The core formula from the first game is here, which still works very well, but a lot has been implemented that left a bad taste in my mouth. Additionally, the way the game is played and the performance on PS4 are both subpar compared to the first game and similar titles.
I've died from glitching through the floor at the main base at least three times and I had numerous game-breaking (and immersion-breaking) issues. Maybe a patch will iron out the glitches, but due to the sheer number of them I can't see the performance being optimized anytime soon. Hell, even the mountain in the first cutscene doesn't load for me, ever; Aloy climbs on air.
Loading times and the frequency of them are overkill for a 2022 game, with random black screens appearing as you cross sections of the map (which also takes seconds to load each time you open it) and the main loading screens taking ages. From what I've read, on PS5 the game loads incredibly fast. While I will go on to describe several other issues with this game, these performance problems are the key reasons I cannot give this a higher score.
The difficulty is great in some aspects, with more puzzles, climbing strategies, etc. However, so much has been nerfed just for the sake of artificial difficulty. For examples, the triple notch is hindered by a small stamina bar despite being almost a necessity for a hunter bow to be effective, there are very few strong damage coils (never saw more "powerful" than 12% explosive damage and never saw a pure damage coil), enemies are relentless and give you no time to scan them or breathe between the constant long-animation knockdowns, health potions now take seconds to consume while you're locked in animation, and throughout the whole game many enemies will one or two-shot you from off-screen. By comparison, I've beaten all the Souls games, but those felt a lot more fair.
The artificial difficulty is also greatly enhanced by... not knowing what to do most of the time; no difficulty setting can fix that. While there's something to be said about holding the player's hand too much (which does happen too), this game frequently puts you in very large areas without a clear indication of what to do, and your Focus can't help. There's an infamous early main quest about following Sylens's signal, with the ultimate combination of confusion and climbing nonsense. And with one particular Tallneck, you can only climb a structure from an area that will leave you literally running in a giant circle to find, if you think to even find a way up. Otherwise you could try to climb several different peaks of the nearby mountain to glide, which you'll eventually find out intentionally never works. By the way, that's all considering the handhelds aren't bugged and the Tallneck doesn't start walking the opposite way or disappear from the map.
I can't put this nicely: the melee pits are atrocious and have no practical application. It seems like the developers weren't clear if they should be for training melee skills you'll rarely use or if they should just be memorization/combo execution challenges. Some challenges are so easy they're comical, others are unclear about what to do, and usually the final challenges are so hard that even setting your difficulty down a notch or two will still give you a challenge. These pits weren't tested enough.
This game could use a big lesson in "less is more". A lot was added that completely detracts from the item focus. While the first game had an issue with offering the best weapons and outfits a few chapters in, this game has so many slight variations on the base weapons that it's not clear what the strongest ones are. The arena vendor offers strong ones, but there are equally comparable, non-legendary weapons with their own good stats and they're scattered somewhat at random throughout the map, so just seeing a gold weapon, coil, or outfit doesn't necessarily mean it's the best for your playstyle.
What makes this worse is the upgrading system. Thought hunting was bad in the first game? This one takes it to a whole different level. You can easily spend an hour running in circles for an RNG item drop from an animal that rarely appears and runs away before you have a chance to shoot it. This isn't a case of extreme realism either, because in reality you'd always get the item you require from any animal you hunt; this is just more difficulty for the sake of being difficult.
Like in the first game, upgrading requires gathering specific machine parts as well. The difference is that now they have to be knocked off before the machine is taken down, and these parts can be from enemies you rarely ever encounter, or their location isn't visible on the map yet so creating a quest won't work. This creates a situation in which upgrading is incredibly tiresome, and it's pointless until you get weapons with a high damage output because the time and resource investment is immense. Often you might have the resources for the third tier of an upgrade before you have resources for the second, which is a strange issue to consistently run into.
If you find weapons or outfits you think are reasonably strong and have perks you like, you will still have to put in serious work to get one or two coil slots unlocked. By contrast, the first game's approach was to let you acquire clearly strong items that had all of their coil slots unlocked automatically. Getting powerful coils to fill those slots was the real reward that came with game progression and exploration, and this is what balanced out the whole "getting the best items early" issue. Want to farm a boss-tier enemy for supplies in this game? Maybe you'll get a decent coil, but you won't have the ability to use it until you invest literally hours into upgrading your weapon, and you definitely won't be finding a much-needed 40%+ damage coil to apply like in HZD.
