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.
I didn't really want to compare Horizon to Monster Hunter because I never really got into Monster Hunter enough to speak at length about its design, but one of the things that I found interesting is that I really don't care for Monster Hunter but found myself thinking of Horizon as being very thematically similar (both in terms of the sorts of weapons you use and adversaries you fight) while handling it in a way that feels very different to me.
One thing that I may be picking up on is that I always felt like Monster Hunter was basically gameplay without a story, which may be an unfair criticism because I haven't really played it in a long time, while Horizon really feels more like a story with gameplay.
I really hope the sequel comes to PC, because I just can't see spending money on a console to play just one game I'm interested in.
Yeah maybe not fair comparison but I could take that the teams cpuld take from sharing stuff in the games, Monster Hunter cpuld take some narrative and goal inspiration from Horizon, what made me stop enjoying MH is the mindless slaying of monster for loot, theres some effort to give an ethical hunt but is too little for me and in a way overshadow the tight and masterful gameplay that feels like a samurai sword refined through the years. On the other hand Horizon coul take some tips in the gameplay balances and build variety from MH. It s not fair comparison but it could be seen as teacher-student situation as Capcom have years upon years of expirience in monster hunting gameplay.
I hope too that this exclusivity stuff will come to an end one day.