Can I just quickly say how amazing it can be to review PS5 games for a second time on PC? It’s like relapsing with an ex you once adored but somehow fell out with. In the interim, they’ve hit the gym hard, matured past some idiosyncrasies, and learned new tricks that make them extra fun to be with.
And that, my friends, is absolutely the case with Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition—an “old” flame I’ve fallen for, harder than an Advanced Blast Trap to the ankles. Because, as suspected, the team at Nixxes has pulled off yet another quality port, and I shall now explain why you ought to swipe right on this.
Horizon Forbidden West
For the newbies, I’m going to cherry pick some info from my original Horizon Forbidden West review, as my impressions haven’t changed one iota since 2022. At its machine core, the robo-lion’s share of this PC offering is that of the original Forbidden West adventure, which is centered on the messianic Aloy.
In Horizon Zero Dawn, she was essentially a nomadic huntress who got the worst 23andMe report results—hers is the clone DNA of a scientist who had a hand in a Dinobots-themed apocalypse that condemned humanity to a weird neo-Stone Age.
Horizon Forbidden West’s quest is yet another doomsday—an Old World plague of life-destroying lantana is branching out to choke off humanity. The off switch that needs to be flicked resides out in—you guessed it—the banned lands left of here. As a bonus, a major DLC pack called Burning Shores is also included, which adds a good six hours of content and a lush new playground to swoop through on your flying pterodactyl mount.
Other switch-ups to that formula included Guerilla Games expanding Horizon Zero Dawn’s skill tree from four disciplines to six, and that was a total of 126 perks versus the 44 in the OGl. There was also a renewed focus on making melee combat more viable. The basic idea is that you can buy into a skill that lets you power charge repeated whacks into an energy pulse, and then a key bit of enemy armour would light up for potentially explosive damage. Just a nice way to make melee cool again in a third-person shooter.
Beyond those interesting perks and a handful of new dino-stickers, the fluid stealth-to-loud combat of Horizon Forbidden West remains as visceral as ever. On any reasonable difficulty, a chance fight with even a small herd of dinos requires more observation, planning, and skillful shooting than a scripted, bespoke boss battle in any competing third-person shooter.
Knowing the pressure points of your quarry and the capabilities of your elemental rock-paper-scissor bound weaponry is key to survival, and was easily the most satisfying facet of this franchise. Horizon Forbidden West hasn’t aged a day in that regard.
Traversal improved a smidge across the sequels, though Aloy’s actual handhold scrabbling still leaves a lot to be desired. The best inclusions were the pullcaster zip-points on the upward path and a Shieldwing that allows you to Mary Poppins off cliffs and onto enemies in satisfying executions. The late-game addition of the aforementioned bird taxi trumps all forms of tameable mounts, too.
Now that we’re up to speed on the original article, let’s get into the actual upgrades and differences between the PS5 and PC versions. Straight out of the gate, it has to be said that while Guerilla Games had a near Naughty Dog level of talent for squeezing the most out of the PS5, visually, Nixxes has gone a step beyond in making this game truly shine on my Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 GAMING OC 24G and a 32:9 super ultra-wide Samsung monitor.
For the latter bit of kit, I’d like to give quick props to Nixxes for including an option to not only de-letterbox the cutscenes but also “ultra-widen-ify” said cinemas with extra screen real estate that doesn’t detract from the original intent of these scenes.
Needless to say, playing on a monitor setup like this is ludicrously immersive. From a practical standpoint, however, playing a third-person shooter with this amount of peripheral can be an acquired taste—you can feel like a ball turret gunner on a B-17. (Spotting targets at 3 o’clock and then wheeling your entire world around to cross-hair them.)
Even with the standard blinkers of a 16:9 setup, though, Horizon Forbidden West on PC provides some whistle-worthy eye candy. The key differences here are unlocked frame rates and customisable graphics settings, which (and I love this and want it for every game) can be toggled on and off in real-time. As in: straight from the pause menu, like it’s a photo mode option.
No more dying to a Slaughterspine as you’re trying to discern if the last option you tweaked made their incisor textures look sharper.
There’s also a broad range of performance-enhancing technologies, including NVIDIA DLSS 3 upscaling and frame generation. AMD FSR and Intel XeSS are also supported. For high-end hardware freaks with extra headroom, image-enhancing NVIDIA DLAA is also available. The game also leverages DirectStorage for quick loading times.
The first impression I got when cranking this up to Ultra across the board (after a considerable shader pre-compilation pause) was how phenomenally dense the geometry is in this sandbox. Which is to say the Decima Engine delivers hectares upon hectares of fine detail at the level you’d only expect from a more linear game with smaller corridor environments.
And as crazy as it sounds, the visuals only get better as this game goes on. While the base adventure was a PS4/PS5 cross-gen title, the Burning Shores environments were current-gen exclusive content that had the benefit of being completely unshackled by a need to scale down. In short, it’s a sumptuous visual dessert worth pushing past the end credits to consume.
When it comes to performance, I’m especially enamoured with Nixxes solution to GPU performance dips with their dynamic resolution system. The layman’s explanation: when you peak out at native res, your chosen upscaler is being used for anti-aliasing. The end result typically looks better than normal TAA, so you’ll not need anything beefier than a 2070 to get results that are comparable to what we got on PS5.
By doing things differently from the variable anisotropic filter on PS5 (that was only in the realm of 4x), texture quality in this version can be made to pop out at you, in an alarming fashion, like a bloodthirsty Snapmaw, at 16x. On the aforementioned 4090 with everything maxed and DLSS at 4K, I was able to gorge upon a visual feast running at an average of 142 frames per second on my i9-13900K test rig with 32GB of DDR5-5600Mhz.
Needless to say, Horizon Forbidden West is now that game in my Steam library—the showcase reason I use to justify spending Liberia’s deficit on a 4090. It’s become my go-to game for showcase o’clock when friends drop by for dinner. Even the non-gaming ones who wouldn’t know a polygon from a Pop-Tart stop and swoon.
In the input department, I should also note that I’m a big fan of a UI that functions well with mouse, keyboard, and controllers, simultaneously. I’m always about a “remap anything” approach to the controls, which feels more expansive here because HFW on PS5 was a notable pioneer of accessibility options that will serve you macro users well. Also, for those of you okay with committing treason against your mother platform, DualSense functionality is available, and the haptics work flawlessly.
When the sun set on my time in that Horizon Forbidden West, this PC port was clearly yet another notch on Nixxes’ belt. One of the prettiest jewels in the PlayStation 5 crown has been polished to an even higher lustre in a port that, via a sensible dynamic res solution, delivers brilliant visuals to a vast range of rigs. Better yet, the antics of Guerrilla Games’ dino-bot hunting double pack haven’t aged a day and still represent many, many hours of happy hunting.
Horizon Forbidden West was reviewed on PC using digital code provided by PlayStation Australia.
