Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered PS5 Review
Summary: An occasionally subtle, but nevertheless substantial upgrade to the original Horizon Zero Dawn that, while I don't necessarily think it's an upgrade that needed to be made, I'm glad it was.
4.6
Still captivating!
Like many people, when news broke of a Horizon Zero Dawn remaster being in the works, I raised an eyebrow. Guerrilla Games’ 2017, open-world epic featuring Aloy, and her journey to hunt awesome-looking robot dinosaurs (amongst other things), was already a great-looking game.
It runs well on the base PS4 that it originally released on and on PS5 after receiving an update in 2021 that upped the game to 60fps at a checkerboarded 4K resolution.
The decision to release a remaster felt a little strange. Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that isn’t particularly old, is still fully playable on current hardware, and has already had an update to take advantage of the newer PS5 machinery. It’s a remaster that felt a little redundant.
So, what has been done to justify this new, native PS5 release of Horizon Zero Dawn? At first glance, it doesn’t look like a whole lot has changed. Upon taking a closer look, however, I noticed that the updates are quite extensive. Developed by Nixxes, a studio responsible for many of Sony’s PC ports as of late, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered has far more going on than is initially apparent.
I’m not going to go too much into the actual gameplay and story of Horizon, because that is entirely unchanged from the original. Our review of the original release can be found here.
The environments have been overhauled. Not in a way that might be immediately obvious, but overhauled, nonetheless. Specifically, the natural elements of the game have been almost completely redone. Essentially, all foliage in the game has been updated with new textures, models, and the interaction model seen in the sequel. The ground is now lush with plant life, the undergrowth is thicker and responds to Aloy moving through it, and the wind moves grass and plants as it blows by.
Snow now deforms underfoot, something that wasn’t seen in the series until the Frozen Wilds DLC and was never a part of the base game. It clumps on bushes and plants and is knocked down when Aloy pushes through them.
This upgrade to nature extends to the terrain itself, too. Most of the changes and tweaks are subtle. Rivers especially, now look far better, both the banks and surrounding landscape, as well as the water itself. Water was one aspect of the original release that was somewhat lacking. Something that the sequel, Horizon Forbidden West massively improved.
The water system developed for the sequel has been transferred over to the remaster and makes a huge difference in those areas. Reflections are far more accurate, caustics shimmer in shallow pools which I’ve always found exceptionally pleasant to look at, and faster-moving water now feels like it has life to it.
Another aspect of the base game that received some criticism, is the dialogue system. Guerrilla went with a BioWare-style conversation system, similar to that of the Mass Effect games. Like in those games, conversations came across a little stiff sometimes. Characters didn’t necessarily emote all that much, and while the models and dialogue were generally great, it came off a little stilted.
For Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Nixxes has added a huge amount of new, motion-captured animations to address this issue. All of these new animations go a long way toward making the conversations feel more alive and is a very welcome change. Like a lot of the changes made in the remaster, they’re seemingly quite subtle, but when going back and comparing to the original, the difference in some scenes is staggering.
In place of the one mode seen in the original game, we now have access to performance and fidelity modes, running at 60 and 30fps respectively. The latter targets a full native 4K presentation with the former being a lower resolution to help hit its framerate target. It isn’t a substantial enough hit where I’d recommend fidelity mode over it, though, and the presentation is surprisingly even across both. Beyond the frame rate difference, I didn’t notice much in the way of obvious changes between the two.
Performance was also rock solid in both modes as far as I could tell, with no obvious drops to the frame rate at any point. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered also has a 40fps mode (for high refresh rate displays) and PS5 Pro support right out of the box, but I was unable to test these features.
Horizon’s sequel, Forbidden West had some excellent accessibility options present when it launched in 2022, and I’m pleased to say that all of these have made the jump over to the remaster. Everything from individual difficulty elements to control adjustments and audio settings can be tweaked. There don’t seem to be any colour blindness options, unfortunately, something that was also missing from Forbidden West at launch but later patched in.
Final Thoughts?
So, that makes upgrading to this version an easy decision, right? It’s hard to say. Aside from the visual upgrades and the inclusion of the DLC, there’s nothing new here, it’s fundamentally identical to the game released in 2017.
Existing owners can upgrade to the remaster for $10, which I think is a reasonable price considering the work that has gone into it by Nixxes.
Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my favourite games of the eighth console generation, and this new remaster only improves it further. Many of the changes present may seem subtle at first, and a lot of them are, but when compared to the original side-by-side, some of the changes are substantial, making this the definitive way to experience the game.
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