When Horizon: Zero Dawn was first announced for the PC, a lot of players were understandably very surprised but overall happy that gamers on PC would get to play one of the best games available on a cutting edge platform. Not to mention, after how brilliant Death Stranding’s port was on the PC, expectations were high. It’s time to see just how the game stands up on the PC, and if it manages to outperform Death Stranding.

Horizon: Zero Dawn takes place in a very interesting world, and whilst one might be keen to compare it to other post-apocalyptic scenarios where factions are at war or unique from each other, it couldn’t be more different. You see, the prime ingredient here that is missing in everything else that’s post-apocalyptic, that just makes this setting tons more interesting is… Robot Dinosaurs.

Now, mind you just by throwing Dinosaurs into something, you can’t make something automatically amazing (looking at you Ark), so you need a lot more than just cool Robot Dinosaurs to make something really standout, as cool as it already sounds. What makes Horizon memorable is its strong world-building mixed with an interesting protagonist and polished gameplay that makes good use of its sci-fi fantasy setting with depth from the machines that highlight the gameplay, preventing the robot dinosaurs from just being a gimmick.

You see, the robotic animal ecosystem has an explanation behind it, how everything works, and why something does what it does has a strong reason behind it. I can’t really go too much into detail regarding it, as the game has some of the best explanations for its world and the state it is in. But what makes all that really effective like all good worlds in films, games and TVs is that in the end, it all relates to the protagonist someway, and they have a strong reason for existing in this world.

That is the same here with Alloy, who like all good protagonists can’t be taken out of the story and just replaced by someone else. For this story to work, she has to be the one in that position. Now, I won’t call Alloy an amazing protagonist as I did feel like her development ran out of steam around the second half, before being energized again with the ultimate reveal. However, the opening half of the game really paints her as a strong protagonist with worries and troubles that make her an underdog, and who doesn’t like a good underdog. Not to mention throughout the game, she has a strong goal that she actively tries to pursue.

In fact, I would say that the opening is one of the best I have ever seen, and to-date has the best growing-up/training montages available in videogames. It manages to really get you excited and quickly on-board with Alloy’s struggles and goals. You see, Alloy is an outcast who was put into the care of another exiled, Rost by Teersa, an important matriarch that knows Alloy has a great role to fill and would be the key to solving an impending extinction once she is older.

Rost, another fantastic character decides to raise her and get her capable enough to be able to take on this important role. The game really opens up after the introduction sections when you are thrust into the wide open-world and have to face the dangerous machines that rule this broken world. The game thankfully does a great job of getting you ready for the skills you will need to survive by this point.

The dinosaur machines are really one of the best things about this game, and as I mentioned before, aren’t a gimmick at all, but instead have a purpose to the gameplay loop. In order to efficiently take down these robots, you have to manipulate their weak-points and target them. What makes this more exciting here than other games that also have enemies with weak-points, is that rather than just act as parts which do a lot of damage to the enemy’s health bar, their destruction actually changes the capability and behaviour of the machine.

For example, you can cripple some machine’s legs or destroy their ranged weapons in order to give yourself more breathing room, and stop them from being too aggressive with certain attacks. In order to further encourage you to do this, the game rewards you with special materials that have a higher chance of dropping based on what components you damage. It makes for an interesting loop that leaves the players with some breathing room to experiment with different strategies.

Different machines have different behaviour and attack patterns that you must learn in order to exploit, which fits well with their archetype. So if it’s something like a giant eagle, you can bet it will behave like that, and use its flight advantage, if it’s something as powerful as a horse, you can imagine it will try and kick you with its powerful legs. So everything fits well and is a natural signpost to the players. You also unlock certain unique arrows that work well with certain weak points better, making more resources to drop off. In turn, these resources can be used to create other traps and arrows to help you.

The traps aren’t just your usual landmines or proximity bombs that you just place in random places hoping for the best, but are those that come with a lot of possibilities as certain wire-based traps have an actual wire that you can decide how to lay down, by setting a starting and end point for it. It opens up a world of possibilities and makes taking down machines with them inherently rewarding.

So all in all, the gameplay loop around the machines is not only strong but also fun that makes you want to actually take on more enemies, rather than just run away from them. Sure it might be daunting hearing a Stormbird pass over you, but it is also exciting since you know the fight will be fun and can go lots of different ways.

Another reason this game makes fighting these machines a rewarding experience is that it has learned from some of the best games in the business, and borrows the best part from all of them, especially games like Far Cry as here you can craft upgrades based on what you fight. You even have the interesting equivalent of radio tower climbing, which I genuinely don’t want to spoil in case you are going in blind.

