Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition (2020) [PC] review

“The strength to stand alone, Aloy, is the strength to make a stand. To serve a purpose greater than yourself.”

-Rost

I look upon the valley beneath me, surveying the area for good places to lay traps, cover to protect me from artillery fire, and resources to replenish my health and ammunition during the fight that’s soon to come. After taking stock of my surroundings, I lay down tripwires and proximity mines, double-check my ammo stores to verify they are full, and take a moment to scan my prey before engaging. His name is Redmaw, and he is a particularly fearsome robotic tyrannosaurus. One who will take everything I’ve learned up to this point to defeat. This is Horizon Zero Dawn.

Overview

Originally a PlayStation exclusive released in February of 2017, HZD was eventually released to PC on August 7th of 2020. This review will be covering that version of the game. 

The Setup

The game begins with Aloy (pronounced Ey-Loy), an orphan in a strange post-apocalyptic world populated by robotic animals and various tribes each possessing varying levels of technology.

Aloy is raised by a man named Rost, an outcast of the Nora tribe alongside Aloy. The Nora place great value on motherhood, making Aloy’s lack thereof a problem. After a relatively short tutorial, Aloy decides that she wants to be accepted into the tribe. This can be accomplished by passing a competitive test to become a “Nora Brave” called The Proving. Naturally, this leads to a training/growing montage, where Aloy goes from a small and weak, albeit determined child, to a strong, confident young woman, capable of not only passing the test but winning it. 

Aloy, the child

Tutorial

Just before the test, the game opens up a bit. Aloy receives her main mission as well as a couple of side missions that introduce some of the quest formats and activities the game has to offer, plus some of the enemies you can expect to encounter throughout the game.

After completing these introductory quests, you compete in the Proving, mostly concluding the tutorial. Outsiders then attack The Proving, introducing several new mysteries. This attack gives Aloy a reason to leave the Nora Tribelands and explore the rest of the world of Horizon Zero Dawn. 

From there, she begins tracking down leads, gradually discovering more about the strangers that attacked the Proving, the events that put the world in its current state, and even her own origins. 

It’s a well-written story, and definitely one of the game’s strong suits. It’s a bit of a slow burn, with a lot of it coming after quite a bit of traveling around the sizeable map. While there are some interesting side missions, there is also quite a lot of busy work. 

Aloy, the young adult

Gameplay

Crafting and Upgrading

The crafting and upgrading systems are fairly important, especially in the early game. Aloy is formidable all on her own, but it never hurts to stack the deck a little. She hunts animals and gathers resources to craft materials and upgrades as well as to improve weapons and clothing. Completing missions earns experience, and as Aloy levels up, she gains skill points that can be allocated between 3 different trees that improve her combat, stealth, or resource management. It’s a decent system that is somewhat rewarding to engage with, but especially in the later game, it becomes tedious to find all the materials needed to craft the next upgrade. The game doesn’t really require it anyway, so equipment upgrades will likely go ignored after a certain point.

Outfits and Gems

Additionally, Aloy can attach gems to her weapons and outfits to further enhance their capabilities. The outfits are cool because depending on what she is wearing and her environment, Aloy will have some flavor commentary, along the lines of “Brr, it’s cold out here,” if she wears a more summery outfit in a freezing climate and, “probably a little overdressed,” if she wears a fur covered parka in a desert. One small nitpick with this is that outfits and skills/stat boosts should mix and match à la Spider-Man PS4/Miles Morales so those aesthetics are left to the player’s choice. As it stands, most of the higher-tier outfits can be a little busy, so it would be nice to be able to apply their stats to the lower-tier attire.

Combat

One of the strongest aspects of the game is the flow of its combat, especially once one puts time into it.

Aloy has a pretty wide variety of weapons and traps at her disposal, and every Machine has various weak points and weaknesses to different kinds of weaponry. This makes it rewarding as for the player as they get better at fighting them because the ease of dealing with them in the later game feels just as much due to personal knowledge, skill, and experience dealing with each Machine variant as it does Aloy’s stronger equipment.

The primary weapons are the bow and spear, which Aloy will get stronger variations of as the game progresses. Well, for the bow at least. The spear eventually improves, but this comes somewhat late in the story, so its use is somewhat limited to post-game content and New Game+ runs.

