Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered (Sony, PS5)
SONY are the remasters of the universe, feeding their PS5 a steady diet of fancified past glories. And hot on the heels of its Spider-Man and Last of Us glow-ups comes 2017′s Jurassic lark Horizon, which became one of the best-selling PlayStation 4 games, spawning a sequel and giving Sony a poster girl in the form of gutsy ginger heroine Aloy.
An epic of travelogue survival, Horizon blended immersive open-world environments with more heart and brains than a Fray Bentos pie. But, given 2017 isn’t all that long ago, this is more tune-up than full-blown do-over, delivering the definitive version of a feminist fantasy for a pocket-friendly price.
Plot-wise, it’s the usual post-apocalyptic shenanigans. With humanity having forged new cultures alongside lumbering robot dinosaurs, carrot-topped crusader Aloy sets out to discover the fate of the old world by slaying a menagerie of mechanical beasts that owe a debt to 80s wind-up toy line Zoids, with T-Rexes sporting chainsaw teeth and mammoths fitted with high-beams.
This is more tune-up than full-blown do-over, delivering the definitive version of a feminist fantasy for a pocket-friendly price
A canny mix of combat, crafting and running errands across a vast world pockmarked with challenges, Horizon is a patchwork of open-world tropes we’ve seen in other games, though you can’t deny the quality of its stitching.
With her ear-mounted doo-dad, Aloy can scan objects, calculate enemy routes and detect weak spots during Horizon’s fierce battles, beefing up her arsenal with a variety of Jurassic perks. Remastered also includes the wonderfully wintry Frozen Wilds DLC, adding seven hours to an already lengthy run-time.
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From its frozen tundra to sun-bleached deserts, Horizon’s National Geographic vistas were always easy on the eye, and Sony’s porting pros Nixxes ensure the whole shebang now runs at a silky 60fps, or 30fps if you prefer even more detail.
By incorporating tech from the later games, snow now deforms realistically while its cloud systems would fool the Met Office. But the biggest tweaks are lavished on the original’s dodgy lip-synch and stilted conversations, which are now gussied up with more than 10 hours of new motion-capture wizardry.
And, given you’re playing with a new controller, the DualSense is put through its paces with haptic feedback that recreate the heat of battle - especially when the triggers tense up as you fire Aloy’s bow. You can even take your old PS4 saves along for the ride.
While fully-loaded, Zero Dawn Remastered is hardly revolutionary, but at least Sony aren’t asking fans to double-dip. An upgrade on the cheap, owners of the original can level up for a tenner, giving veterans the chance to revisit one of the PS4′s finest for less than the price of a pint and some nuts.
Whether you’re new to Aloy’s world or are a Horizon veteran, Remastered makes one of the last generation’s best-looking games sing on PS5.
