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.