Honestly unfair at this point to the degree that I feel kinda bad for these guys.
First game was pretty mid, and released three days before Breath of the Wild - a game that made it almost impossible to go back to how the original Horizon felt.
This game is a pretty fair improvement over the first, and despite being cross-gen, looks really fantastic on PS5 in 4K. But a week after it came out Elden Ring drops and just destroyed any chance of this ever being memorable.
Story and writing still a huge mess. A big 40hr game that seems like it has a place to take you, only before quickly wrapping things up with a “oh there’s actually a bigger bad on his way, so please look forward to the inevitable third game!”

One of the true magic moments in a Bethesda game is that feeling of stumbling upon a stunning vista that reveals just how boundless the world really feels.
Starfield promised that in epic proportions, but falls short of their games legacies in nearly every way. Had this been just a dozen actually hand crafted planets or so across a few solar systems, this could have almost singularly saved the game. As it is, Starfield is a soulless game supposedly about the spirit of adventure - but here the call for adventure is barely even a whisper.

Triumphant sequel to a tremendous game. Fumbles in a few spots, and at a couple of moments feels at risk of having severe bloat, but there’s some kind of grim magic to its excess. Come the halfway-ish point, I was all in on the twisty story. The combat is viciously wonderful. There’s a much more horror tone to this than the first which really works to hit at the sense of utter despair.

Much has been said about Drukman’s politics and what he drew from as an Israeli American for his influence. The clear attempts at paralleling the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict comes across as an insane misreading of what is a genocide being inflicted upon an ethnic minority by an apartheid state. If you go off TLOU Pt2 you can more or less surmise that he thinks “both sides are just so violent, no?”