Horizon Zero Dawn - PC Verion Review

When there are rumors about Horizon’s future to the PC, “No dear, would you like that?” I passed by saying in my head. First of all, the PC version of Death Stranding has already been announced and its publisher on the PC platform was 505 Games, not Sony. Huge Sony will pour money into Hideo Kojima, then when the day comes and intends to show up on the PC platform, will it release one of its biggest games to someone else? “It is coming out in line with Kojima’s terms. DS is a one-off. If there is more than one PS4 game coming, Sony will take over publishing,” I thought. Subsequently, it was announced for the Horizon PC and I really sat down. As you can see from the writing of the review, of course, it was not bad news for me, it was simply wrong and I had question marks in my head. When they saw the port of the game, they seemed a little lost.

What could be better than robots and dinosaurs? Of course robot dinosaurs!

If you are a “PC Exclusive” person like me, I think I will need to tell you about Horizon from the beginning. Because as a person with an eye to console games in general, I didn’t have enough idea about what Horizon was from afar. Let me explain it in the most superficial way possible after playing now, then let’s get into the details: O PC gamer! What about Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which we praised for adding RPG sauces to the open-world third-person action-adventure genre? Aha, think of his version with higher production quality, a more original universe, and much more balanced, smooth-running progression systems that don’t tire the player! Take you Horizon Zero Dawn.

Horizon Zero Dawn steam

So I was not aware of it guys, Ghost of Tsushima was not the first Sony production to beat Ubisoft in Ubisoft’s game, it was Horizon before the finish line. up. You already know the robot dinosaurs and low-tech people in the game. Even the visual aesthetics alone explains how these add originality to the game. Therefore, Horizon is a production that we cannot pass by using few words and saying “This is how Assassins Creed is” as there is no historical story. However, a possible AC cutthroat would have been a shame if it did. Because it manages to absorb the originality of the game world into the activities for the game and thus strengthens its place. So he is successful in “applying” his universe.

By the way, the story of the game is not as original as its world. On the other hand, it flowed in my experience because it was explained beautifully. Our lead character, Aloy, is a bit of Mary Sue, but it’s hard to find fault with most of the male protagonists in video games anyway, so I can’t say that there is a protrusion in narrative game scenarios that are not very mature. I think it is much more lovable than a Lara Croft if we are going to have fantasies, she wants me to buy her flower chocolate.

(It should be noted that the game owes its success in story and universe to narrative director John Gonzales, by the way, he was a brother from Obisidian who worked on Fallout New Vegas. He grew up well. I said let me pass it on.)

What do your elf eyes see Aloy?

When it comes to gameplay, one point that I highly appreciate Horizon is that the mechanics do not get derailed even though a system is set up to level up. For example, you play a game like Borderlands, when you combine certain stats and build a “build”, your character starts to fit the code, and at that point, the pleasure you get comes from the success of the mathematics. On the other hand, is an action-adventure game, there are predominantly systems that put the numbers aside and you can do things that you could not do before. Of course, we see games that blend these two systems now, and the distinctions are not as sharp as before. However, often the producers blend these two systems, keeping the complexity of the work low in order not to exclude the “casual” actors and the emergence of “perishable” mechanics in the hands of good actors.

Horizon Zero Dawn PC gameplay

Here, Guerilla has done a well-above-average job in adding skill and item features to the game that we are quite familiar with. The fact that you have to use both your marksmanship and your mind to defeat robots by hitting their weak points and using elemental effects makes Horizon the most enjoyable “archery game” I’ve seen. The clever design of the different strengths and weaknesses of our wide variety of robot dinosaurs also has no small share in this.

Console experience literally on PC

I think many of you have a lot of doubts about the overall quality of the game. but I still felt the need for acknowledgment. What about port quality? At that point, there is a deplorable game. I said, “I didn’t understand why Sony didn’t broadcast Death Stranding on PC”? It seems to me that Kojima didn’t get enough support from Sony in perfectionist snag mode. Because the Decima Engine used in both Death Stranding and Horizon is essentially Guerilla’s engine. However, where Death Stranding rarely drops below 50-60 FPS at settings beyond the console at the same resolution, I can get 35-40 FPS using console equivalent settings in Horizon.

Now, there will be some of you who will say “Death Stranding is a very static game, a lot of things are happening in the Horizon” but let me state that I disagree. Both games are productions running 1080p 30 FPS on the console, the reason why one performs less on the PC than the other on the game’s activity levels is to imply that Kojima does not fully benefit from the meat of the console, he is a friend who is obsessed with good production, loves to exceed the budget, it is not such a thing. When you put other problems aside, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that performs close to Death Stranding, not Horizon, with its vibrant world and plenty of action.

Horizon Zero Dawn PC version review

It is Guerilla’s incompetence that this game gives such low performance, which is not the only problematic part is low FPS. There are visual errors that should definitely not be present in a game that has seen a serious polish, such as the disappearance of mountains on the horizon, the intertwining of clothes. Since I overclocked the card a little bit, I wondered if it was due to it, but when I researched it, I saw that there is no, there is a general problem. For example, crashes are one of the things that happen to people a lot that I didn’t live with. There are also those who experience these crashes before they can see the menu of the game because, at the very beginning of the game, there is a “Shader Compilation” process that takes 10-15 minutes, whether you install the game on the SSD, even if the system is powerful. For example, the man comes to the end of this and falls on the desktop, barely seeing the menu and this time encountering crashes in the game. It is annoying that this so-called optimization process cannot be passed and is done from scratch when you change any hardware part.

Add on top of all that the lack of graphics options makes the game’s poor performance even more frustrating. Does shadow quality adjustment provide no performance gains in a game? You can cover all the shadows completely, the frame rate doesn’t care. The variety of other settings is not much. In the GTX 970 i7-4790k combo, I had a lot of fun when I did two in-game Benchmark tests, one of which I did by taking everything to the top and the lowest without changing the resolution, with an average FPS of 30 and another 50. The in-game performance is already lower than in the Benchmark test.

Is the game “unplayable” after all? Unplayable depends on what you mean and it is undeniable that it is a port that is sorely out of the box when it comes to scalability and stability issues, not in my case. If you are buying at $10 (steam page) and you cannot operate it and closed it, I cannot say return it in the situation where the price rises, wait for 1-2 patches. However, if you haven’t bought it yet, do not go and buy it in this case and at this price.

Important Note: The first small patch for the game was released today, and with the upcoming patches, Guerilla Games promises to completely solve the problems in the game. We are planning to update the rating and comment section after a few patches.

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