I have played quite a bit of Horizon and I'm very thrilled for it's sequel. Although it got faced in the same year as Breath of the wild and the open world feels lacking compared to it the core gameplay and the machine roaming works so well that I want to see more, Guerrilia games have an exceptional graphic department but to me is their art that make shine both Horizon and Killzone 2 worlds.
It's true that it doesn't have much built variety or different approaches are not very well incentivised but I feel they stuck to the core working well and sprinkled some other option to play around. To be fair if you compare to Monster Hunter that game took many iteration each adding and trying something different and not everything has gotten into the core gameplay.
RE: Game Design Lessons from Horizon Zero Dawn