What a lackluster expansion
When I started playing through the Frozen Wilds expansion of Horizon Zero Dawn, I had some pretty high hopes for it. Too bad it was a pretty big let down compared to the rest of the game as a whole.
In the Frozen Wilds, you travel to the frozen north area of the map where the Banuk tribe lives. The Banuk are a pretty secretive tribe that pretty much stays to themselves, but their area is being overrun by machines that are corrupted by a rogue artificial intelligence named Hephaestus.
The expansion does introduce some new enemy machines that were pretty cool and significantly more difficult than the previous machines. It also introduced towers that heal nearby machines, forcing you to focus on taking down the towers before fighting the machines.
Aloy ends up taking on the chieftain of the Banuk so she can be in charge of them and lead them into the volcano mountain where Hephaestus is. There are a lot of sidequests to do in the area as well, but I found them to be pretty meaningless at the level I was. I was already quite strong since I had completed the game and the quest rewards were pretty insignificant and I found a lot of the quests to be pretty boring and repetitive.
The final mission of the game was pretty extensive though and led you along a path inside of the volcano to defeat Hephaestus. This expansion did add a lot more of a Tomb Raider feel to the game. Prior to this, there wasn't much in terms of platforming and puzzle solving, but there were a few puzzles that were introduced. They weren't anything special. It was basically turning knobs to make light flow through a certain path. Kind of dumb in my opinion. I would have just preferred more fighting, but I guess it is cool they wanted to try something new.
The game did recently get an update for PS5, which gave it true 4K resolution and 60fps. Personally, I didn't notice much of a difference in gameplay after the update was put into place, but I know that 
The final boss of the expansion was a decent fight. It was nothing compared to the scale of the fight of the true end game quest, but it was pretty cool.
While fighting, towers would pop up that needed to be killed or they would heal the boss, but other than that, it was just shooting arrows at him to know off armor and tick away at his life bar. A bunch of rolling out of the way of attacks and plinking away with arrows.
Once you defeat the boss, you are able to override the computer and get rid of Hephaestus once and for all. But prior to you being able to get rid of Hephaestus, the AI tells you about more monsters that it was able to release upon the world.
Then you must escape the volcano before it all is destroyed. Once you are out of the volcano, you meet back up with the old Banuk chieftain and there is some pretty insignificant dialogue and the expansion just pretty much ends. It was a pretty disappointing ending to be honest. But after 45 hours of gameplay with this game, I am glad to be done with it so that I can focus more on finishing Ghost of Tsushima and other games.
Overall, I really enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn. It had some amazing graphics and really great story behind it. It is sad that the expansion wasn't that great. I am really looking forward to the sequel to this game. I have seen some gameplay videos and it looks incredible. One of the things I like about the sequel is that handholds will be lit up when you use your focus. That was one of the most annoying things about the Frozen Wilds was that they wanted to focus more on platforming, but it was such a chore to look around for the different handholds for climbing. I am glad that they realized this was a frustrating thing for the players and did something to fix that.
I still recommend playing this game to anyone that hasn't been able to. It is such a cool experience.