3/5 ★ – squid0812's review of Horizon: Zero Dawn - The Frozen Wilds.

No reinventing the wheel here. This is just more Horizon, with all of the accompanying caveats. The area this expansion adds to the game is impressively large and utterly gorgeous in a way that stands out in what was already an attractive game. With that being said, the stuff that you actually do in the new area has barely changed. There’s a fairly enjoyable main quest that once again hinges on a clever connection between a tribal society and the AI left behind by a more advanced civilization. Unfortunately, the appropriation of real world tribal customs is more egregious than ever here; there are aspects of the relationship between Aloy and the Banuk that made me audibly groan while playing. Still, there is a satisfying narrative payoff if you can look past the clunky portrayal of tribal society. The side content is slightly better than it was in the base game, but it still wasn’t much to write home about for me. The addition of the control towers that buff and heal hostile machines is a cool idea that is a significant improvement on the corrupted zones from the main game. The side content also does a slightly better job of offering incentives for completing it, including potential spear upgrades and improved XP rewards. I just always ended up feeling like I was playing a Ubisoft checklist game whenever I diverged too far from the critical path - as with the base game, I think I would’ve liked this more as a 5 hour linear adventure rather than as 15 hours of open world bloat. I have the least to say about the combat aspect of the expansion. They added a couple of rather challenging new machine types, which adds in a bit of welcome novelty to the fights. But really, little has changed from the main game - as long as Aloy is taking on massive robo-creatures, the archery-based combat remains deep and satisfying as hell. The inability to imagine more substantial tweaks on the gameplay and world-building of the base game here irks me slightly. But nonetheless, if you had a good time with the main campaign, then there’s little reason to believe that you won’t have fun with this. In that sense, this expansion’s lack of innovation is both a strength and a weakness.