(Bloomberg) – Sony Group Corp. releases the highly anticipated new entry to its Horizon video game franchise on Friday, and early reviews suggest it’s poised to be another big PlayStation hit.

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Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn, scored an 89 on review aggregator website Metacritic. Bloomberg called it “fantastic” and a worthy successor, bigger, better and prettier than the original. The action-adventure game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world full of warring tribes and robot dinosaurs.

This new Horizon is the first big PlayStation launch of 2022 and reflects Sony’s strategy of releasing blockbuster exclusives that can only be played on its consoles. While Microsoft Corp. has largely focused on its Game Pass subscription service and publishes all of its games across multiple platforms, Sony has stuck to a traditional approach, relying on franchises like Horizon to help sell hardware like the PlayStation 5.

But this new game will be available for the latest generation PlayStation 5 and the previous PlayStation 4, an unusual 16-month move in the new console’s life cycle that may have been prompted in part by the continued shortage of chips. Sony has sold over 17 million PS5s since the console launched in November 2020, but it’s been hard to find. Desperate fans have taken to Twitter to quickly see which stores are stocking up or pay big bucks to resellers.

Horizon is one of the newest franchises from the Sony stable. The company’s Amsterdam-based studio Guerrilla Games began designing the world of Horizon a decade ago while finishing the latest entry in its Killzone series. Where the Killzone games were dark and sinister shooters, Horizon is a bright and colorful open-world role-playing game. The first installment was a huge critical success on PS4 and was released on PC in 2020. A spin-off, Horizon Call of the Mountain, was announced earlier this year for PlayStation’s next-gen virtual reality headset.

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In recent years, Sony has shown signs of releasing more titles that can be played across multiple platforms. He’s released several older PlayStation hits on PC and even brought his baseball series, MLB The Show, to Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo Switch. Sony bought Destiny maker Bungie Inc. earlier this month for $3.6 billion, promising the company’s games would remain on a variety of devices. It also plans to offer a subscription platform, named Spartacus, to compete with Xbox’s Game Pass, Bloomberg reported.

Earlier this week, Sony said Horizon Zero Dawn has sold over 20 million copies, setting high expectations for Forbidden West. But Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Amine Bensaid said he would be surprised if the game “doesn’t rise above its predecessor”.

Sony will also release another blockbuster, God of War Ragnarok, later this year.

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