Back to the wilds: Horizon Zero Dawn PC review

Horizon Zero Dawn has gotten a whole slew of accolades in 2018, including:

• Best PS4 Game
• Best Performance for Ashly Burch
• Best Art Direction
• Best Soundtrack
• Best Story
• Best Post-Release Content
• Best PlayStation Console Exclusive

… and the last one is a pertinent point. The previously PS4 exclusive has made its way to PC, available through Steam and the Epic Games Store since 7 August 2020, having originally released on 28 February 2017. It comes with The Frozen Wilds DLC, so you get the complete experience ahead of its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, which is expected to launch in 2021.

You get the same story, on what some would argue is a superior platform, but that’s not really the point is it? Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition making its way to PC opens up the possibilities for even more Playstation console exclusives to be made available. This review will focus more on the features available on PC.

STORY BRIEF

If you somehow were not aware of Horizon Zero Dawn, here’s a handy blurb provided on the game’s store page:

EARTH IS OURS NO MORE

Experience Aloy’s entire legendary quest to unravel the mysteries of a world ruled by deadly Machines.

An outcast from her tribe, the young hunter fights to uncover her past, discover her destiny… and stop a catastrophic threat to the future.

Unleash devastating, tactical attacks against unique Machines and rival tribes as you explore an open world teeming with wildlife and danger.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a multi-award-winning action role-playing game – and this Complete Edition for PC includes the huge expansion The Frozen Wilds, featuring new lands, skills, weapons and Machines.

In this open world, you will be playing as Aloy as she makes her way through this world that seems both oddly technologically backward, yet advanced. There appears to be hints of a catastrophe that took out the humans before you, as you scan logs left behind. There are both flesh and metal creatures that populate this beautiful land, the latter quickly becoming dangerous should a hunter be careless. Aloy will be able to utilize many tools at her disposal to find the answers she seeks.

ALOY ON PC

Using the ROG Strix SCAR 15, all settings were cranked up to the highest and yes, the game remains as beautiful as ever. For those of you with your full monitor setups, it has support up to native 4K, along with 32:9 ultrawide ratio and at a 3840×1080 resolution support – though cutscenes remain at a 16:9 ratio. You can also enjoy unlocked framerate should your hardware be able to support it, up from the 30 FPS on the PS4 Pro. It may be disappointing to learn that there’s no raytracing support, or that the assets have not been changed for the PC release, but it’s a testament to how good the game originally looks that you wouldn’t realize it if they hadn’t told you, in my humble opinion.

With the keyboard and mouse, you can easily remap the keys as you need them, but the default ones should work just fine unless you have certain preferences, or you can go back to using a controller too. I actually found trouble with the original PS4 release giving me motion sickness for whatever reason, so the adjustable field of view option is a godsend (up to 100 degrees).

As with Death Stranding before it, Horizon Zero Dawn on PC also packs a Photo Mode, where you can have Aloy pose and look pretty (and decidedly out of character) or just slap on Instagram filters onto the incredible vistas that this world has to offer. It feels like there’s less options for HZD‘s photo mode compared to Death Stranding, but then again, Kojima’s attention to detail in regards to Reedus is unparalleled. There’s still lots of fun to have – just remember to turn off the UI when you take your screenshots (oops).

You can run the in-game benchmarking to get a rough idea of how your PC holds up. At this point of writing the review, many players have been complaining about issues of crashing and poor optimization, rather marring the experience should this be the first time players get to enjoy the game. Guerrilla has already acknowledged the issue, saying it’s their “top priority” now, so PC players will have to sit tight and wait for a patch. In my case, I didn’t see much, if any, issues, so I seem to have gotten off lucky.

FOLLOW

The launch hiccup issues aside, Horizon Zero Dawn being on PC gives more players the opportunity to play through the game for themselves. Guerrilla has said they are working to have the game playable on more variety of hardware, so maybe even a potato could run it once they’re done with optimizations.

It’s essentially as direct a port as you can get, as a lot of the settings you already could find in the original release. That might be disappointing for some who were looking for more, but as mentioned earlier, doesn’t that show how great it was, and still is? Definitely a recommended title, maybe just wait till it gets patched.