Forza Horizon

Forza Horizon is a well balanced arcade-style racer filled with personality, fast cars, and some amazing visuals. The game’s steering model holds true enough to the Forza roots to feel challenging and tactile while loosening up enough to feel floaty and fun. It’s amazing how well the game melds both simulation and arcade styles together. The game’s presentation is loud, festive, and filled with life. The game’s exciting feel, amazing scenery, and penchant for churning out unadulterated joy make it an easy racer to recommend.

The colors and sounds around Digi-Colorado are inviting and bold. The game is presented in an orangey-yellow palette that’s easy on the eyes and quite breathtaking to look at. Mountainous scenery abounds. Winding roads twist through wooded forests and across arid plains beneath rocky plateaus; towering peaks rise above the trees in the distance. Horizon looks phenomenal. The game is complete with a day night cycle that adds variety to the scenery and makes for some stunning visuals and unique night racing experiences. Bright skies and warm sunsets dominate the day while lasers, fireworks, and spotlights illuminate the night sky. All of the scenery zips by at a rock-solid 60 fps which creates a great sense of speed and immersion. It’s an amazing feat considering the fidelity of the graphics and the age of the Xbox 360. The game is complete with a bumping soundtrack filled with various electronic offerings (Warning: may include HOT DROPS) and some indie rock. The soundtrack always keeps the game pumping and feels unique, well selected, and rarely trite.

The interface and overall feel of the game is punchy and packed with personality. Event posters are busy and bright while the event tents and surrounding signage are thoroughly doused in neon. So many racing games are coy and void of human life and thankfully Horizon is not. People are everywhere. The game is centered on a racing/dance festival located in the center of the map. This serves as the game’s main hub. It houses an upgrade station, shop, race center, garage, etc.. The festival is clearly visible from many of the roadsides and looks incredible at night. It’s filled with stages, party-goers, and various animated carnival rides illuminated by spotlights, vibrant lasers, and fireworks. It sounds cheesy but this festival convincingly conveys an energetic, exciting atmosphere that is simply fun.

You’re introduced to various racers and personalities while trying to climb the ranks and advance through the tournament. Each featured racer is voiced and you’ll hear little quips from time to time that humanize your opponents. A DJ chimes in over your radio with brief snippets about these racers and a female character will tip you off to different events and help you around the festival. All of these little touches breathe life into the game. It makes the setting feel like an actual place with palpable characters and not some absent, lifeless ghost town. The lively presentation is a nice contrast to the traditional Forza, minimalistic, car brochure approach.

The single player career is robust, varied and lengthy. You start the game with an old Volkswagen and work your way up the chain of glitzier, faster cars. Your goal is to earn wristbands to progress to the latter stages of the tournament. Each wristband is color coated and you earn points toward unlocking the next band by completing the current or previous band’s events. These events include point-to-point, closed circuit, and mixed surface races. In addition to the wristband events, there are also street races and showdown events. Street races are located in small hubs and will have you competing in various car classes in point-to-point races with traffic. Showdown races are over-the-top, one-on-one races that pit you against extraordinary opponents like a biplane or helicopter and have you driving a featured car. Win the race and the car’s yours. You unlock these races by leveling up your popularity points. You earn these points by building up scoring combos while drifting, driving at high speed, performing burnouts, and getting close to traffic.

Unlike most open world racing games, Horizon offers up plenty of interesting things to do while you’re roaming the world in between events. Your stunts are constantly being tracked as you drive around the map which encourages you to drive erratically and rack up combos. The game also doles out an achievement for driving on all of the map’s roads. Your exploration is tracked by highlighting the roads you’ve driven on which makes it easy to find areas you’ve yet to traverse. While out on the road there are speed cameras and speed zones to pass through. Speed cameras track your top speed across a set point while the speed zones gather your average speed through a given section of turns. This is a clever twist on the speed camera idea and feels more skill based than just blasting through a gate as fast as you can. Hidden in plain view on these roads are 100 bright pink signs with the mechanic, Dak’s mug on them. Knock one of these down and you get a 1 percent discount toward upgrades for your cars. Throughout the game you also get tipped off to the location of hidden barns around the map. There are nine in total and each contains a classic car that gets restored and unlocked for free once you find them. These barns are fairly well hidden and offer up a nice break from the traditional races. Navigating all of the roads, searching for hidden cars, and collecting discounts give you incentive to explore. All of these little diversions are genius. They give you objectives to work toward even when you aren’t racing. You always feel like you’re making progress in the career. It rounds the game out and adds a little variety to the experience.

