To those who say that a new IP gets treated harsher:

What about Resident Evil 6, for example? Old IP, critics still gave it a low score. Hmm.

What about Silent Hill 5, Mario Tennis Ultra Smash, Starfox Zero, etc. Maybe it's because these games have flaws? And with that in mind, maybe HZD isn't just as good.

It's STILL a great score, there is no matter to debate that. And everbody should play and enjoy it. But towers are definitley not the reason why Zelda got a higher score.

I'm not familiar with how Horizon implements towers, but based on what I've read, it seems the output of both isn't quite the same. Towers in Zelda are essentially just better vantage points that color your map, and feel much more like a nod to the man-fish in Windwaker than anything else. I have no idea how reviewers looked at both games, but if the implementation is different, that might explain why certain reviewers (assuming they're the same reviewer looking at both) weighed the two games differently.

Now, if reviewers are docking points for something trivial, like the fact that a tower is a tower, than that simply means the reviewers are morons.

Well, past Zeldas have also received lower scores.  What it comes down to is this Zelda is better than past Zeldas so it gets rated on that.  How many reviewers compared BoTW to Horizon or Witcher 3 or GTA V?  Not many at all... they're not really rating it on scale with other open world games.  They're tating on how well the open world formula was applied to the Zelda universe.

OP, can you link to these reviewers who supposedly docked points from Horizon solely for map towers? Maybe the rest of BotW is so damn good it overcomes map tower points :)

From Destructoid's review conclusion:

"Horizon Zero Dawn is a fascinating premise wrapped in a tortilla of tropes. It has detective vision, radio towers, skill trees, masked load screens (Tony Hawk's American Wasteland gets no credit for popularizing this in 2005, by the way), and a world map littered with billions of points of interest -- all stuff you've seen before."

They gave it a 7.5 and seemed very down on Horizon having elements that featured in other games.  He also implied that he found crafting to be tedious.

I mean, how are skill trees a negative?  How are points of interest a negative?  Masked load screens?  I don't care if I've seen these things before, I care if they're well implemented or not.  

Just for the sake of comparison, the same writer gave Super Bomberman R a 7 and Zelda a 10.  He also seemed to like crafting and towers in Zelda.

The fundamental difference is that in BOTW, the map towers only tell you the topography of the area, whereas in a Ubisoft-esque game, it fills the map with a bunch of icons and chores to do.

Essentially, this. The towers are the spiritual successor of the map-filling feature from WW. The problem with Ubisort towers is that they always feel like busy work, mostly because there are so many and there isn't much benefit to doing them. Towers don't here. In BotW, they are a tool for encouraging exploration by triggering the need for completion.

That being said, there's nothing wrong with Horizon's, either. At all. And this is coming from someone who was nervous about them at first. Neither feel like busy work.

Well, one of those two games definitely has more of an ubisoft look and feel, but I'm not too sure why that particular feature is a negative. I actually rather enjoyed the challenge of climbing some of those in games like AC and Farcry.

I do have a theory: The knowledge that you're about to glide off high places in Zelda and potentially swap to some shieldboarding awesomeness may have made Zelda's towers seem quite cool.

Besides, Zelda's towers are more for looking for things via binoculars on your own and tagging them on the map; they don't really function like one you'd find in the aforementioned AC or Farcry were suddenly everything is revealed.

That last part, I couldn't help but wonder, does he have to give Zleda the exact same scopre and give out the exact same gripes and words that he gave Hoizon?.

Lots of tinfoil hats in this thread...