Its very pretty but these games suck. Boring narrative, watered down by needless open world shit, uninspired crafting, platforming that is straight up not good, and why the FUCK is everything so hard to see? Its gorgeous, but its sensory overload. There are so many effects and splashes of color they forgot to make the game fuckin readable.
I was a bit confused as to why the first game got so much praise after I started playing it. It feels like a completely hollow game with lame characters and story and dialogue and gameplay and the "RPG" (items with colored tiers) elements aren't even good.
I liked the story of lost tech and the overall geoengineering effort run amok. I honestly enjoyed the game more than BotW which had weirdly similar vibes. The second one was feeling less coherent though, I haven't finished it yet. I enjoy uncovering the mysteries, which means I don't think I could replay it.
I kind of noped out when I discovered that the larger enemies turned into arrow sponges. The combat never really clicked for me and it just became tedious.
I really enjoyed the combat in the first half of the game, but I turned the difficulty down to story mode for the second half because the combats were getting so tedious.
The combat sucks too, especially against the human enemies that are just boring to fight, at least the machines look interesting and have their own specific weak points. For some reason you also get really good weapons like halfway into the game, which makes it too easy.
I think a lot of the enjoyment in these kinds of open world games comes from how good the traversal is. Spider-Man has a very similar formula, but swinging around New York on webs is a lot of fun. Traversing Horizon's world isn't fun, and you need to craft items for fast travel.
I liked it, but I literally didn't play any of these survival/craft/shooter games until the first Horizon caught my eye. The thing that wins me over is the controller gimmicks with the PS4. I love when it lights up and makes noises in sync with my actions in the game.