It was a mess. The developers mantra basically seemed to be 'do more of that' instead of 'fix that'. The climbing is still as crappy, but there's more of it now. They increased the collection of status effects and the amount of weapons available that have various combinations of status effects (and buffs and strengths), blowing up the weapon pool to an incomprehensible size. Seriously, you'll have 25+ weapons in your inventory, which all consists of either bows or slings. There's so many bloody side-quests that it becomes numbing. And most of the new machines really aren't very fun to fight. The map also sucks and is structured really weirdly. Remember all that lush jungle footage in the marketing of this game? Well, have fun spending 50+ hours in the desert before ever setting foot there.
The story in Zero Dawn was never that good, only the lore, and now that that mystery is resolved Forbidden West doesn't even have that to hold on to. It just has its characters, which have the charisma of a loaf of bread.