The original game was a promising yet flawed open world exploration-heavy game with a great setup and great worldbuilding. It was a very "PG-13" corny theme park experience sometimes and the best moments were rooted in the lore, not the actual story of Aloy. But especially the first half was a great hero journey surrounded in mystery with some rather harrowing plot twists. The villains weren’t that important, the main focus was the unravelling of the mystery of Aloy's origin and getting to know the history of the world.

Horizon Forbidden West was in a difficult position – Aloy couldn’t continue on her discovery-filled journey. She was all-knowing now. Unfortunatelly Guerilla opted for a classical Marvel-like structure with a cookie-cutter world saving story and it fell apart quickly. There was also an attempt of something like "Mass Effect-ish" plot development with the base of operations and the assembling of your own team and whatnot but it fell incredibly short (it just doesn't work well with the premise of a solitary hero like Aloy I guess).
Once again – the world itself is beautiful and well realised. But now the side content just repeats itself with little to no innovation. Side missions are slightly better then in HZD but - boy oh boy! - the main story pisses itself so hard so quickly.
The premise of the dying world could be good, but right after the Embassy mission you realise the main portion of the game consists of three to four big fetch quests – these are supposed to bring you to the different areas of the map which they achieve but it feels very unorganic. The writing is like a watered down Avengers story with unnatural and cringey dialogue, unlikable NPCs and cliché after cliché after cliché…
I actually liked parts of the exploration. The traversal while not being flawless was definitely better and snappier than in HZD. Guerilla "borrowed" once again from better games (Zelda and others) and introduced a glider, a grappling hook, rebreather and a free climbing mechanic - but for some reason you can't use them while solving puzzles. All those are completely on rails and strip you of your abbilities, which is utterly and completely frustrating.
Side activities were completely unoriginal and there were some mindboggling design decisions, but for a limited time I really enjoyed walking through all those beautiful forests and I loved all the different vistas – but that was it. I basically facepalmed the back third of the game, constantly on the brink of putting the game down.
One of the most criminal parts of the story setup were the villains. What on earth were those Superman-1978-Zod-like idiots supposed to be? They’re introduction and basically every second of their screentime (except for Tilda – mainly thanks to Carrie-Anne Moss’s great performance ) were one big comedy nonsense.
And of course – there is the (very rushed) happy ending with a sunset and with a looming danger in the background: a sequel bait…!
Please Guerilla – you’ve managed to create a good lore and a beautiful world, now you should really work on that writing.

If you consider buying/playing the game maybe just put the main story aside and enjoy the world itself and the things Guerilla is quite good at - the combat and the machine variety. Because the story might kill the game for you as it did for me.

(While not being the main problem, the technical state of the game wasn't the best - despite what was said about this Nixxes's port since release. It still needs a few patches - the frame generation was a welcome addition, but it is not very well implemented, there are also some shadow flicker issues, particle artifacts, frame dips and some inexplicable performance degradation over time. Some of it could be on my side but some of it are definitely an engine related issues and should be adressed.)

Graphics is good.

Si