Patient Gamers

The biggest issues have already been mentioned by others but I'd just like to add - there's a lot more climbing in Forbidden West, but the mechanics feel a lot worse (to me anyway). I found the climbing in HZD boring but serviceable; in HFW it just feels awful, Aloy never does what I want her to do and I regularly plunge to my doom for unknown reasons. Also the pullcaster (basically a grappling hook) is super clunky to use and adds essentially nothing gameplay-wise, just some random superfluous interaction points. It feels like there might have been some cut content there.

I enjoyed Zero Dawn quite a bit - the hunting and fighting mechanics in particular - but Forbidden West is kind of a sidegrade at best. It just feels like a sequel for the sake of a sequel.

Forbidden West's story is a bland and predictable after coming from Zero Dawn. It feels cheap. They introduce tge bad guy early on, and while the characters are all trying to figure it out, it's really obvious to the player.

There's a lot more interaction with Aloy's friends, which is fine on its own, but they also brought in the main hub trope, where all your friends gather at the base and you keep going back home after every mission. It makes the game feel a lot more like a level-based game than a real open world game.

Where ZD would have you go from A to B to C to D, FW makes you go A-B-A-C-A-D-A.

There are some other criticisms, but these are the ones that bothered me. That's not to say it was a bad game, but I don't have any desire to go back and play it again like I did with HZD.