Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Review

There’s something about the ability to import old save files into a remastered video game that, while obviously great for players, can feel a little anticlimactic. It’s booting up a (technically) new game only to stare at an already-completed file, with ample temptation to simply load up that end-game checkpoint and dick around for an hour to see what’s changed.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered felt that way for me, at first. After all, it’s the exact same journey in a prettier package, what could I possibly gain from replaying a game that I believed pales in comparison to its sequel? Turns out, a newfound appreciation at the least and an eyeball-moistening visual banquet at the most.

I’m Aloy. Or as the machines like to call me, “Hey you in the tall grass!”

Yes, make no mistake, this is the Horizon Zero Dawn you know from just seven years ago, first released on the PlayStation 4 and very playable on the PlayStation 5 thanks to backwards compatibility and PS4 Pro-adjacent performance uplifts, as well as PC where it can already be pushed even further. What’s happening here though, is that developer Nixxes – a star player in PlayStation’s PC porting efforts – has gone back over the entire game (alongside original developer Guerrilla Games) and reworked it to be visually and technically on par with 2022’s Horizon Forbidden West.

And though it can be hard to believe when we’re currently in the midst of a marketing run for a new model of the PS5 that costs $1200 and requires hours of Digital Foundry video essays to adequately communicate the difference for the end user, the leap from a very beautiful PS4 game to a very beautiful PS5 game can actually be quite transformative. That much is clear from the moment you step back out into Horizon Zero Dawn’s harsh, post-apocalyptic world of regressively primitive humans and high-tech robot dinosaurs.

I think this is where all my dead houseplants reincarnated

Comparing the two versions of Zero Dawn side-by-side, or even simply eyeballing this remaster with a recent enough memory of the PS4 original, it’s immediately clear that “remaster” maybe isn’t a strong enough label here. It’s essentially the same game under the skin, which seems to be one of the more crucial criteria for the term, but this isn’t a mere transposing and uplifting of existing assets with a new performance profile. Instead, Nixxes has basically re-arted the game from top to bottom with new technologies, new environmental detail, textures, animations, camera direction, lighting, effects, character models, everything.

The result is a game that truly offers a generational leap in visual fidelity and also works from an updated style guide to bring it closer to its sequel in overall art direction. That, to me, is the more noteworthy result of this endeavour. With Zero Dawn, Guerilla had a lot of success in leveraging the still-young Decima Engine for a technically-proficient open world game with some stunning scenes, but it wasn’t until Forbidden West that the world of Horizon really felt like it had established an identity. Now, with that same identity retroactively applied to the first game, Aloy’s debut adventure feels that much more special. It’s more cohesive, more enchanting, and more impactful.

Naturally one of the first things you’ll notice are the sweeping improvements to character models, which now look almost as good as their Forbidden West counterparts with huge amounts of new detail, more cinematic lighting and more convincing skin rendering (three cheers for Aloy’s peach fuzz). Importantly, these characters don’t just look better in stills but, thanks to hours of new motion capture data and direction, behave a lot more believably in the game’s frequent and once-awkward dialogue sequences. Forbidden West still has an edge in the base quality of its character models and its best-in-class conversational scenes, but what’s here is starkly superior.

Be vewy, vewy quiet… we’re hunting Sawtooths

The real star here though, is the world itself. A common thread throughout this remastering effort is Nixxes going the extra mile and not just upscaling Zero Dawn’s original assets or reskinning it with bits from its sequel, but also creating a huge volume of brand-new art wherever it felt necessary to complete the vision. This means that environments are brimming with incredible new textures and even new geometry, along with reworked water effects, new weather details and those amazing skyboxes and cloud systems from Forbidden West (the areas added in the Frozen Wilds expansion are particularly mind-blowing).

Another of the bigger enhancements comes from the foliage throughout the world, which has not just largely been replaced with all-new assets but is seen in far greater abundance than before, making the original feel almost barren in comparison. Plants react more realistically to Aloy now too, which is one of those minor things that folks love to argue about on the internet but, frankly, does make a big difference to embedding her in this overgrown world.

It’s a good reminder of how studios leverage increasingly more powerful hardware to not just shove extra pixels and bleeding-edge effects onto our screens, which tends to be the low-hanging fruit fuelling online discourse, but also to better realise a game’s artistic vision. And because art is a many-faceted concept, so is Nixxes’ approach to “re-arting” Horizon Zero Dawn. Take the game’s smattering of human settlements, from humble camps to grand cities, which benefit not just from graphical upgrades but foundational ones. Places like Meridian feel more alive and lived-in thanks to crowds that are both denser and more expressive with folks that genuinely look as though they’re going about a schedule and not just idling on predetermined marks like underpaid actors in a too-elaborate movie studio theme park.

Thunderjaw is what they used to call me, too

Lighting, too, represents a complete overhaul in comparison to the PS4 original and again exemplifies Nixxes and Guerrilla’s combined effort to not just throw new detail and technologies at the “old” game but rethink and re-tool its entire makeup to deliver something that comes together with a much stronger sense of direction and fully realised vision.

In less impactful but still important updates, the game’s sound mix has seemingly also been revamped for Remastered. I’m sure there are nuances here that are lost on me, but there’s definitely a much wider and more full sound here that takes better advantage of spatial/directional audio. I listened both on my Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbar and speaker system, as well as the PlayStation Pulse Elite headset, and compared it to the PS4 version, and the difference is quite stark. The original mix is a lot crunchier and busier in comparison, with the new treatment giving things like reeds swaying in the wind and machine footsteps crunching through the dirt much more room to breathe.

There’s full DualSense controller support as well, with all of the haptic feedback and adaptive trigger goodness you’d expect.

“Everything the light touches, is our remaster.”

All of this means very little to the actual game of Horizon Zero Dawn, with this remaster representing a carbon copy of the PS4 version in terms of story and gameplay content. That’s not overly surprising, of course, but it’s worth noting. If you didn’t jive with the game the first time around – and I’ll admit that I thought it was just okay as a first stab at a new idea – I don’t see this release changing your mind. It is nice to have an excuse to go back and replay it after some time away, although my return trip hasn’t really given me any fresh insight or reason to rethink my initial assessment.

There are, however, some very welcome additions to Zero Dawn’s suite of accessibility and approachability settings with a lot of the additional work done in the sequel coming back over to this remaster.

Final Thoughts

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is kind of a tough one to summate or score in a traditional review format. The mechanical elephant in the room here is obviously the question of whether this endeavour was a necessary one, or who it might be for, but I don’t think I’m here to ponder the necessity of a work or judge who should consume it.

Despite being lukewarm on Horizon Zero Dawn when it first launched in 2017, I’ve come right around on the series since its fantastic follow-up. I’m also the owner of a big and expensive OLED TV along with an ongoing pre-order for the PlayStation 5 Pro, so I definitely think it’s for me, at the very least. 

If what you want is to re-experience Horizon Zero Dawn – or experience it for the first time – with some of the prettiest visuals you’ll see in modern gaming, this will get you there. But more than that, if you’re interested in game design and production, especially on the artistic side of the process, it’s a fascinating look at what is arguably a “best-case” remastering effort where ambition and capital were clearly in abundance.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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