Gameplay

If you like role-playing games that focus more on story and action than character sheets, stats, and inventory management, you'll feel right at home in Horizon Zero Dawn. I felt like HZD gave me that Tomb Raider vibe, not only because of the female protagonist, but also as there is a healthy mix of exploration, story, character development, and combat. You traverse vast open landscapes that are rendered beautifully and don't feel nearly as empty as the world in Death Stranding. Just like in Zelda, you're not confined to the open world all the time. While traveling you may discover several dungeons that hold secrets and riches—all waiting for you to explore.

Guerrilla Games did a great job crafting a believable world for Horizon Zero Dawn that creates a multi-layered backdrop for the game with several factions and tribes which have their own rituals and culture—just like you would expect a tribal society to develop over the centuries. In towns and cities you sometimes overhear conversations that add to the experience without feeling like yet another tacked-on cutscene or dialogue.

I found the story to be captivating and interesting. It nicely unfolds at the right pace, and most characters are genuinely worth caring about. There are some weak moments and slowdowns of course, but I definitely want to finish HZD; I'm around half-way through the game now with 15 hours played. There are plenty of side quests, collectibles, and other things to explore; the main story is completely linear though, which I feel is fine.

While the game has human enemies, the majority of combat is focused on fighting the machines that roam Earth, a bit like robot dinosaurs. Besides their visuals, I didn't find them to be that machine-like. For me, they were just animals with a metal skin, which I suppose fits the narrative. Combat is highly focused on stealth and cunning. A head-on approach usually fails, the better tactic is to strategically position traps with various damage types enemies can be weak to—a scanning device will reveal those weaknesses, so no experimentation is needed. You may also stun enemies to swoop in for the kill, or slowly roast them with a fire dot that ticks every second. There are several weapon choices. For example, the spear is used for melee combat. It has two attacks: light and strong; when enemies have not detected you, an additional "takedown" option appears, or you can use it to tame creatures for riding or make them fight for you. In terms of ranged combat, you may pick from several bows and other equipment—merchants will sell you better gear, too.

The scanning device I previously mentioned is also used to point out weak spots and target those. Every species requires different tactics and battle variations, which is refreshing. However, this also means players who like head-on 3D shooters won't get very far. Enemy AI is decent, the monsters are definitely not bullet sponges, most human enemies are much more boring to fight, though. The game's difficulty is well balanced on "normal". Utilizing all the equipment at your disposal can become tedious, also because the controls to switch between gear are not that intuitive and often hinder the flow of combat.

Character development is similar to Tomb Raider; there are no classes, but you may mix and match from a simple skill tree. I felt like the choices didn't radically alter the playstyle, but you can definitely sway towards the mechanics you prefer. There are also several armor options and upgrades for equipment, which you can use to build synergies. The crafting system is simple enough for everyone to understand without getting overwhelmed, annoying distractions like inventory management or carry weight are not part of HZD, thank God.

Overall, I'm happy to report that Horizon Zero Dawn mostly lives up to the hype and is definitely worth checking out if it fits your genre. On the other hand, considering this game is three years old, I'm not sure if paying full price is worth it at this time. Unless you are starving for new content, waiting a bit longer should do the trick. It's not like 2020 has been the year of new games, at least so far.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

Visually, Horizon Zero Dawn can impress. While playing I kept wondering about how they did so on the PS4 in 2017. Of course, graphics on the PC platform are MUCH better than what's possible on consoles, but the fundamental rendering tech in the engine is unchanged. You just get higher resolutions, more FPS, better effects, and improved detail on textures. Horizon Zero Dawn is powered by the Decima Engine, which uses DirectX 12 exclusively. In order to handle open-world scenarios, the engine uses streaming and has dynamic memory management. The culling system is able to account for the player's vertical position, which ensures underground caves aren't loaded as long as the player walks the surface of the Earth. Guerrilla Games has several interesting presentations on the developmental aspects of HZD. If you are interested in game development, definitely consider taking a look.

Horizon Zero Dawn uses an amazing lighting system that combines baked lighting with dynamic lights and several night-day light modes that can be combined and blended between to create a realistic experience of passing time. The streaming engine works well, I would say better than in UE4—there's much less pop-in, although a little bit of it occurs in some scenes, and the LOD system is fine, too. While some LOD-blending pop-in is present, it is not too distracting.

The physics engine could be improved a bit. While it does its job just fine and delivers a realistic experience, it seems some animations are locked in at 30 FPS, and others bug out sometimes if they run at high FPS—not game breaking, but definitely something the developer should look into. There's also some drama about Aloy's hair physics at high FPS—I didn't even notice it until I watched a side-by-side comparison video.

