A nice little extension piece to the main story, new kind of weapons and new kind of enemies and I gotta say wrt combat, I had more fun here than in the main game trying to experiment on all the new weapons they brought in for the dlcs and prior to it. The story I'd say don't go with any expectations, that's kinda applicable with the main game as well. It was fun and the new area looked great but I have to say the whole Quen area for the DLC is horribly optimised for PC, I literally got less than half the performance I got during the main game which itself was pretty shaky cuz of my vram limitation. The area doesn't even look that different or improved upon compared to the main game if you ask for the amount of performance drop. All that said visually what an experience it was to pilot those airborne and waterborne machines, absolute beauty. Really looking forward to find out how much better the third game's gonna look in contrast to this. Also Sylens was literally one of the best characters in both the games. Lance Reddick was such a goat, gonna miss his presence not just here but also in John Wick and a potential Quantum Break sequel.

Maybe playing the first game and this one back to back was not a good idea. Might've had a slightly more positive view on this one if I hadn't played both the games back to back cuz most of the core elements whether it's the story, gameplay feel very identical. Also despite me taking my sweet time to finish the main story I was barely invested in all the crafting, skilling up and upgrading. I barely levelled up and completed quests despite being too under levelled, don't know if it enhanced the challenge or increased the tedium or a bit of both, cuz I hardly even changed the weapons until the final set of missions. The first game had a better lore, I barely cared about the zenith crap, not that I had any expectations for both the games in the first place. But the graphics and art style of the game are absolutely best in the business, I think its even better than Alan Wake 2. AW looks more realistic but this one's more gorgeous to look at. Deciding to play this game at 21:9 Aspect Ratio instead of the usual 16:9 might be the best decision I made regarding this game, makes the art style and visuals look even more godly.
They did add new elements to the gameplay and revamped the skill tree and also brought forth changes to melee and other stuff but I don't know the combat somehow feels better on the first game, maybe has to do with how the machines move while in combat. The characters were a mixed bag, they did a decent job with returning characters like Varl etc but had some annoying new characters as well. Overall I did actually like it I'd give it a 3 if I hadn't played Zero Dawn right before playing this. It's fun to shoot robotic animals and roam around in a setting like this with such gorgeous visuals. Onto the DLC now 🫡.

It was good to see them not following the trend set by Combat Evolved of backtracking the same area multiple times. Also they really cooked with the cutscenes, the CGI/animation of the cutscenes definitely felt movie calibre. They could've actually made an animated series/movie out of those cutscenes instead of the live action Halo.The actual game looks good too but then doesn't really match the visual tone/quality set by the cutscenes, so it felt like watching 2 different things. The gameplay was really fun, had a lot of diverse setpieces/encounters but it did feel hard to navigate stuff on heroic difficulty, also frustrating at times with the poor checkpoint system and bullet sponginess. I can't really vouch for this being the best among the series, so far Reach and 3 are tied at that for me.