Damage
Spike Trap
Propelled Spike
Machine Health
Heavy Lifter
Efficient Repair
Machine Elemental+
Splitting Spike
Override Subroutines
Mounted Archer

Can you max out all skills in Horizon Forbidden West?

Horizon Forbidden West players are currently unable to respec their spent skill points, so once a skill is unlocked, there’s no way to re-do the action and get the skill points back.

How do you do the spinning scythe in forbidden West?

To perform the Spinning Scythe move, you need to press R1 twice then wait for a second then press R1 twice again. You can perform a Halfmoon Slash by holding R1 then releasing it.

Does Horizon Forbidden West have the lure call?

Despite having the same gesture in both games, Horizon Forbidden West will no longer have Lure Call as a learnable Skill in the game. Instead the same gesture will only be used to call and summon a Mount.

Who are the masters Horizon Forbidden West?

Nemesis, also known as the Masters, is the main antagonist of the Horizon franchise, serving as the main antagonist of Horizon Forbidden West.