Forza Horizon Review

Forza Horizon is what happens when you assemble a crack team of talented racing game veterans, plucked from a bunch of the UK’s finest driving developers, and shove them all under one roof and set them loose with Microsoft’s money.

This supergroup of racing devs is called Playground Games and its staff hail from some of the UK’s best and brightest racing studios; Codemasters, Bizarre, Criterion and many more. Playground Games' job was to take the incredible resources of the Forza franchise and create an open-world spin-off of this generation's leading circuit racer.

The results speak for themselves. Forza Horizon is the open-world racing game that open-world racing game fans have always wanted.Think Test Drive Unlimited but with the nuanced handling and carefully crafted cars of the Forza franchise mixed with the confident presentation fans of Codemasters' racers are accustomed to.

Your goal in Forza Horizon is to become champion of the Horizon Festival, a heaving celebration of cars and music plonked in the middle of the Colorado countryside. This slice of Colorado incorporates a variety of different environments, with the scenery shifting as you weave across the map. Twisty mountain passes give way to winding country roads and small towns, before bleeding into a red desert ridge. The road types are just as varied, ranging from narrow dirt tracks to a lengthy freeway that, in the right car, you can breach the 400 km/h mark on. It's not as large as Test Drive Unlimited's Oahu but it's significantly better looking.

In fact, most everything about Forza Horizon looks improbably good. The fingers of sunlight reaching out towards you at dusk. The scattered leaf litter and gravel being kicked up in the wake of speeding vehicles. The bustle of the Horizon Festival itself and the way the shadows of the always-rotating amusement rides dance across your dashboard. It’s a world brimming with detail everywhere you look, from the leafy country lanes to the ribbons of asphalt lining dusty red canyons. It’s devastatingly gorgeous. It’s like Emma Stone playing bass guitar in her underpants.

It looks just as fantastic at night, too, which comes around every half hour or so. It’s especially cool to note the distant soft glow of the Horizon Festival, fireworks bursting overhead, as you approach under darkness from afar.

The cars are equally impressive. The high bar set by Forza Motorsport 4 has been maintained and, in some ways, surpassed. With a full day/night cycle now in effect Forza Horizon’s cars feature illuminated, working dials in cabin view. Pop up and hideaway headlamps are fully animated too, like those featured on, say, a BMW M1 or a ’69 Charger. As the sun sets your headlights will automatically emerge from the hood or from behind the retracting grille.

The menus and overlays have a distinctly Codemasters feel to them but they’re a little more subdued. This means that while the presentation feels dynamic and modern it doesn’t cross the line into obnoxious.

The audio design also rates a positive mention. Like Forza 4 the engine notes of the game's various steeds remain uniformly excellent. Open the taps in a tunnel and know that somewhere, somehow Jeremy Clarkson is grinning uncontrollably. It sounds like Zeus trying to swallow a hammer drill. The radio is probably mixed a little too loud, but you can easily adjust it. Knocking the radio down to an audio level of 14 (from 20) and leaving the car volume maxed seemed to do the trick.

The radio itself isn’t too bad, to be honest. The mix of music and DJ chatter seems pretty organic, although you’ll definitely grow tired of the tracklist before you get anywhere near finishing up everything the game has to offer.

More important than the audio visual side of the equation, though, is obviously the nature of the racing itself. The Forza teams on both sides of the Atlantic have spoken at length about Forza DNA in the lead up to the release of Forza Horizon. It’s the feelof the game, the thing the Forza 4 faithful were sure was going to be compromised in this open world spin-off. I could tell you that the physics under the hood of Forza Horizon, the ones that infuse every car with its own unique handling characteristics, have been migrated directly from its track-based stable mate – but that would be just taking Playground’s word for it. What I will tell you is that if you’re fresh from Forza 4 you won’t miss a beat sliding behind the wheel in Forza Horizon. It’s impossible to confuse these games as anything but relatives. They’re like Baldwin brothers. Adjust the driving assists to your usual preferences and you’ll find the Forza feel – this Forza DNA – remains intact.

As a side note, I had a great little shared DNA metaphor, where Forza 4 was the faithful family dog, dependable, well-behaved and happy to be contained in a walled-yard and Forza Horizon was something else. Like a coyote or something. An animal that says bollocks to fences and runs around causing mayhem all over the countryside. Then I heard humans share about 50 per cent of our DNA with bananas and it suddenly didn’t seem all that clever. The important thing is that these games feel like they have a shared ancestor.

Drive it like you stole it.

The handling is entirely satisfying, whether you’re drifting around a gravel corner on the game’s new offroad surfaces or weaving through freeway traffic with your foot on the firewall. If you prefer your racing games a little more straightforward and manageable, Forza Horizon will suit you fine with its full suite of driving assists. However, this game is definitely at its best with simulation steering on and traction control off because that’s when it’s at its most unpredictable. It becomes more than just mashing the throttle and pointing your car in the direction you want to go at this point; it demands finesse.

