Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Review – Now with Added Shine

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Review

By now, anyone who is a fan of action RPGs has probably played Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn. Released in 2017 for PS4, Horizon Zero Dawn was a bit overshadowed by another action RPG: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Eventually, though, fans caught up to the critics. Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the best PlayStation 4 games, with incredible art design and graphics, an original story, setting, and characters, underscored by beautiful music. Now, Nixxes Software has teamed up with Guerilla to bring Horizon Zero Dawn up to current visual standards with Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.

Best Gets Better

Set in a 31st-century post-apocalyptic world, Horizon Zero Dawn is a classic quest/coming-of-age story. Humans have reverted to richly imagined but relatively primitive tribal cultures. Machines have evolved into sentient, animal-like constructs that hunt and are hunted by humans for parts. Stories of ancient humans — i.e. our own times — have become the stuff of myth and legend. The central character in Horizon Zero Dawn is Aloy, a young woman outcast from the Nora tribe. Her quest is to learn who her mother was, why she was cast out, and what happened to the old world. Horizon Zero Dawn has a compelling story, and Aloy is a memorable hero.

Horizon Zero Dawn is an open-world action RPG. Aloy forages for supplies, hunts the machines for parts, and crafts new weapons and consumables. There is a main story quest and several side quests. Aloy is an agile character and climbing is a major aspect of exploration. In other words, the gameplay is pretty standard to the genre. It’s also where Horizon Zero Dawn shows its age. The map is cluttered with objectives and the game’s UI is likewise a bit inelegant.

Thanks to stellar art direction, though, Horizon Zero Dawn was, and remains, one of the most beautiful games ever made. Its vision of a distant-future American mountain west is detailed and the tribal cultures and machines are striking. It’s only in comparison to some of the latest, state-of-the-art games does Horizon Zero Dawn seem dated. By and large, few people playing Horizon Zero Dawn in 2024 would complain about how it looks.

Room For Improvement

Players who definitely notice the slightly dated look of Horizon Zero Dawn are those who played its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West. As good as the first game looked, the sequel surpassed it in just about every way. Lighting, water, plants, character models, faces and animations were all improved. It’s really for that reason that Nixxes and Guerilla decided to give Horizon Zero Dawn a fairly significant spit shine.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered focuses almost entirely on the game’s graphics and performance. Dialogue animations have been improved by over 10 hours of additional motion capture, and a new camera distance highlights them. Overall, character faces and skin textures — at least for the leads — have been improved, though some of the minor NPCs still look dated. Water and reflections are vastly better, and lighting and textures are sharper and more dramatic. Almost all of the game’s foliage has been entirely redone. Overall performance has been improved and now players can expect 60 fps in performance mode, 30fps in 4K quality mode, and 40fps at the balanced setting. The game’s audio has been refined and spatial placement is more pronounced using headphones.

Being focused on graphics, some core gameplay components like movement animations, quest design, and the map are still behind the curve of Horizon Forbidden West and other recent games. Despite the improvements made in the Remastered edition, hair looks and moves unnaturally, and characters still often clip through dense vegetation.

To Buy or Not to Buy

By almost every metric, Horizon Zero Dawn is a classic action RPG. For anyone who missed it, the Remastered edition is definitely the version to pick up. For those who already own it, the upgrade to Remastered is a reasonable $10 and at least on PS5, PS4 cloud saves work just fine. If the new and improved visuals inspire folks to play the game, or play it again, that’s a win for everyone.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher for review***