Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered - Review

Earth remains theirs.

Console: PlayStation 5
 Updated and republished in December 2025

So, I’m one of those weirdos who was actually happy when the long-rumoured remaster of Horizon Zero Dawn ended up being true. For a second there, I thought maybe some wires had been crossed with Lego Horizon Adventures, a retelling of Zero Dawn by Guerilla in Lego form. That was a surprising announcement, and I certainly have nothing against it, but I was a bit disappointed it wasn’t that rumoured remaster.

Why? Well, not only is Horizon my favourite PlayStation series, but I never played the original all that extensively. Looking back, my time with the game was pretty much a straight shot through the campaign. I never bothered with the hunting grounds and thus completely missed out on Talanah and the Hunter's Lodge. I never did Petra's quests, never raided all Bandit Camps, and missed much more as I found out while playing.

I was already eying a replay and this remaster, for the low upgrade price of €10 was the perfect excuse for me to do so… and do even more than I planned! The review you are reading now is an updated version of the 2024 ‘original’. I’m updating it because the original was written after 10 hours of gameplay and having just finished the introduction. This one is written after 97 hours of gameplay, 100% completion rates on both the base game and the Frozen Wilds Expansion and with a Platinum Trophy under my belt.

There’s some more stuff I want to talk about so let’s get to it and see how Nixxes made this already great game shine just a bit more on the PS5!

This remaster seems to have had a mission statement: to make the 2017 original look just as good as its 2022 sequel. In that, Nixxes has succeeded with flying colours. Grab a still from both games and put them side by side, and it’s hard to tell which is which if no unique landmarks are in view. There are certainly differences but those are hard to spot at a first glance.

They seemingly accomplished this by pulling as many assets from the sequel as possible. Where they couldn’t reuse assets, they created new ones to match. The result is that this remaster is nearly a 1:1 match with Forbidden West, still one of the best-looking games on the PS5 years later in my humble opinion.

However, this isn’t quite true for dialogue scenes. One of the biggest criticisms of the original ( and one I shared) was the stiffness of the character models. There is still some of that weird, stiff rigging but Nixxes also re-recorded and motion captured over 10 hours of dialogue, significantly improving movement and facial expressiveness for those. Characters aren’t just standing around anymore when they talk but, as an example, tilt their head and point in the direction they are asking you to go in.

Nixxes has done a lot more than just this to make it look so much better but this is the stuff I felt worth mentioning. If you want to know all the details, there’s an entire blog post that I recommend you give a read.

This visual transformation isn’t a perfect job though. There’s quite a bit of clipping, usually small stuff like a finger poking through a cape or a strand of hair going through Aloy’s cheek. Not as distracting as the dialogue issues though. For one reason or another, Aloy can spout voice clips completely unrelated to what's happening on screen. Weird, but pretty admittedly distracting. I also encountered a few other bugs such as a Carja Soldier walking in thin air and one big issue I’ll get to a little bit later.

I also don’t understand why Aloy’s spear still disappears from her back. I noticed this in the original but brushed it off as something they couldn’t get to work on the hardware. In Forbidden West, however, the spear is always there, so I don’t get why it once again vanishes in this remaster. The game imports its models and animations, no? So, what's the problem? If anybody knows, please do tell me.

Some welcoming changes that were made are all the extra options in the settings menu. From accessibility options like larger font sizes, turning off pickup animations to save time on item gathering and more. A lot of stuff that makes the experience more convenient, customizable and thus welcoming to all kinds of players. You can even import your old Horizon Zero Dawn save if you want so you can continue right where you left off or start a new adventure in New Game Plus. 

The obligatory comparison between the 2017 original and te 2024 remaster. Credit: Rajman Gaming HD because I failed to make a better one.

The visual upgrades and related improvements are impressive, but that’s really all she wrote. The DualSense integration is neat but standard for a PS5 title and no game-changer by any stretch of the imagination. Performance wise there isn’t much to talk about either. The typical graphics and performance modes with a ‘high performance’ mode for the PS5 pro. If, like me, you were hoping for some gameplay tweaks and additions, you’ll be disappointed. 

This is a remaster, not a remake, so I never expected big changes like the shield glider to pop up. That's just not in this project’s scope, nor does the game need major changes—the foundations are solid and very fun. Nevertheless, there are some small things this remaster disappointingly didn’t address.

Fast travel is still locked to travel packs instead of being available through campfires which leads to an unhealthy amount of slow backtracking if you don't invest in that ‘infinite use’ speciality backpack. We’re back to limited item slots, so inventory juggling is still a thing and something that got more annoying the deeper I was into the game.

Do these issues affect the experience that much? No, they don’t, but they’re quality-of-life improvements I really miss—things that would’ve pushed this remaster that extra mile. And, I have to give credit, I complained about the lack of transmog in the original version of this review and that I was “hoping that, through very popular request, transmog will be added sooner rather than later”. Well, that happened. There is a consistent bug in which on some outfits the transmog will reset upon reloading the save but I am taking it!

And then there is one major glitch that was also in the original that just hasn’t been fixed: a soft lock. At a point you are given two main quests and you can choose in what order to them. It can occur that one of them won’t show up in your quest log, not activate and thus preventing you from progressing the story further. This happened to me this go around and if not for a backup save, I would’ve had to restart the entire game again. That this hasn’t been fixed nearly a decade later is all kinds of dumb.

Before closing out, two quick tips and a few words on the story. Even though this is a remaster of a game I’ve already played, the story buff in me can’t resist talking about the narrative a bit.

I remember the story being tighter and more focused than the sequel, largely because the central mystery was more compelling. That still holds true, even if it does not have the same impact when you’ve experience before or simply know the reveal at the heart of it all.

Those tips? 1., set the HUD elements to dynamic. There are a lot of display elements on screen, some of which are quite large. This way, elements like the health bar only pop up when you’re in combat, giving you a clearer view and making me feel more relaxed. Less info for my brain to process, you know?

2., don’t be ashamed to play around with the difficulty. Horizon Zero Dawn was my comfort game for nearly all of 2025 and in that time I played all the way from normal difficulty to ultra hard. When I felt it all got too easy and boring, I cranked it up… when I wanted to get a move on or felt that I had proven myself and lowered it down. That helped keeping the experience fun across those nearly 100 hours, no matter the mood I was in. 

Conclusion

With Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered, Nixxes achieved what they set out to do: bring the 2017 original in line with its sequel by making it look just as good. There are even some unexpected updates, like re-recorded and fully mo-capped dialogue that address issues in the original. All this makes the game a real looker and up to current-generation standards, though I can’t say I wasn’t hoping for a bit more. I didn’t expect the world with this remaster, but some additional minor gameplay tweaks would’ve put a nice bow on it, adding convenience to the experience.

Even so, these aren’t big deals, especially if you’ve never played Horizon Zero Dawn before. The polished visuals make this the best way for newcomers and veterans alike to (re-)experience the game in its best possible light. This is the definitive version of the game.