Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Review
thesixthaxis.comSony’s remaster strategy remains a little baffling for ardent gamers, now that we’re firmly in an age of backward compatibility. You could argue that there’s clearly diminishing returns in graphical advancements, but they wouldn’t be sticking with this plan if it wasn’t showing some benefits. From Spider-Man Remastered to The Last of Us Part I, Until Dawn and now Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, there’s a layered reasoning for each release. They bring the games back to the forefront of discussion and release schedules, nudge sticker prices back up a notch, tie in with TV and movie projects, and more. And with games now taking longer than ever to make, they’re good projects to let developers gain experience, try out new techniques, push the envelope a little further while the sequel’s production is still going through the gears.
In the case of Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, it’s Sony’s PC porting specialists at Nixxes taking on a very different job, in partnership with Guerrilla Games, broadening the scope of what that studio is charged with doing for a full remaster in the latest iteration of the Decima Engine. While Nixxes was able to automate some parts of this, dropping new replacement assets in place with systemic changes, an awful lot has required a manual pass and complete overhauls with new techniques.
This could have come at the cost of performance, but thankfully it really hasn’t. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered offers 30fps, 40fps (on a 120Hz screen) and 60fps modes, and there’s going to be some trade-offs here, but I felt like the 60fps performance mode looked absolutely fantastic. It matches the frame rate that the original game can get when played on PS5, but brings all the improvements we’re about to delve into, keeps a high resolution and has higher-quality anti-aliasing and upscaling. The frame rate and resolution metrics will only be pushed further with the PS5 Pro, which this game natively supports.
Arguably the biggest change and improvement is an overhaul
Read more on thesixthaxis.com
