The Best PlayStation Game Every Year 1994 - 2024

Sony’s desire to lean into narrative-heavy single-player games really helped the PlayStation 4 find its feet after a rocky previous generation. There were plenty of great examples but sitting in the middle was perhaps the most special: Horizon Zero Dawn.

A brand new IP is always a gamble but Guerrilla Games were onto a winner from the word go with Horizon, which became the biggest new IP of the PS4 era.

Zero Dawn remains one of the generation’s best lookers; the roving mountainsides of Colorado were interrupted by juts of metal and inhabited by dangerous animal-shaped machines. Both settlements across the land and bunkers underground told different stories of how this post-post-apocalyptic world came to be, combining open-world discovery and a linear, authored plot that constantly answered questions in a way that posed more, prompting players to explore further and deeper.

And across this lush world, the player clashed with a buffet of ‘bots, utilising various strategies to get the jump on them, trick them into facing each other or simply fighting them head-on yourself. Combat was immensely satisfying; tearing parts off your opponents and exploiting weaknesses in often nail-biting exchanges.

The odd flaws were far overshadowed by the innumerable reasons to fall in love with the world of Horizon, and it's really no wonder that Zero Dawn won several end-of-year awards and the series instantly found itself a place among Sony’s most valued properties.