Armored Core 6 has me thinking about what had me bounce off Horizon Zero Dawn so hard and I really hope I can articulate it without it sounding like 20 year old game design discourse.

Like the gameplay loop itself, what the player is actually doing, is so tight and interesting and provides routes for doing it in different ways that that takes up the brunt of my attention, and the story being minimal and cryptic and dry, requiring a lot of interpretation, suits it extremely well. While everything I saw about HZD suggested to me a work of media I'd really enjoy as an HBO miniseries or a comic, but seemed to mostly revolve around missions where you Sneak In Somewhere, shoot up a technopagan rave, and repeat.
Like the missions and scope was broad and expansive, but what you did in that space seemed a little bland, vs a more finite number of missions of limited scope that you can approach in a variety of different ways.
Like ultimately there's no point in comparing these two games beyond refining my thoughts about my own tastes, they have such entirely different creative goals that they may as well be from other planets, it's just fun to feel like I've got a closer read on which one's atmosphere I can breathe.