Hands-on review: Horizon Zero Dawn's 'The Frozen Wilds' DLC is worth the money

It's not often you see single player DLC, but Horizon Zero Dawn offers it with the new 'The Frozen Wilds' DLC expansion. If you own the game, it's worth visiting again for this DLC alone.

In recent times, DLC has been overpriced giving us expensive items for little content. I don't want to single out any games, but let's just say consumers these days pay lots of money just for little things like extra costumes or new colours.

Some other AAA video games make you pay for bonus playable characters or get a Season Pass just for new multiplayer maps. Horizon Zero Dawn thankfully does not follow popular trends and offers a DLC expansion worth your time and money.

Horizon Zero Dawn still remains to be my favourite PS4 exclusive of all time and I gave the base game a perfect score earlier this year. Well 'The Frozen Wilds' offers even more hours of fun quests for you to do and an all-new storyline.

To access the new area, you can load up your old save file and head to the right hand corner of the map. There's a huge snowy area that you can discover that features both a main story and lots of other quests for you to do as well.   It's worth mentioning you need to be at least level 45 in order to do all of the missions successfully. You will also need to equip yourself with the best weapons, items and equipment as well. Even while playing this game on the 'Normal' difficulty setting, the new missions are not an easy walk in the park!

Anyway, the DLC features a new quest for Aloy to do. Without giving away too many spoilers, Aloy has to help the Banuk tribe get rid of a new Daemon infecting the land and the machines. There are new big and hard machines for you to face resulting in some very challenging boss battles.

What I admire most about the DLC is its value for money. The DLC costs close to $32 NZD in New Zealand, but the main story lasts for around nine to ten hours. If you factor in all of the side quests, you are getting close to 15 hours of gameplay.

To me this is a bargain because it has a longer gameplay length than some full video games. Not to mention the frozen landscape is huge and full of surprises. There's puzzle solving, exploration and lots of other things you can discover.  Graphically, the new frozen environment looks beautiful. The base game was full of green vegetation, but this new area is covered thick with snow and ice. The change in scenery looks realistic and it's still one of the best graphics I have ever seen on a PS4 console.

The only minor criticism I can give about this new DLC is that some of the missions in the main story can get a little repetitive. You are forced to fight the same enemy types over and over again.

I don't want to give it away, but this new enemy type is hard to kill and you have to defeat several of them at the same time. It can get a little repetitive, but it's a challenge that is doable and isn't too frustrating.

As a whole, Horizon Zero Dawn's 'The Frozen Wilds' DLC is a must buy if you love the base game. It offers hours of extra gameplay and doesn't feel like a ripoff. It's one of those games that does DLC the right way.

Verdict: 9.5/10