Secondary weapons can vary quite a bit depending on one’s approach to the game. There are slingshots, which fire bombs with various elemental effects applied to them, Tripcasters, which shoot out tripwires that can again have elemental effects, although some can just be explosive, and Longbows that fire more powerful arrows at the expense of firing rate.

Some Machines only need one weapon to effectively dispatch, and others will require Aloy’s entire arsenal to deal with effectively, but there is almost always a choice in how to engage with any given enemy. 

Graphics

Despite releasing in 2017 for PS4, Horizon Zero Dawn is still one of the best-looking games on the market. The machine designs are fascinating. Obviously inspired by real animals, they manage to be charming, beautiful, and intimidating all at the same time. Their armor gives them the hard machine edge, but underneath there is a network of wires and tubes that gives them an almost organic quality as well. The game has a wide variety of them, and each has its own place in how it engages with the environment, other machines, and the player. The locales of the game are also rich with detail, each displaying its own personality. The environmental effects are also very impressive, especially the snow. It displaces around Aloy as she moves through it, shifting and piling up in a very convincing way.

Side Quests

If Horizon Zero Dawn has one major flaw, it is that it is sorely lacking in engaging side content. The hunting lodge quest described at the beginning of this review is one of the strongest examples. Unfortunately, even that boils down to “talk to quest giver, go to location, take out enemies, return to quest giver.” The lodge quests add some story to this format, but ultimately they work because of the escalating difficulty against stronger and stronger enemies, gradually introducing players to the depth of combat. 

Cauldrons

A few quests involve exploring locations called “Cauldrons,” underground factories that manufacture Machines. These quests involve gaining entrance to the Cauldron, typically engaging in some basic traversal, puzzle solving, and combat, and ending with an encounter against one of the more powerful Machine types, like a pair of Snap-Maws (robo-crocodiles) or a Thunderjaw (robo-T-Rex) in a relatively confined space. Within each Cauldron, there are typically some collectibles that provide a little lore for the world. It’s hard to call the Cauldrons optional though, as they each reward Aloy with the ability to hack some machine types, so in order to use that ability to its fullest, she must explore every Cauldron.

Longnecks

The last of the “side-quest but required/recommended” category is climbing the different Longnecks. These serve as the Assassin’s Creed-style map-clearing towers. They’re a little more fun than just climbing a tower since they move, but they serve the same function. Aloy must climb these in order to see the whole map.

Bandit Camps

Beyond these, the only other quests are bandit camps and borderline fetch quests. The bandit camps do have a character Aloy interacts with that is fun, but the camps themselves aren’t that interesting. They mostly serve to reinforce that human enemies aren’t as fun to fight as the machines. 

Everything else is just a step above a basic fetch quest, and scraping the world to extract every little bit of value from it is not very rewarding. Guerilla Games might look to The Witcher 3’s example in writing side quests. The main story is very compelling, so the writers can definitely tell similarly engaging side stories to help the world of Horizon Zero Dawn feel a little more alive. 

PC Specifics

All of the above is applicable whether on PC, PS4, or PS5 via backward compatibility. But what are the specifics of the PC version? First and foremost, the game runs well now. Upon initial release, there were a lot of issues with the performance, both with general smoothness as well as bugs. Luckily, most of those issues have been dealt with. There have even been some pretty major feature updates, like the addition of DLSS and FSR. These use machine learning to upscale the image and do wonders for performance. My experience playing at 1440p with mixed high and ultra settings was a solid 90-100 fps, and 100-110 fps using DLSS. If you don’t own a PlayStation console, or you do, but also own a PC of similar or greater processing power, I think I would recommend picking it up for PC due to the customizability of the settings. Plus you can install mods, which is always a benefit of PC ports.

All that said, the PC release is the same as the console release. There isn’t exclusive content or anything, so if you’ve already played the game on PS4, you aren’t missing anything. 

Final Thoughts

All in all, Horizon Zero Dawn is a strong 7 or a weak 8 kind of game. There is plenty to like and many features on offer, but they don’t come together into a perfect game. How much you like it will largely depend on your personal tastes, but it’s worth a shot in my opinion. Though maybe play with a guide so you know what is important to engage with and what to ignore.

Pixel Perfect

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A long time fan of all games, Dr. Dave’s interests are wide and varied. From video games, to music, to motorcycles, you can find him on Twitter @DrDaveProjects or catch some of him and his friend’s Let’s Play content on Garbage Tier Gaming and related channel, The Dumpster.