After turning heads with a stunning 2015 reveal, PlayStation 4 exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn has publicly stuck its robotic head into the figurative sand. Fans wouldn't be blamed for growing hesitant in the quiet months since. A playable slice of this open-world adventure game's combat underwhelmed in late 2015, and a launch delay from last holiday season to February 28 made us wonder if Guerrilla Games (makers of the Killzone shooter series) might ultimately disappoint its hopeful fans.

Thankfully, Sony and Guerrilla let us dive in to the apparently lengthy game from the start last week, with a four-hour long, go-to-town play session with the "near-final" version of the game. After this extended slice of the game, I can't wait to play it again.

Surreal color burn

Sam Machkovech



Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech



Sam Machkovech

Summing a game up in a buzzword phrase is dangerous enough, especially when I haven't played the full thing, but let's start with this initial-blush takeaway. I'm calling Horizon a bombastic, robo-mythical quest whose incredible open-world combat pulls off a unique twist: you'll battle like a warrior, but you also have to be an effective trapper and herder.

I played the game's first three chapters, which serve as a nearly two-hour-long tutorial, and then Guerrilla fast-forwarded me to chapter seven for my final two hours. This left me in the dark about some major opening-sequence plot points, though these were still hinted at by characters I eventually met. The entire time, I controlled Aloy, an orphan born into a mountain society that survives in a hunting-gathering way. Technology does not connect the people who dot this world's hills, mountains, valleys, and riversides, but the wilderness is as populated with traditional wildlife (rabbits, turkeys, boars) as it is with electric-organic robot creatures.

Those robotic creatures have been here as long as we remember, as we're told by Aloy's primary caretaker, a bearded man named Rost. Without giving too much away, Aloy's mysterious origin story is a problem for some village elders, and Rost loyally sticks with the little girl as they slip into the tribe's outskirts. We start to control her as she develops supernatural senses and trains for her initial mission: to prove herself worthy of a tribal designation called "the boon." Earning this would both curry favor with her original tribe and perhaps answer questions about where she came from (ones that even Rost can't answer).

Long, unskippable cut scenes rule the day in the opening sequence. Many of the beginning scenes are pre-rendered, but once you're firmly in-engine, the game's real-time visuals prove themselves in incredible fashion. All dialogue scenes, including in-game chats about missions and lore, include tight zooms on immaculately rendered faces and heads. Quite simply, Guerrilla has mastered the PS4 here.

Everything looks incredible on the primary characters: swaying strands of hair; tightly pulled dreadlocks, full of texture and detail; bushy beards; telling eyebrow ridges; glimmering, shifting eyes; expressive mouths; pock-marked skin; texture-rich clothing with material-based lighting. As they speak, real flashes of emotion shine across their faces, too. Surprisingly, pretty much every lower-tier NPC I ran into in my earliest stretch held up to the same level of visual scrutiny, as well. The uncanny valley crept up more for lesser characters, but Guerrilla still employs a solid facial-animation system to bring life to even its most throwaway side-quest chatters.





Sony Interactive Entertainment



HDR, PS4 Pro

All All PS4 consoles can render HDR color and luminance data, and if your TV is compatible , you'll reap quite the rewards. Horizon's color data is rich and intense, and I could tell a clear difference between HDR and non-HDR TVs at the preview event—especially when bright, colorful lights glimmered out of the many robots' eyes. Guerrilla staffers tell me HDR was added "very late" in the game's development, which is hard to believe after seeing what I saw. Meanwhile, my session on a 4K TV with a PS4 Pro looked quite good in motion, though as we found at PS4 Pro events, Horizon doesn't quite reach a full 4K signal. I didn't bring pixel-measuring gear with me, but I would estimate something around 1600p resolution—which certainly looks sharper than a quadrupled 1080p resolution on a bigger screen.



When the camera pulls back, the engine switches its emphasis to sweeping, explosively colored vistas, showing off Horizon as possibly the most dramatically colored video game I've ever seen. You know how when you see an amazing sunset, you can close your eyes and still see that exact, surreal color burn in your eyes—both how it coats the sky and how it drenches your nearby environs in a transformation of hue? I still feel that way about how Horizon drenches its sunniest scenes in bright blues and berry-like reds.

This color emphasis mostly stands out because of how it bleeds on top of a very green Horizon world. Foliage, grasses, and shrubs all animate with individually rendered and arranged elements, which means winds both subtle and strong always drive the game's seemingly endless florae. Color information for all of this content is preserved and blended with whatever day or night cycle you're currently in. The same can be said for the game's snowy paths and lengthy rivers. (This all, by the way, ran at a nearly locked 30fps refresh in the "near-final" build.) This visual splendor reaches further, even into indoor scenes, too.

Listing image by Sony Interactive Entertainment