The best Yakuza game in years, and that's honestly saying something.

Though it only serves as a transitional title before LAD 8 drops, Gaiden gives us everything we love about the previous Kiryu-led Yakuza titles, bringing back classic minigames and side content for a great experience. The story is great, with some incredibly powerful emotional beats. The combat rules, especially the new Agent style, which allows you to use high-tech gadgets in battle. The Colosseum, Akame Network, and countless minigames make it so you can go days without progressing the story. I loved this game so much!

Pros:

-Fun gunplay and mission structure. I loved the assassination levels, the church shootout, the brothel bombing; all of them utilized different mechanics to do something different with the limited capabilities the game offers.
-The map is large and easy to navigate, without being too cluttered.
-I like the characters, and the story is decent.

CONS
-Good GOD, 90% of this game is DRIVING. Even if you skip the transitions, most of the game is still just DRIVING. It gets old FAST.
-Map is big and very empty. There is no side content in the main game, and the free roam content is inessential when it isn't punishingly difficult.
-Collectibles are lame and not worth seeking out.
-Plot is rudimentary, and you can see the "twist" coming from a mile away.

All in all, I had fun, but not nearly enough of it.

Horizon: Zero Dawn was one of my favorite AAA releases I've played in a minute. Strong sci-fi concept, great combat, open world that's mostly fun to explore, decent story and characters. It had its flaws, of course, but that didn't stop me from playing it for weeks on end. So when I started Forbidden West, I was hoping for an even more improved experience, working out the kinks from the first one and adding even more depth to the gameplay. I'd just finished God of War: Ragnarok, so I kind of went in with higher expectations.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite meet them. HFW is a direct sequel to Zero Dawn in the best and worst of ways. While it maintains that sci-fi concept with a good story, building upon the revelations from the first game, it also kept a lot of the things that brought down Zero Dawn for me.

To start, there continues to be an over reliance on an incredibly offputting melee combat system. Even fully upgraded and with all kinds of upgrades and buffs, your spear does jack shit against most enemies. You're better off dodging away and using one of your many ranged combat weapons on an enemy rather than hitting them with your spear, but it doesn't stop several side quests from requiring you to use the melee.

Furthermore, the game's open world is larger than HZD's, but it's also far less populated, and even more difficult to navigate. You can go through massive stretches of the map without seeing a single machine or collectable, with lots of strange areas where it seems like something was supposed to go that never got put in. I recall traveling to a far corner of the world to examine what looked like a structure, only to find a massive open lake with a Tideripper in the middle of it. There was no possible way to fight it in the water like that, and no quests take you there. So why was it even there???

The waypoint system is also very flawed, giving a general direction rather than a route; I had several instance where I followed a quest marker and got stuck behind a mountain that I can only find a route around by constantly reopening and closing the map. It was awkward, and annoying. Even when they added the ability to fly, it only clarified for me that there's a whole lot of nothing between your objectives.

Okay, now on to the stuff I liked! The combat continues to be the real selling point of the series. While I did feel like it felt a little looser than Zero Dawn's action, the combat with bows, traps, and elemental damage make every machine encounter a unique challenge. If you're a compulsive looter like me, you will never run out of crafting supplies for your traps and ammo. I will say, however, that the game doesn't really incentivize trying new weapons outside of a few hunting trials and side quests. I fully upgraded two Hunter bows and used them almost exclusively for the entire game, and almost never used the traps aside from a few stealth areas. I guess that one's on me, but I know what I like, and Hunter bows were the best.

The story also continues to be fascinating. It's a bit silly, but the idea of terraforming machines in a post-apocalyptic earth always scratches an itch for me. The moments in HFW where you find datapoints from the Old World are my favorite parts of the story, and this game does some very cool stuff with its main quests, like the Thebes bunker and the HADES Proving Ground.

Finally, I really enjoyed exploring in this game, just like in HZD. While the map is indeed full of big empty spaces and minimal actual mysteries, the points where you do organically discover stuff make it worthwhile. I loved climbing cliffs and finding myself face to face with a Sunwing, or entering a ruined settlement and marking a suspicious trail with my Focus. Looting wrecked machines, fighting rebels, helping hunters take down a Bristleback; it's all these little encounters that make roaming the open world worth it. It's still a big empty open world at the end of the day, but I at least enjoyed the initial forays into the fog of war.

In the end, it's a less strong sequel than I would have liked. The fact that it's still so buggy two years after launch is a little disheartening, but the game never fully crashed for me once. I guess I was hoping for a more focused experience than what I got (lol).