(Bloomberg) -- It’s difficult to imagine, but it’s true: If video games had never been invented, we might have never known the joy of pulling back the string of a bow, slowing down time and shooting an arrow right into the glowing skull of a robot dinosaur.

Sony Group Corp.’s stunning game, Horizon Zero Dawn, introduced this concept in 2017, and it’s just as satisfying in the sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, which comes out Friday for PlayStation consoles. After playing for nearly 20 hours, I feel comfortable saying that the game is fantastic. It builds on everything that worked so well in the first game, adding new battle techniques and methods of traversal. Some players may be disappointed at how similar Horizon Forbidden West feels to its predecessor, but I wasn’t one of them. It’s hard to get sick of shooting those dinos.

Horizon Forbidden West is set in a post-apocalyptic version of the U.S. where hulking machines based on prehistoric reptiles stalk the land and humans live in primitive, tribal societies. In the first game, which was set around Colorado, we learned that a 21st-century tech mogul was responsible for the grim state of affairs. This new game expands that story into Nevada and California, where we find out more about the past, meeting an unexpected new faction that has emerged with malicious goals. Playing as a hunter named Aloy with red hair and a knack for trouble -- voiced by Ashly Burch -- you have to figure out what’s going on, save the world and so on.

Sony said last week that Horizon Zero Dawn has sold more than 20 million copies, raising the stakes for this sequel. 

The new Horizon offers a ton of new features: a grappling hook, a hang glider and a diving mask that lets you explore underwater without holding your breath. There are new types of robot dinosaurs, new weapons and even an addictive new board game that you can play in villages across the game’s massive world. In a move inspired by the popular Mass Effect series, you even wind up getting your own base and recruiting characters who will chat with you (there is so much chatting!) about your progress in the story and how everybody feels about what’s been going on.

Read more about Sony’s plans for another Horizon installment in virtual reality

The mantra for Horizon Forbidden West’s development appears to be: make everything bigger, better and more beautiful. Close-up shots of characters showcase expressions and mannerisms with a subtlety that wasn’t present in the first game. There are more ways to hunt and trap the machines than before, whether you’re throwing a javelin with a delayed explosion or using a gauntlet to shoot shredding discs to tear off pieces of a robot Stegosaurus’s exoskeleton. The human opponents are far less fun to fight, but it can still be satisfying to sneak around one of the game’s many Rebel Outposts as you fight the Tenakth, a military-driven tribe that plays an important antagonistic role.

Although the game looks gorgeous, it also has quite a few bugs. Over the course of play I ran into several technical glitches ranging from a whole system crash to a more minor inconvenience, when the camera was somewhere it shouldn’t have been. A day-one patch may fix some of these issues, and given the ambition on display here, they weren’t too bad -- as jarring as it was when I started a conversation with one guy during the night and suddenly it turned into daytime.

Bugs aside, Horizon Forbidden West is an incredible achievement. There are moments of sheer awe and joy, like when you use the grappling hook to fling yourself into the air, then slow down time so you can unleash a volley of arrows into an enemy on the way down. If you played the first game and want more Aloy adventures, this will satiate your cravings. If you didn’t, I’d recommend playing it or at least watching a YouTube story summary before jumping into this one so you have some sense of what’s going on. 

Or you could just ignore the story and spend hours upon hours hunting dinosaurs -- a perfectly satisfying option.

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