Controls on the PC are solid, not perfect. I remapped dodge from the left control key to mouse button 4, which is much easier to use. Switching between weapons/ammunition is annoying, even with a gamepad, but it's manageable. Keyboard and mouse control aiming and movement is almost flawless; getting stuck on in-world objects is rare, although it does happen from time to time on downed enemies. The riding controls are just alright, plenty of room for improvement here.

Compared to the console version, a field-of-view slider with sufficient range has been added. You also get completely uncapped FPS and various monitor aspect settings. While this works for gameplay, the real-time rendered cutscenes are fixed to 16:9, and pillarboxed, as you can see from our screenshots, which were taken on a 16:10 setup. The options menu has several bugs, though. For example, when you change the game's resolution, only the internal render resolution changes, the monitor stays at the previous setting. When switching from 1440p to 4K, for example, the game renders in 4K and scales the output back down to 1440p, which obviously doesn't look good—a game restart should fix that. Another issue is that the anisotropic filtering setting simply does not work—changing it doesn't do anything.

When you start the game for the first time, update your display driver, or change the graphics card, the game will go through a really long "compiling shaders" process. It will peg all your CPU cores at 100% for several minutes (!) on a 8c/16t Core i9-9900K, and takes even longer if you have a weaker CPU. I'm sure there must be a better solution for that. Steam forums are full of people complaining about crashes and instabilities. I haven't encountered a single crash in 15 hours of gameplay using an Intel CPU paired with a GPU from AMD or NVIDIA, Windows 10, and the latest drivers—very strange.

Both AMD and NVIDIA have released game-ready drivers for Horizon Zero Dawn, which we used for all our testing. We also used the latest public version of the game, not a press pre-release, which apparently had even more issues. While Horizon Zero Dawn has an integrated benchmark, we didn't use it and opted for open-world gameplay instead, which is more realistic. The benchmark shows a very fast flyby through a city, which isn't representative of the game loop at all. Also, the integrated benchmark results are very optimistic, reporting much higher FPS than you will be able to achieve in typical in-game situations.

Graphics performance is VERY demanding, but you are rewarded with outstanding visuals. Achieving 60 FPS in Full HD is not easy. At the minimum, you need an RTX 2060 Super or Radeon RX 5600 XT. Cards like the RX 580 and GeForce GTX 1060 run at only 30 FPS, almost half of what you would expect given today's typical game requirements. You are of course free to dial down the details to achieve better FPS. If you are looking for 1440p gaming at 60 FPS, the Radeon VII, RX 5700 XT, and RTX 2070 Super have you covered. At 4K, not even the mighty RTX 2080 Ti can achieve 60 FPS.

Considering GPU architecture, we see that AMD's Radeon RDNA cards do very well in HZD, especially the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT are better than expected. On the other hand, Vega architecture Radeons have fallen behind a lot—even the outdated Polaris architecture does better here, in relative terms, of course. On NVIDIA, the differences are smaller. Pascal still sees a performance hit compared to Turing, not because they gimped it, but because of Turing's improvements. The relative differences are similar to our 22-game average, which means there is no additional penalty for Pascal cards. Seems NVIDIA optimized their driver for both architectures.

After seeing the excellent texture details in our screenshots, I'm sure you know what to expect in terms of VRAM usage. The game uses a lot of video memory, which is a good thing as you are rewarded with great textures. Most modern graphics cards have enough memory for the highest texture setting; 6–8 GB is almost standard for the upper midrange now. At lower resolution, the VRAM requirements are high, though. For example, 1080p uses 6.8 GB VRAM, which is more than most cards in this segment can handle. That said, I didn't notice major issues with 4 GB cards. On these cards, some textures are sometimes streamed in at lower quality, which is visible, but not a huge deal. When VRAM is tight, you may notice a tiny amount of stuttering from time to time, but the game is still extremely playable. The only exception is 4K gaming with 4 GB AMD Radeon cards—here, the game failed spectacularly, rendering only the ground without any objects, models, or textures. What's surprising is that this works fine on NVIDIA, as even the GTX 1060 3 GB works at 4K. We've been noticing this pattern for years now; it seems NVIDIA has slightly better memory management, or can handle memory pressure better.

Overall, I would expect better polish though from a port that's been in the making for such a long time. Remember, Horizon Zero Dawn was first released in 2017 on the PS4. Guerrilla Games is "working hard to address the issues", but other than tweets, there have been no developments, almost one week since release. I'm starting to wonder if they even care enough. The technical difficulties shouldn't deter you from checking out the game though. Gameplay is excellent—this title is worth considering for every serious PC gamer. Let's hope Guerrilla Games can get out a patch soon.