Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Review

REVIEW COPY PROVIDED BY PLAYSTATION

Horizon Zero Dawn was a pivotal moment for Guerrilla Games. After creating five games over the course of thirteen years developing Killzone games exclusively, the studio needed a fresh start. The result was a post apocalyptic action focused RPG that was critically acclaimed and massively successful on a commercial level having sold in the ballpark of 25 million copies. As great as Horizon Zero Dawn was and for how important it is to Sony and Guerrilla Games, does a remaster, just seven years later justify its existence?

In the summer of 2021, PlayStation bought Nixxes, a studio known for great work on PC porting, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that their first project with PlayStation is a remaster. Continuing their reputation for doing excellent work, the Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster goes above and beyond just a simple PS5 upgrade.

Horizon Zero Dawn was already a beautiful game but the team at Nixxes have done some incredible things. The environment is are more lush, the lighting is impressively authentic and the robots look better than ever. The team at Nixxes looked at the concept art to find areas that they could make improvements and bring Zero Dawn closer to those initial drawings. A lot of environmental changes might not sound important, but when taken as a whole, they add up to a much stronger sense of realism.

With the increased power of the PS5, there was the new ability to add many more NPC’s to the world at the villages and outposts. But they didnt just place a bunch of people at these areas, instead over ten more hours of motion capture has been added to make the game have a more realistic and alive feeling. When combined with all of the lighting and environment effects, the robot dinosaur apocalypse has never been better.

Horizon Zero Dawn looks as good as Forbidden West, but more importantly it also plays like it too. There is a quality, performance and balanced option, but we recommend playing in performance. In performance mode you get a steady 60 frames per second frame rate, but the visual quality appears negligible compared to the other two modes.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered includes the DLC “The Frozen Wilds”, which if you bought the original but never jumped into the additional content, using the ten dollar upgrade path makes a lot of sense, especially with the ability to import your save data easily from the main menu.

At the core, Horizon Zero Dawn is an excellent adventure with a great post apocalyptic story and Nixxes didnt alter the blueprints, they just made the best version of it. Zero Dawn didn’t break the action RPG mold, but it was as refined and polished as you could want an adventure to be. The only exclusive issue that we had with the remaster was how off-putting young Aloy looked, which was initially concerning for all of the characters, but once Aloy was grown, our fears were put to rest.

Im still unsure how I feel about a remaster after just seven years, but Zero Dawn was an excellent game, so it’s not totally undeserving. It’s hard to know who this game is for, especially with around 25 million sold. However, with 60 million PS5 users, there are likely some people that missed out on Guerillas pivotal RPG.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered makes a fairly strong case for a lot of potential buyers. If you played the original but missed “The Frozen Wilds DLC”, then the upgrade path makes sense or if you never played either Horizon games, this is not only the best way to start, but arguably the better story, finally, if you only played Forbidden West and wondered how Aloy’s journey began, this would be a great way to experience the beginning of the adventure with ease and in line with what you know of the series.

VERDICT

Horizon Zero Dawn Remasted checks the boxes on the basic requirements for a remaster, but Nixxes transcends expectations and make this version of the game an easy recommendation for a lot of different scenarios.