For a very long time I was an avowed hater of simulation racing games. Though I respected them for what they were, games like Sega GT and Gran Turismo were far too dry to capture my interest. They were too focused on the car magazine crowd, getting into the nitty gritty of automotive engineering in order to drive a repetitive hour-long race. But then came Forza Motorsport, a series that dared to acknowledge that driving could be an exciting and fun experience. I mean, the point of these games is to give you a stable of real-world cars that you could never afford and let you mess around with them. It doesn’t take much to make this premise appealing, and Forza understands this. I still remember the opening to Forza Motorsport 3 where it let you cut loose with an Audi R8 and asks that you simply enjoy the act of driving such a precisely designed machine. It was a perfect reflection of Forza’s ethos: driving should be equal parts accessible and exhilarating, and nothing else should get in the way.

Needless to say, I’ve been a longtime fan of the Forza Motorsport series. So when Microsoft began pumping out an open-world spinoff series it should have been a no-brainer for me to play it. But I dithered, reasoning that I didn’t want to exhaust myself of the franchise, and besides, they weren’t "real" Forza games anyway. It wasn’t until last month when the first Forza Horizon was featured on Games with Gold that I decided to give it a shot, and I could not have been happier to be wrong. I do not say this lightly; Forza Horizon may be the best racing game I’ve played since Burnout Paradise.

Now, I should qualify this by saying that Forza Horizon is a different game than Burnout Paradise. While both games are about driving cars in an open world environment, the similarities pretty much end there. Horizon is a much more grounded take on driving, lacking in stunt jumps, nitrous boosts, or sexy crashes. But for all that it lacks when compared to Criterion’s masterpiece, it makes it up by being unabashedly Forza.

The premise of Forza Horizon is centered around the titular Horizon festival, a regularly occurring celebration of all things vehicular. This particular Horizon festival takes place in Colorado, and is not lacking in the picturesque vistas of the Rocky Mountains. Hundreds of racers have congregated to the festival in hopes of showing off their skills and becoming famous. The player starts off as the last person admitted to compete in the festival. You start as a complete unknown and you will need to work their way up a ladder of 250 other racers to become Horizon’s champion. To that end, you will need to compete in events littered around the world. While the game does have activities not seen in Forza Motorsport, such as stunt events and races against aircraft, the majority of events will be either circuit or point-to-point races against other cars.

The one aspect that Forza Horizon fails may be in its portrayal of the people at the festival. For instance, there are named racers throughout the game that are more well known than the standard competitor and will develop a rivalry with you as you make a name for yourself. The game even rewards you for beating them in races, culminating in a one-on-one race with pink slips on the line. While these rivals exist as a way to give you something to work towards as you’re grinding through races, they come off as one dimensional and they don’t change their taunts all that much from race to race. I mean, I beat Zaki Malik four consecutive times, does he really need to call me a scrub on the fifth race? Also, the portrayal of women comes off as weirdly dated, with females mostly relegated to standing around in tight outfits prior to the start of races. Even the voice in your earpiece, Holly Cruz, is oddly flirty and way too impressed with even your most basic of accomplishments. It all feels like pandering to the pubescent boy marketing demographic. I’m not saying that the portrayal of women in Forza Horizon is out-and-out terrible, but it just serves to make the game’s setting feel more contrived than it needs to be.

Regardless, Forza Horizon is all about racing cars, and it’s in the races that the game feels most like its parent series. Most events take place on closed courses that strictly limit the types of cars allowed, which encourages players to experiment with cars from various styles, companies, and eras. To facilitate this, the game showers you with enough credits to buy pretty much any car you have your eyes on, and by the time the credits roll you should have several dozen vehicles sitting in your virtual garage. Like vanilla Forza, the game celebrates all cars and doesn’t push premium performance machines over standard production vehicles. It’s just as much fun to wrestle with an Abarth Esseesse on dirt tracks as it is to blast through mountain roadways in a Dodge Charger. Credit must be given to the driving engine that gives the player leeway with drifting and turning while still feeling distinctly Forza-like. Of course, the game includes such indispensable franchise staples like the driving line and rewind to make for a smooth, player-friendly experience.

One of the biggest departures from series orthodoxy is the stunt system. In Forza Horizon, you will be awarded stunt points for doing just about anything that isn’t standard driving. Once enough points are accumulated your popularity increases, unlocking Showcase events that give you the opportunity to access exclusive cars. You get points for smashing roadside signs, for narrowly missing other vehicles, for passing opponents, and for a variety of other dangerous actions. By doing these stunts in quick succession you will build up your points total with a multiplier, but if you crash you lose the points accumulated from that stunt chain. It’s a delightfully tense risk-reward system that makes even the simple act of driving around the world exciting. There are even PR Stunt activities that require you to hit a points target in a set period of time with a specific car, and while they provide a stiff challenge, I found myself happily restarting over and over again in order to nail the perfect stunt run.

I can’t understate how much I enjoyed my time with Forza Horizon. Even after completing all the events and becoming the number one racer at the festival, I am still itching to do more. It’s gotten to the point that I’m seriously considering tediously searching for the last 11 discount signs to smash just to stay in Colorado a while longer. It’s even got me to consider a purchase of Forza Horizon 2 to get more open-world racing action before I dive into the latest entry. If you’re the slightest bit interested in racing games, then you owe it to yourself to check out Forza Horizon. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to figure out a way to trigger that last barn find.