The resource pouch still has to be upgraded despite the new, much-needed stash feature. This is primarily because the medicine pouch has been nerfed too. You can spend skill points to slightly upgrade your pouch capacity, and different outfits can do it too, yet enemies hit so hard and so frequently that you'll quickly burn through your limited medicine pouch. This then requires you to press a button to restore the smaller pouch from your overall carry capacity: your resource pouch. This means, instead of all the berries you collect immediately going to your accessible health pool, you're restricted from using them until some of your smaller capacity is used. Even with upgrades, the overall carrying capacity for medicine is still quite low, and this is obvious because the amount of plants you'll have to collect in this game is ridiculous; they're constantly respawning everywhere for that reason.
The expanded skill trees are a welcome addition, although I felt like there was way too much going on and not enough effectiveness. Spending numerous points on the surrounding skills to valor surges (primary skills - active abilities) could mean investing many points in things you have no interest in. The first game somewhat did this, but this game does it a lot worse. HZD had obvious, desirable skills too, and in this game only one can be used at time; the rest are all minor, passive skills and sometimes repeats. The use of a primary skill is also hindered by the constant need to build up the valor meter after it expires.
I wish the unlimited fast travel pack wasn't removed. It's great to be able to travel without a pack from campfire to campfire, but does anyone really want to pull up the map and find a campfire before navigating to another? I want to open the map and go to a campfire instantly like I could in the first game. The only way around this is to buy dozens of packs from merchants. Sometimes, without the option of a machine to ride on (like the first California chapter), you'll have to run for 900+ paces. Alternatively, in most cases you could search for a machine to carefully override, but it's an unnecessarily time-consuming situation either way because you could've made it to your goal in less time than it took to find a Charger or Bristleback that wasn't listed on the map.
While all of these issues drastically detract from the game's enjoyment, the voice acting, audio, character development, animation, narrative, graphics, and overall presentation are phenomenal. This game easily has one of the best scifi stories I've ever seen. It's just a shame how far it strays from the original and was poorly optimized for PS4. HFW would be much better as a movie, especially because there's so much talking and dialogue to that extent that, even as someone who loves narrative experiences, I often wanted to skip them to play the quests.
I appreciate the relic puzzles, gliding, use of the rope tool, and several of the other new features that affect the gameplay in a positive way. Machine Strike is a cool game and I was excited to see a mini-game like the Witcher 3 incorporated in 2015. Again, it's a difficult and intelligent system, yet it's at least fair. Somehow the world never manages to get too repetitive either, which is honestly impressive considering the sheer scope of the game.
I've died from glitching through the floor at the main base at least three times and I had numerous game-breaking (and immersion-breaking) issues. Maybe a patch will iron out the glitches, but due to the sheer number of them I can't see the performance being optimized anytime soon. Hell, even the mountain in the first cutscene doesn't load for me, ever; Aloy climbs on air.
Loading times and the frequency of them are overkill for a 2022 game, with random black screens appearing as you cross sections of the map (which also takes seconds to load each time you open it) and the main loading screens taking ages. From what I've read, on PS5 the game loads incredibly fast. While I will go on to describe several other issues with this game, these performance problems are the key reasons I cannot give this a higher score.
The difficulty is great in some aspects, with more puzzles, climbing strategies, etc. However, so much has been nerfed just for the sake of artificial difficulty. For examples, the triple notch is hindered by a small stamina bar despite being almost a necessity for a hunter bow to be effective, there are very few strong damage coils (never saw more "powerful" than 12% explosive damage and never saw a pure damage coil), enemies are relentless and give you no time to scan them or breathe between the constant long-animation knockdowns, health potions now take seconds to consume while you're locked in animation, and throughout the whole game many enemies will one or two-shot you from off-screen. By comparison, I've beaten all the Souls games, but those felt a lot more fair.
The artificial difficulty is also greatly enhanced by... not knowing what to do most of the time; no difficulty setting can fix that. While there's something to be said about holding the player's hand too much (which does happen too), this game frequently puts you in very large areas without a clear indication of what to do, and your Focus can't help. There's an infamous early main quest about following Sylens's signal, with the ultimate combination of confusion and climbing nonsense. And with one particular Tallneck, you can only climb a structure from an area that will leave you literally running in a giant circle to find, if you think to even find a way up. Otherwise you could try to climb several different peaks of the nearby mountain to glide, which you'll eventually find out intentionally never works. By the way, that's all considering the handhelds aren't bugged and the Tallneck doesn't start walking the opposite way or disappear from the map.
I can't put this nicely: the melee pits are atrocious and have no practical application. It seems like the developers weren't clear if they should be for training melee skills you'll rarely use or if they should just be memorization/combo execution challenges. Some challenges are so easy they're comical, others are unclear about what to do, and usually the final challenges are so hard that even setting your difficulty down a notch or two will still give you a challenge. These pits weren't tested enough.
