Horizon is my answer too. I was expecting an open world that felt alive, but instead it was a jam-packed theme park. You don't hunt, you go to the right exhibit and kill everything within it. The entire herd is within a 50 meter radius, go nuts. Go away and come back later and it'll be full again, exactly where it says so on the map, jammed between other points of interest with extensive, contrived looking plarforming challenges connecting it all. It's like a zoo and a vending machine had a baby but we're supposed believe it's a big open natural world. Great concept, garbage execution. I felt like Bobby Hill hunting at La Grunta.

HZD has genuinely some of the best storytelling and worldbuilding in gaming, but the kicker is that you have to play about half the game to get to it and it's all told in flashback because the actual interesting stuff is what happened to get to this point rather than what's happening now.

If blasting bits off knockoff Zoids isn't doing it for you, then you're going to run out of steam before getting to it.

The Last of Us is definitely about the story. If you're not invested in that, you're probably not going to enjoy it. There's nothing much in the gameplay that sets it apart from similar games.

I'm so glad I didn't read about HZD. I got it on sale and saw that it was similar to Assassin's Creed. Being thrown into it without any expectations definitely helped.

I like the combat (as a person who constantly plays archers). The bows, traps, looting and fighting robot dinos was pretty cool. Figuring out how to take them out and aim at specific weak spots is fun.

The world is still pretty weird and honestly I would have dropped the game after a few hours too if I didn't like the archery so much. The story as a whole is pretty good after beating it. But the delivery of it all kinda sucks.

You seem like a mountain dew game fuel and CoD kind of guy.