Truly love the game mechanics of tearing off components of large mechanical creatures, each with their own behaviors and weaknesses. I really liked Zero Dawn in that regard and Forbidden West doesn't disappoint.

What I liked:
1. The art, world, and character design. Forbidden West is a visual spectacle and I find myself using photo mode a lot.
2. Combat mechanics (as mentioned earlier).
3. Traversal. I like the introduction of the new mount and being able to climb mountains.
4. Performance. The game runs superbly well. I am running a RTX 4080 with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700x 8-core and 16 GB of ram and I get around 100 FPS at the highest quality at 2k resolution.

What I didn't like:
1. Excessive hand-holding. Whenever there was any sort of puzzle I came across, Aloy would just say what I should do next without giving me a minute to think. I tried to see if there were any setting to turn this off (I tried contextual reminders) but I don't think there was any.
2. Side Quests. Some are not bad but most of them are your average fetch quests/find this missing person. I found myself starting to skip dialogue for these as I just wanted to get it over with and get the skill points.

I want to mention, because this is a 3rd person game and how firing arrows work, there is a quirk where if you are behind cover but your aiming reticle is not, you can essentially shoot at enemies with your arrows behind a wall and enemies can even fire back at you. This makes some battle situations too easy (especially against human encounters) and this isn't a hard thing to do. All in all though, I really enjoyed this sequel.

Truly love the game mechanics of tearing off components of large mechanical creatures, each with their own behaviors and weaknesses. I really liked Zero Dawn in that regard and Forbidden West doesn't disappoint. What I liked: 1. The art, world, and character design. Forbidden West is a visual spectacle and I find myself using photo mode a lot. 2. Combat mechanics (as mentioned earlier). 3. Traversal. I like the introduction of the new mount and being able to climb mountains. 4. Performance. The game runs superbly well. I am running a RTX 4080 with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700x 8-core and 16 GB of ram and I get around 100 FPS at the highest quality at 2k resolution. What I didn't like: 1. Excessive hand-holding. Whenever there was any sort of puzzle I came across, Aloy would just say what I should do next without giving me a minute to think. I tried to see if there were any setting to turn this off (I tried contextual reminders) but I don't think there was any. 2. Side Quests. Some are not bad but most of them are your average fetch quests/find this missing person. I found myself starting to skip dialogue for these as I just wanted to get it over with and get the skill points. I want to mention, because this is a 3rd person game and how firing arrows work, there is a quirk where if you are behind cover but your aiming reticle is not, you can essentially shoot at enemies with your arrows behind a wall and enemies can even fire back at you. This makes some battle situations too easy (especially against human encounters) and this isn't a hard thing to do. All in all though, I really enjoyed this sequel.