When the game was first released, there were certain critics who were not happy with these similarities, and bafflingly called the game nothing more than a shell of ideas other games had already done. However, that reasoning is just as weird to me today as it was back then. Great games are inherently the best parts of the greatest innovations in this medium that has inspired them, whilst bringing improvements and new features themselves to the table. The same is with Horizon: Zero Dawn where it not only uses some of the best mechanics available in games, taking inspiration from them but improves on them tenfold and introduces never before seen improvements and mechanics in games.

The game also has some of the best quality of life features I have seen in-game, from quick crafting and scavenging all the way to the actual waypoint system. Whilst a lot of games today might be using a waypoint system that draws a point on the HUD for you to follow, dynamically changing as you get close, ultimately drawing you a traversable path, I do believe Horizon was the first game to do this really well. It is because of features like these that the game is not only fun to play, but super accessible.

The story as I have mentioned is brilliant as well, with strong characters and great plot points that keep moving the action forward. However, because the game is open-world with a lot of intricate side-quests, a dialogue system and storylines, the developers had to make some concessions, opting to go for a simulated system for dialogue sections, kind of like Mass Effect and the recent Assassin Creed games where the dialogue sections are static cameras pointing at a speakers face who blandly delivers their lines with moving lips.

I know that giving a lot of care and polish to every interact animation wasn’t a great idea as it would mean a lot of work, restricting how much you could actually design and write for the game in the end, it still sticks out compared to the more tailored and animated cut-scenes in this game. Still, overall, the game has such a strong storyline, where gameplay and narrative go hand in hand, that these issues are barely an inconvenience, and the game is one of the best experiences I have ever had. It is because the game is so well made, and designed with a powerful story behind it that it pains me to say that the PC version is not the best place to play the game at all.

One of the reasons it took me some time to write a review for this was because I have been giving Guerrilla the benefit of a doubt, hoping they’d release a patch or something which would make the game perform much better, but I do not believe that will be realistically possible with this. The game has lots of optimization problems on older hardware, even on something as powerful as a GTX980ti which I tried to play the game on. Technically my system exceeds the recommended requirements, and with how much of a technical breakthrough Death Stranding was on the PC, I was expecting to play this game on the highest settings in 1440p at least but sadly I couldn’t.

 

If you look at the video above, you can see what system I was using as well as the sort of performance I was getting. I was averaging around 35 fps, and the newer patches haven’t changed that much. It was such a shame, as whilst the PC really makes an already breathtaking game even better, it doesn’t run it as well. If you have a newer RTX card above a 2070, you should be able to get the best performance out of this game. However, as much as all big websites are trying to show how well it runs on their 2080ti, that card is worth 3 PS4 Pros at least. Usually, I have seen problems like this happen on older cards because the DX 12 implementation whilst supported isn’t as hardware-driven as the newer architecture of cards, I don’t think that is the issue here especially since Death Stranding runs so well.

I believe the issue this time is with the game needing asynchronous compute to run well, the older cards do not have that functionality, which is why they suffer from it. Asynchronous compute basically allows GPU’s to better perform multiple tasks at the same time, and you need at least a Pascal card to draw benefits from that (GTX 10xx series and above). Furthermore, unlike Death Stranding the game has no DLSS or FXCAS support which could have improved the performance a lot.

I wouldn’t mind this as much, as whilst not getting 60 fps is always a bummer on PC and something a game like this deserves, what really sucks is that some features are just straight out missing. You don’t have hair simulation above 30 fps, and all snow deformation is gone. This makes no sense as all this is already supported on PC, and games like Red Dead Redemption 2 are already using an advanced version of that tech.

 

I feel like one of the biggest reasons why Death Stranding turned out to be so good on PC is because they had a real passion to make the game on PC, and Hideo has never shied away from saying that he always thought the game would work best on PC as it was meant to be played. However, it’s opposite with Guerrilla and Sony’s mindset here, who basically think of this as a teaser for you to buy into the next game and a PlayStation 5. It’s disheartening to say the least, and something that shows through the issues with this port.

I am sure this could be said for anything you make or do, but attitude is very important, and a great one can be monumental in what your end product becomes. Sadly, with missing features, undersold requirements, and controversies with the price increase before launch, it does feel like the approach and attitude was lacking.

This is such a shame, since the game is genuinely one of the best things ever made, with a strong world, good protagonist and a great core gameplay loop behind it. It would have easily been a 9/10 but with the state of the PC port I am afraid we can’t justify that score on this platform. Still, if you have a decent gaming rig with a new RTX card that supports Asynchronous Compute, you really do not want to miss out on such a stellar game on the PC, as despite its port issues, the core gameplay remains as iconic as it was when it released for the PS4.

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