What you’ll be doing is racing, and a lot of it. You work through the Horizon Festival competitors tiers by completing festival races. These could be point-to-point races across the game’s varied terrain, circuit races on closed-off street courses, or even mixed surface races featuring both asphalt and gravel or dirt. Horizon outposts, which are hubs scattered around the map you can teleport to, contain special PR stunts. There are three types of PR stunts. Speed challenges require you to hit a speed trap at a minimum rate of knots to pass. Photo challenges see you nursing a special vehicle to a certain picturesque point on the map and snapping an image. Stunt challenges set a score target for you to hit by chaining together drifts, near misses and other dangerous driving. There are also Showcase events, rationed out to you as you work your way through the game, that pit you against things like planes and choppers. The first, a race between a '70 Ford Mustang Boss 429 and a P-51 Mustang (a famously formidable WWII-era fighter plane), is a true highlight.

Outside of the festival you’ll find a series of unsanctioned street races that take place on public roads with civilian cars present. These don’t contribute to your Horizon Festival progress but score you more cash. Then there are instant challenges you can trigger whenever you see another Horizon competitor on the road. Just tuck in behind them and you’ll be prompted with an invitation to challenge them. A waypoint will be deposited a few kilometres away and a one-on-one race will immediately begin. Depending on the car you’re in, and the car they’re in, you’ll be warned just how easy or difficult the race will be before you proceed.

Importantly, there are the online modes. Rivals mode lets you win extra bounty by beating the ghosts of friends and other players and should be familiar to those of you who’ve played Forza 4. Forza Horizon features eight-player online racing but its Playground Games, like Forza’s traditional Cat & Mouse and Virus modes, look set to be the stand-out feature.

When you’re not racing you can be painting and customising. The visual customisation system is just as deep as fans would expect, and vinyl groups can be imported from Forza 4 so you can go nuts right away.

Speaking of nuts...

If I were an outspoken yet hilarious UK motoring journalist I’d probably say something outrageous at this point, like anybody who walks into a store from this day on and walks out with Test Drive Unlimited 2 instead of this should be sterilised; but I’m not, so I won’t.

What I will say, however, is that Forza Horizon and Playground Games have rewritten the rules of the road. Thing is, Forza Horizon is exactly the type of game we’ve been trained not to expect. We’ve been conditioned to accept concessions. Increased scope for lesser quality visuals. Technical prowess for reduced content. We deal with Test Drive Unlimited 2’s visual shortcomings because it’s so enormous. We take the likes of the technically robust DiRT Showdown and make do with all the track recycling. None of this is the case with Forza Horizon. I don’t know how a game of this size, with everything going on, can look this good and still support a rewind utility, fully functioning car interiors and a full day/night cycle. I don’t know how the frame rate for this enormous game remains resolutely locked, because whether you’re racing under headlights or screaming down the freeway at over 400 kilometres per hour it never, ever dips. It might as well be witchcraft. I don’t know how it does it. It just does.

It’s not without fault. Upgrades remain but tuning is out, which will likely disappoint some. Mechanical damage is out too. No-one is going to want to limp across Colorado in a busted car, but it does mean you can muscle your way through opponents in ways you’d be hesitant to attempt in Forza 4. Speaking of damage, Forza Horizon also retains a weird quirk from Forza 4 where visibly smashed windscreens only appear so in chase cam; they appear unbroken in cabin view.

The clichéd rivals who trash talk you before a race are a relic of racing games gone by and feel pretty out of place here. I also reckon that the amazing Barn Find idea, where you track down rare cars in dire need of restoration hidden across Colorado, is honestly kind of wasted. It’s an inspired concept but the Barn Finds in Forza Horizon are simply classics you probably already have in your Forza 4 garage. The Bugatti EB110, Shelby Daytona and Jaguar D-Type, for instance, are all rare birds, but it dulls the thrill somewhat when you drive to the marked area on the map, cruise around until you find a barn, then enter it only to find a car you own or have driven several times in Forza 4. You could mount an argument the Barn Finds really should’ve been cars completely new to the franchise. Finding them would’ve been far more exciting if they were.

Not exactly rare, but definitely new to the series.

This really is minor stuff, though, especially when you look at Forza Horizon as a racing game to play as well as Forza 4, not instead of Forza 4.

The Verdict

If you love Forza 4, this is the perfect companion. If you love cars, this is essential. The school of thought may be that it’s hard to push racing games this late in a generation, but Playground Games hasn’t just moved the needle here. It’s buried it.
Ladies and gentlemen, the open road beckons. And racing developers of the world? Playground Games has just put you on notice.