It's really jarring to have to go back to "jump all over these jagged rocks to try and climb a thing if you miss the 'intended' path" design after how amazingly open BOTW is. Horizon grew on me after my
initial impressions once I left the Nora area and made my way into the western half of the map (I'd put it around the middle of the 8/10 games on that list), but having to go back to what passed as "good" open world design before BOTW's open navigation and
chemistry engine was still pretty hard to deal with. Especially considering that Horizon doesn't really have anything "special" going for it in its open world design besides looking pretty and being moderately well polished.
EDIT: I think my biggest disappointment with the game though isn't the world design (which is passable at best), but the difficulty of the combat. When I managed to kill a Thunderjaw the first time I encountered one without taking so much as a scratch on hard mode, I felt really let down because I expected something that looks like that to kick my fresh out of the Sacred Land butt into next week. The only truly difficult parts in the game are when you're mobbed by several fast moving enemies at once, and even that becomes easy once you raise your fire arrows to a high enough level with modifications to set any small to medium size enemy on fire in 1-2 shots. After that everything that isn't a "large" enemy becomes "set on fire->knock over with R2 while its hopping around->critical->repeat", or if you're too mobbed "set on fire->run around/into bushes if there are some until it wears off->repeat". The few enemies not susceptible to being set on fire usually have some way of killing them quickly that is fun to figure out, but once you do figure it out they quickly become trivial and despite the decent amount of enemy variety you can reduce all enemies in the game to some pretty simple formulas for killing them with a good third of the game still left to go. The game becomes even easier once you get enough resources to just buy as many health potions and blaze as you need to have near infinite healing and explosive power like what's even the point of medicinal herbs after you achieve this?
EDIT 2: lol I made a big complaint post without even meaning to so here's things I did like about the game. The combat is really fun in the second third of the game, when new enemy types start appearing but before you get into a spot where everything becomes trivial. Some of the characters were memorable and well fleshed out. I appreciated how Aloy in the main quest was focused on her own goals and really couldn't care less what the people she was involved with thought of her or what they wanted (her back and forth with Sylens was great), even if that characterization doesn't really mesh with "sidequest Aloy" going out of her way to help every single person she comes across with the most trivial of problems (I got a good laugh when Aloy told the police chief that she didn't have time for him only to immediately help him out). The cauldrons were all pretty great except for the one that pits you against a bunch of regular dudes. The walking around segments in the old bunkers where you piece together what happened to the Old World was my favorite parts of the game, a good "facing down the apocalypse" drama that leaves you with just enough tantalizing tidbits of information each time to drive you forward to the next site. In fact I found just about everything with regards to digging through the Old World technology and solving the mysteries of the machines a lot more interesting than learning about the "modern day" culture, which I felt relied a little too much on cliches and didn't go into enough detail regarding certain things.