Horizon Zero Dawn's questionable remaster launches to Mixed reviews as players lament a new mandatory PSN sign-in that wasn't in the original, visual glitches, and audio bugs

Despite ranking among history's least necessary remasters, the prettied-up re-do of Horizon Zero Dawn has been earning plaudits from testers. Ours included, actually. PCG hardware guru Nick Evanson was impressed by what he saw when he took the Horizon remaster for a spin, calling it the "best version of Horizon Zero Dawn it could possibly be, short of a full remake." I admit it: in spite of myself, I kind of want to drop the £10 on the upgrade just to see.

But maybe I should wait, because in the wake of its launch yesterday, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is currently sitting at a "Mixed" user-review score over on Steam. Some fans are loving it, mind you—61% of reviews are positive—but it looks like the experience is pretty variable depending on your hardware. Fans both on Steam and elsewhere report bugs and audio glitches with the new version. And some of them are justifiably annoyed about the PSN login requirement.

"Really enjoying the remaster, but it def needs a patch or two," writes a user named Travbedaman on the Horizon subreddit. "I'm noticing small stutters or hitching during cutscenes, the audio mix in that first town area has some weird reverb with NPC chatter and sound effects… A few minor floating items or clothing graphics glitches. This is not killing my immersion or anything but would be nice if these things were sorted out."

"Agreed," replies NiceColdPint, "Quite a few visual glitches they need to address." p0rnw0lf—and if you can't trust a name like that, who can you trust?—adds that "The audio issues are bugs. There are multiple pre rendered cutscenes where if you pause it, hit the windows key, open the sound mixer in the bottom right side of the task bar, and you'll see that the game has been dropped to 30% in the windows mixer."

That audio bug is a bugbear in particular. Another user noted the exact same thing happening in their game in a separate thread, while some Steam users report similarly weird things happening in their Windows audio settings when playing the game.

Other reviewers note freezes, crashes, and issues with gamepads. But the real culprit for most of the negative Steam reviews is that PSN requirement: Players are more than a little baffled that a steadfastly singleplayer game like Horizon—the original version of which had no such restriction—would make them jump through Sony's hoops. Fair enough, really. I can't get too upset about a login, personally, but I've long-since resigned myself to the data-scraping, account-based hell we now live in. If other people are still fighting that good fight I suppose I can't blame them, and I imagine there are a few people out there who have had to spin up entirely new and entirely pointless PSN accounts just for the privilege of playing.

The good news is that some users report adding "-showlinkingqr" (sans quotes) to the game's launch options lets you bypass it, but I haven't tried that myself. I couldn't even if I wanted to: I don't own the remaster. I probably won't until Sony puts out a patch or two.