Huge fan of the first game, but I couldn't finish this one for multiple reasons:
1.The main characters voice and personality are unbearable. I had to mute the voice audio, just to play the game. The voices lines feel like they were written by a 10 yo. It's too cringe.
2. The story is all over the place, it's not structures or linear. They tried to glue two stories together and failed. Badly.
3. The first games soudtrack was iconic, this one is mid at best. Speaking of audio: no greeting from the seatruck while the pda's voice is... i can't even call it robotic, its like AI but somehow worse?
4. The snowfox bugs are still not fixed. Built 9 of them and all of them are clipped through the snow, under the map. I started a new game - still the same issue.
5. The iceworm glitches out and can hit you from across the map.
6. The PDA scans are unfinished, which makes me think the developers didn't really cared about the game to begging with or didn't bother finishing it. You' d scan a plant and it would be two sentances. One of them is "BiG UnDerWatER PlAnT". Yeah... thats. Its like the people that made the descriptions HATED the 3d and concept artists.

I highly advice to just play the first game. I really tried to love this game (seeing how long I tried playing it), but I can't deny the sheer amount of problems it has. Its like they started it with passion, mid-way lost interest, started hating it and then chucked it into the world when its 60% done.
The developers didn't love this game like the first one, they just made a quick cash grab.

it's different.
feels a bit like a spinoff title, like far cry 3 blood dragon compared to far cry 3, although not as extreme

but i think it's a good game.
shorter experience with more land based exploration? yes, but definitely fun and worthwhile

I was looking forward to play Below Zero but I quickly found out that they decided to go with a protagonist who doesn't stop spewing dialogue exposition instead of having a silent protagonist like the first game. I don't understand why anyone would think that listening to a character constantly talking to themselves is an enjoyable experience, if I wanted to get my hand held and torture myself by ruining my immersion every 5 seconds I'd just play a Sony game.