This game could use a big lesson in "less is more". A lot was added that completely detracts from the item focus. While the first game had an issue with offering the best weapons and outfits a few chapters in, this game has so many slight variations on the base weapons that it's not clear what the strongest ones are. The arena vendor offers strong ones, but there are equally comparable, non-legendary weapons with their own good stats and they're scattered somewhat at random throughout the map, so just seeing a gold weapon, coil, or outfit doesn't necessarily mean it's the best for your playstyle.
What makes this worse is the upgrading system. Thought hunting was bad in the first game? This one takes it to a whole different level. You can easily spend an hour running in circles for an RNG item drop from an animal that rarely appears and runs away before you have a chance to shoot it. This isn't a case of extreme realism either, because in reality you'd always get the item you require from any animal you hunt; this is just more difficulty for the sake of being difficult.
Like in the first game, upgrading requires gathering specific machine parts as well. The difference is that now they have to be knocked off before the machine is taken down, and these parts can be from enemies you rarely ever encounter, or their location isn't visible on the map yet so creating a quest won't work. This creates a situation in which upgrading is incredibly tiresome, and it's pointless until you get weapons with a high damage output because the time and resource investment is immense. Often you might have the resources for the third tier of an upgrade before you have resources for the second, which is a strange issue to consistently run into.
If you find weapons or outfits you think are reasonably strong and have perks you like, you will still have to put in serious work to get one or two coil slots unlocked. By contrast, the first game's approach was to let you acquire clearly strong items that had all of their coil slots unlocked automatically. Getting powerful coils to fill those slots was the real reward that came with game progression and exploration, and this is what balanced out the whole "getting the best items early" issue. Want to farm a boss-tier enemy for supplies in this game? Maybe you'll get a decent coil, but you won't have the ability to use it until you invest literally hours into upgrading your weapon, and you definitely won't be finding a much-needed 40%+ damage coil to apply like in HZD.
The resource pouch still has to be upgraded despite the new, much-needed stash feature. This is primarily because the medicine pouch has been nerfed too. You can spend skill points to slightly upgrade your pouch capacity, and different outfits can do it too, yet enemies hit so hard and so frequently that you'll quickly burn through your limited medicine pouch. This then requires you to press a button to restore the smaller pouch from your overall carry capacity: your resource pouch. This means, instead of all the berries you collect immediately going to your accessible health pool, you're restricted from using them until some of your smaller capacity is used. Even with upgrades, the overall carrying capacity for medicine is still quite low, and this is obvious because the amount of plants you'll have to collect in this game is ridiculous; they're constantly respawning everywhere for that reason.
The expanded skill trees are a welcome addition, although I felt like there was way too much going on and not enough effectiveness. Spending numerous points on the surrounding skills to valor surges (primary skills - active abilities) could mean investing many points in things you have no interest in. The first game somewhat did this, but this game does it a lot worse. HZD had obvious, desirable skills too, and in this game only one can be used at time; the rest are all minor, passive skills and sometimes repeats. The use of a primary skill is also hindered by the constant need to build up the valor meter after it expires.
I wish the unlimited fast travel pack wasn't removed. It's great to be able to travel without a pack from campfire to campfire, but does anyone really want to pull up the map and find a campfire before navigating to another? I want to open the map and go to a campfire instantly like I could in the first game. The only way around this is to buy dozens of packs from merchants. Sometimes, without the option of a machine to ride on (like the first California chapter), you'll have to run for 900+ paces. Alternatively, in most cases you could search for a machine to carefully override, but it's an unnecessarily time-consuming situation either way because you could've made it to your goal in less time than it took to find a Charger or Bristleback that wasn't listed on the map.
While all of these issues drastically detract from the game's enjoyment, the voice acting, audio, character development, animation, narrative, graphics, and overall presentation are phenomenal. This game easily has one of the best scifi stories I've ever seen. It's just a shame how far it strays from the original and was poorly optimized for PS4. HFW would be much better as a movie, especially because there's so much talking and dialogue to that extent that, even as someone who loves narrative experiences, I often wanted to skip them to play the quests.
I appreciate the relic puzzles, gliding, use of the rope tool, and several of the other new features that affect the gameplay in a positive way. Machine Strike is a cool game and I was excited to see a mini-game like the Witcher 3 incorporated in 2015. Again, it's a difficult and intelligent system, yet it's at least fair. Somehow the world never manages to get too repetitive either, which is honestly impressive considering the sheer scope of the game.
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