Exploring and navigating the map is a breeze thanks to the game’s hub system, the Horizon Outposts. These are little pink and white tents that you can fast travel to, access your garage, and buy upgrades at. Initially it costs a fee to transport to the hub but completing its events will remove the charge.There are three events (PR Stunts) at each hub that include a high speed challenge, stunt challenge, and a photo challenge. Each event lets you drive a featured vehicle that you may or may not own. The speed challenge has you whip along a route for about thirty seconds with the goal of crossing the finish line above the required speed. The stunt challenge presents you with a score to beat in a set amount of time and the photo challenge has you drive to a set location and photograph the vehicle in front of one the game’s set pieces.

The driving in Horizon is a nice hybrid of simulation and arcade styles leaning toward the former. All of the cars have their own unique feel and sense of weight and swing. Some cars feel gripped and rooted to the road while others feel more loose and hard to control. The driving takes finesse. It has a really nice feel to it. It requires well timed braking and sharp racing lines to succeed but also allows for drifting and corner cutting to gain an advantage. The earlier races will have you driving slower C and D class cars while later in the career you’ll be jetting around in unruly R1 class cars. It’s a really nice progression leading up to the faster cars and the difficulty curve ramps up perfectly as you progress. The races feel fair. If you race well, you’ll win. There’s no rubber banding or cheap tactics that the game employs to make or break you – it relies only on your skill. It’s unusual for a game with arcade-style to reward you for legitimately racing and it’s incredibly refreshing and stress-free. It has a nice pureness to it.

The game offers up plenty of customization options for drivers of different skill levels. There are various assists that can be turned off or on to significantly change the difficulty of the driving. By tinkering around with these options, you can create a perfect difficulty tailored to you. The upgrade system has also been streamlined. You can upgrade a car to a specified class with the push of a single button. The traditional tuning system is also present but with slightly less depth. These options open the game up to more players while providing enough depth and challenge for more seasoned racers.

Online play allows for up to eight racers to join together and battle. In the basic modes, courses are chosen randomly and players vote after each race to select which car class to drive in the next race. There’s also the “pure skill” game type that requires all racers to use the same car and tuning setup for a more even competition. A strong counter to this mode is the party mode which is composed of three nutsy game types. First is “Cat and Mouse”. In this mode, the party is split into two, four man teams, each with one slow car, designated as the “mouse”. The objective is to get your team’s “mouse” across the finish line first while trying to slow the other team’s “mouse”. The final two game types, “King” and “Infected”, are variants on the game tag and have you chasing and avoiding players in small, free-roam areas. These modes encourage complete carnage and are a total blast to play. Lastly there is a free roam mode with various challenges similar to those found in Burnout Paradise. These challenges involve multiple players accomplishing map specific requirements and a variety of cumulative goals. Completing matches raises your online level and upon leveling, you are rewarded with a random car or cash prize. Nothing truly unique or out of the ordinary is offered in the multiplayer, but it is pulled off cleanly and the level-up rewards will keep you coming back.

Forza Horizon is a lengthy, flavorful driving experience. It offers up top notch racing and visuals while maintaining a balance between challenge and fun. The game keeps you constantly engaged in and out of races, always rewarding you along the way. The team’s passion for cars, beautiful scenery, and music shine throughout. Vibrant energy penetrates all aspects of the game and makes for an exciting, stimulating experience. Horizon has a strong identity and creates a perfect union between simulation and arcade style racing while looking good doing it.