problems: this games balancing is god awful, the progression is horrendous, bosses are extremely easy, generally consisting of somewhere between two and four easy to dodge attacks, trivialized even further with stamina being extremely easy to manage, and a ton of acess to some pretty insane hitbox manipulation, the only difficulty in them comes from awful balancing or the eventual bullshit attack (like malenias infamous spin attacks, or mohgs hard to read blood), the only fights i felt like were an actual challenge were two of the last three bosses, maliketh/clergyman and godfrey (in his second phase), and morgott, the first boss of the game, while this game is an open world, its mainly in individual areas, since most areas in the game only transition into each other through elevators or dungeons, this is especially bad during the last stretch, where the previous sandbox open world turns into a long corridor, health in this game is really bad, at the start of the game you are really fragile, but investing in health will not get you more tanky, it will only stop you from being more frail, the games mini-dungeons (caves and catacombs) are generally a boring chore, with most being extremely similar generic environments you can run through and fight a boss you have seen before to get boring loot, with only the ocasional exception in the form of npcs or actually interesting items, the bosses generally dont feel special, with most of them fitting into archetypes like knight in horse, or dragon that flies, with generally identical movesets, and a lot of them just straight up repeating, like the tree sentinels, the balancing in the game is also really bad when it comes to favoring the player, with tons and tons of stupid strategies, cheese, gimmicks, and a ton of really broken attacks, and the notorious farm in mohgwyns area, which can be acessed theoretically extremely early in the game, only requiring the player to beat one boss and one player-like enemy, and with the proper equipment, the player can abuse it to reach as high of a level needed in less then an hour, with all these problems, eventually exploring the lands between lost some of its luster

good things: the visuals, this game looks, in both the artistic direction and graphics, purely amazing, the world of this game is wonderful, its gorgeus, everywhere you look there is a brand new beautiful weird thing that you could have never anticipated, be it enemies, items, npcs, locations, it all just shines with criativity, while this wonder weakens after some time, due to problems listed beforehand, you still are constantly bombarded with new shiny oddities, the games big dungeons are amazing, exploring them is a ton of fun, they are really varied, and i just couldnt get enough of going through them, they were all truly wonderful, everything in the game (up to margit) can be done in a million different ways, you constantly have endless options and it never feels overwhelming, the combat is really fun to engage with (even if the numbers are a fucking problem) and i never got bored or frustrated by it for a single second, there is endless variety and option with how you are gonna fight, and what you are gonna use to fight, the armor (which doesnt matter a lot due to the health problems mentioned above) and weapons look amazing and are all a blast to use and see in action, the main bosses (that arent just recycled enemies) all look absolutely amazing and their looks and moveset are all bursting with creativity, my favorites being godrick, radahn, and godfrey, i have to give a special highlight to the volcano manor, which is in my opinion the best area in the game by far, from start to finish, to all the options you are given with engaging with it, its all absolutely brilliant (also my other favorite dungeons are stormveil, academy, leyndell, and farum azula), the underground areas are also amazing as well, one of my favorite things the game does is not show the full map at the start of the game, it helps with the sense of wonder

elden ring is an absolutely amazing game at its core, with amazing gameplay and an endlessly captivating world, but the more time you play it the more its problems become apparent, constant repetition of its ideas, be it with enemies, bosses, or mini-dungeons, the bosses, while amazing visually, are extremely easy to beat and just dont pose a challenge, the end of the game is completely linear, with the game becoming a corridor between the boss of leyndell and the final boss, and, when it comes to balancing and progression, it honestly feels like the devs couldnt figure out how to get it right and just gave up and released the game with these aspects pretty much broken

04/05/2023 edit: i saw the witness developer say that elden ring does not have design and that sums up my feelings pretty well, also i bumped up the score to 9 cause the game LOOKS too cool and awesome and good to give it anything below that even if it kinda deserves it

good parts: the game looks gorgeous, nothing to add here, it looks fucking great, combat is pretty great*, the system is really cool, shooting at specific parts, being able to choose how you approach situations, shooting off big robots weapons and using them against them, its all really cool and fun, and i loved mastering it, the world conceptually is awesome, and the lore is pretty cool and creative

bad parts: the world kinda fucking sucks, its generally really empty and theres nothing cool to find, sure there are areas that are more filled with ruins and are cool and striking visually, but theres nothing in them to do, its just cool to look at, inside them and around them theres just more of the enemies that are everywhere else, the enemies are cool, but ive seen them before and they are everywhere else, while i started the game exploring around fighting everything doing sidequests, by the time i was finishing up the second area, i was kinda done, the combat, while i said is great, it gets worse the higher the difficulty, due to boring hp scaling, i started my playthrough played on very hard, until i got bored and changed to hard, also for some god damned reason you have a dodge roll with insane invincibility, so you can just kinda spam that with no consequence to make most fights way easier and make non obligatory fights trivial, this is a open world game with levels and towers that unlock the map, which is you know, awesome, level design pretty much doesnt exist here, the world feels like it was made for a movie not to be played on, while the lore and world are great, the actual story that is told is pretty fucking bad, especially the "ending arc", which stretches on forever and almost made me just uninstall, it teases you on for 5 hours repeating itself in the gameplay and in the narrative, by the end i felt like i had done the same thing and heard the same things like 4 times, also the whole game, especially the beginning, kinda feels weirdly anti-reigious in a cringe reddit way, especially the beginning, it feels like there was a really cool opportunity for storytelling here about the new humans and how they see the world, but its just sacrificed for lore (in other words, the game confuses its worldbuilding for its actual story), the HUD is fucking nightmarish, its actually grotesque, and if the game didnt allow me to turn most of it off, i might have just quit halfway through the game, its actually mindblowingly bad, also the game does the give you dialogue options that dont actually do anything, which is, fun

TL;DR: horizon is a boring ubisoft open world, and while it looks amazing, has creative ideas, and has a really cool combat system, the game executes them poorly, by leaving its gorgeous world empty, sacrificing its creative worldbuilding to talk about itself, instead of telling an actual story, and making the combat shift between trivially easy, and boringly hard