Horizon Zero Dawn has its own particular place of honour in a phenomenal line-up of PlayStation 4 first-party exclusives – an open world delivered with some of the best technology in the business, combined with the gameplay finesse and polish of a more linear experience, humanised with some of the most impressive character rendering of the generation. When Hideo Kojima went shopping for a game engine to deliver his vision for Death Stranding, it was Guerrilla Games’ Decima technology he settled upon – and can there be any higher praise than that? In the wake of Kojima Productions’ generally excellent Death Stranding PC port, expectations were sky-high for Horizon’s PC conversion. With that in mind, it’s both baffling and extremely disappointing to see the port fall so far short of expectations.
Make no mistake, the core game is all there. It is indeed the Complete Edition. It’s still a unique experience for PC users, simply because multi-platform projects and even the odd PC exclusive aren’t built quite like this. Horizon Zero Dawn looks and feels a class apart in many ways – and yes, you can increase graphics settings and improve resolutions and frame-rate compared to the PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro originals. However, where the game falls short is in its many technical failings.
When a game is content-complete but requires polish and bug-testing, it’s considered beta code – and that’s the impression we got from this conversion when we tested it, to the point where much of the reviewing process has been a case of testing and re-testing the game on multiple pieces of hardware to answer a simple question – is there something wrong with our kit or is the game at fault? It’s a little bit of one and a lot of the other, but the bottom line is that there are many technical issues that need addressing to the point where not all of them can be included in this article. A 35GB day one patch arrived on the same day as the embargo lift – hence the delay in publishing our review – but the many and varied problems are still in effect in the code that makes its way to players.
It starts with the initial ‘optimisation’ phase on boot. Like a number of DX12 and Vulkan titles, shaders are compiled and stored the first time you play the game – as opposed to generating them during play, potentially inducing stutter. It’s an extended process to say the least, it adds to the storage footprint, and if your drive fills up during this procedure, the game crashes to desktop – sometimes with an ominous ‘fatal error’. While testing and re-testing across systems, the process could often stall and lock-up even when required storage was available. Beyond that, when I booted the game on my 4K screen in full-screen mode, something didn’t look right. It turned out that Horizon was rendering at 4K, downscaling to 1080p, then upscaling to 4K again. Switching to the borderless display option fixes this (albeit introducing other issues), as does swapping back to full-screen mode from borderless. Bizarre.
Once past these issues, things do look up. Horizon Zero Dawn offers a large amount of options to tweak, scaling graphical elements both higher and lower than the default PlayStation 4 presentation. Better still, the inclusion of an ‘original’ graphics preset is a great touch – and it’s similar to the ‘default’ option on Death Stranding, where the settings are essentially a match for the PS4 version. You can define the console experience as the baseline and scale up – or down – from there. However, similar to Death Stranding’s PC port, while the settings are there to push to higher quality levels, the actual improvements to visuals are thin on the ground.