Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds (DLC) (PS4)

The Frozen Wilds is a standalone-feeling story expansion set concurrently with Horizon Zero Dawn's main campaign. Aloy travels to The Cut, a snow-locked region on the border of Banuk territory, after hearing rumors of machines going savage near a smoke-belching mountain called Thunder's Drum. What she finds is a tribe in crisis, a benevolent AI named CYAN trapped inside a Cauldron facility, and the malevolent HEPHAESTUS pulling strings behind a veil of superstition and tribal mythology. The Banuk read all of this as a spiritual war between a Spirit and a Daemon, and the friction between their cosmology and Aloy's hard-nosed technological literacy gives the expansion most of its character. It is not the most emotionally resonant story Guerrilla has told, and a couple of NPC archetypes lean heavily on the same grounded-tribal-warrior mold the base game already ran through. But the lore payoff is real: the Sylens thread gets meaningfully extended here, and if you are planning to move on to Forbidden West, skipping this DLC will leave some character motivations feeling thin. On the mechanical side, The Frozen Wilds does real work. The level cap rises from 50 to 60, a new Traveler skill tree adds quality-of-life bonuses like mounted item pickup and a jump-dismount attack, and three elemental weapons join Aloy's arsenal: the Forgefire (a flamethrower-style bow), the Icerail (an icicle-spitting harpoon that detonates weak spots with satisfying explosions), and the Stormslinger, which flings balls of lightning and sits comfortably among the strongest tools in the entire game. These are not afterthoughts. They are genuinely useful enough to carry back into the base game. The expansion also introduces a dedicated in-region currency called Bluegleam, earned through quests and hidden collectible pockets across The Cut, that gates the best Banuk-tier gear. The hunt for Bluegleam is one of the more rewarding scavenger loops Guerrilla has designed, because the hidden caches tend to reward you with sweeping views of the snowscape as a bonus. The difficulty spike deserves its own paragraph because it is steep. Five new machine types arrive in The Cut: the quick, canine Scorcher, the hulking bear-like Frostclaw and Fireclaw, and daemonic variants of existing machines that glow purple, resist corruption and shock, and hit considerably harder than anything outside of late-game base content. Recommended entry is level 30, and you will feel it at level 50 if you are sloppy. The daemonic classification also means you cannot override these enemies, which strips one of Horizon's most creative tactical tools from the table for most encounters. Players who loved riding overridden Tramplers into a Thunderjaw fight will find The Cut a more confrontational, less chess-like experience. The new control towers that passively heal nearby machines add another priority target to manage in already-chaotic encounters. Some reviewers found this refreshingly demanding; others found it a slog. Your tolerance for combat friction will determine which camp you land in. The region itself is gorgeous, full stop. The dynamic snow tech Guerrilla built for The Cut was impressive enough that it was eventually backported into the base game for the 2024 remaster. Three new hunting ground trials, one Tallneck (with a twist), one bandit camp where enemies carry a scanning device that can pinpoint your position, and a set of puzzle-heavy side quests fill out the runtime. Side quest quality is a step above base game filler, and the Concrete Beach Party audio logs scattered across the map are a quiet highlight for anyone who cares about the pre-apocalypse world-building. The expansion clocks between 10 and 15 hours depending on completion rate, which is a healthy amount of content. If you bounced off the base game's open-world routine, nothing here fixes that. But for anyone who already lost a weekend to Aloy's story and wants more machine lore, sharper combat, and a lead on where HEPHAESTUS is headed, The Frozen Wilds is exactly the right next step. Monika, Scout Team