Review of Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds

Let's start with the positives:

• there is a lot of content
• the new machines (3 that new with one being a tower and the rest are more difficult reskins of the base game machines.

• the new map is great and a fun historical location
• there are some cool gameplay additions and quality of life improvements.

Negatives

• the main story is not good. It's a series of fetch quests and busywork, with a loose narrative about a AI and a brother and sister. The cutscenes really jammed it up with the drama and emotion and it just falls flat. One of the main characters is like crying over a AI that she thinks is a spirit and it just does not land, she just looks dumb for thinking it's a mystical being. The brother sister relationship you are supposed to invest in is not gripping and doesn't hit you in the feels like it wants you too.

• the dlc is meant to be more difficult and what that means is bigger health pools but no real combat challenges.

• the missions, fights, and exploration are really just more of the same.

• some of the main quests you can tell are just filler. They will give you four objectives all over the map to do simple tasks and then those tasks branch out into smaller fetch quests. You can tell the devs were just trying to add to the run time of the short story.

• the climbing is still terrible and uninteresting.

• I yet again ran into more glitches on PS5. Textures were loading in weird, getting stuck in random flat terrain, the climbing messing up. I was really surprised by all these bugs in a AAA first party game.

It's a average to good dlc. If you were dying for more of this game get it and you'll probably like it, if you didn't love the base game I'd pass. But it on a sale.