I’d say you’d be more likely to enjoy it than not. Obviously racing is a big part of it, but exploration is another, and it usually does a decent job of that. It’s a little hamstrung because you have a GPS, so you know where all the roads are, but they usually tuck some stuff away and have some things to find and collect, if it isn’t just a little over done (I think Horizon 5 had you breaking signs to get followers, and there were like almost 300 signs?). They’ve had some car unlocks hidden as well, but you get pointed to the area and it’s pretty hard not to find them. But it gives you plenty of visuals to look at, usually some decent music, and a good variety of driving activities.

Story is usually a little rough, because the premise railroads you on every game. Usually a festival goer in-universe with “normal"car and you work your way into better cars by winning events and such. Not much else to it, and how else do you get the progression to better cars?

One of the aspects you may enjoy, especially if you’re artistic, is designing car liveries and staging photo shoots and such. I haven’t done in-depth liveries since Forza Motorsport 4, and I think people have found ways to basically import images to the car, but doesn’t mean you have to.

Controls are going to be basically bog-standard car controls, and controller is perfectly fine for Horizon or any Forza game, really. I’ve put, pretty easily, probably 2k hours into various Forza games, all on controller.

I’d say it is not Sim racing. It’s not Mario Kart, you do have to brake and understand a little bit about racing, but the AI is usually pretty forgiving and adjustable as you see fit, and also usually has some built in slow-downs to keep things close. Fits somewhere on the sim side of the scale, but it’s definitely not difficult racing by any means; car damage I don’t think exists outside cosmetically, and you can ram AI cars all day without much penalty.