Driving over one hundred miles an hour down the open road is one of the things that gets race fans up in the morning. Its what makes people do crazy things for crazy reasons. This feeling of exhilaration definitely comes through in Playground Games Forza Horizon for the XBOX 360. Never was there such a palatable sense of speed in a Forza game and never a departure so successfully exceuted as that from Forza 4 to Forza Horizon. It’s going from a simulation centered game to an arcade open world centered game with simulation elements. Excellent work…
Forza Horizon uses the tired old concept of a “festival” to have its game centered around. The fact that there has to be a story excuse for racing games is getting seriously over used. There is nothing so terrible as a story in a racing game, even fighting game stories are better. But Playground Games does a descent job of setting the game in this venue. The lack of customization of your character and the total lack of any real hooks with the “story premise”at all make it clear that there was some kind of marketing reason for this setup rather than a philosophical one. I would have preferred the game to just begin with the radio announcer talking about the festival and me driving there. No characters to interact with, no stupid cutscenes of me getting multicolored wristbands. Perhaps if Playground Games had not needed to make all that, they could have added a couple dozen more events.
Forza Horizon has a descent selection of cars and by the time you reach around the gold band mark(75% of the way through) or so you will have enough money to buy whatever cars you feel you need to progress and win. I have to admit though, that most of the story missions seemed tuned for a certain car or range of cars. Another words if you have a stock car in this range, you will probably feel competitive but not win. If you max out your upgrades in that range however, you will probably win pretty easily unless you make some driving mistakes.
Forza Horizon has the Forza 4 engine running it so some of the draw distances are not great and while I was impressed that they finally added night racing to Forza. It was understandable that there were no weather effects. Considering that would have probably over taxed the engine. But again, most open world games DO have weather effects and most DO have night racing. But I never found the game wanting mechanically in it’s current condition. Except in those rare occasions where I had to catch someone online and was unable to see them after they turned an open corner that I should have been able to see. It’s not that important, especially for an online experience but Forza is definitely squeezing all it can from the 360 hardware; just up to line where it impacts your experience with the title.
Tuning is gone in Horizon and while you can do upgrades either automatically or manually. I have to say that some of the decisions they made about how far to go with upgrades was off putting during my play time. If I want to change my drivetrain, why can’t I? Especially in a car that you could have done so in Forza 4. I can’t imagine it would have added that much work to the game. But that aside, the player does get an optimized decal editor from Forza 4. The editor definitely seemed more user friendly and possibly even more powerful. I haven’t done an actual side by side comparison. You can import all of your images from Forza 4 which is great. But other than taking lots of pictures of certain cars, I really felt the reason to customize a little unnecessary. In comparison to Forza 4, there aren’t even half as many cars. And there are no Porsches which is really odd. The reason to customize used to be to have something no one else did. But for some reason the smaller the car selection, the less interested in that I became.
The majority of the fun I had with Forza Horizon were the point to point races both online and offline. I did like some of the boss races, but most were just not all they were cracked up to be. If you pull up in some crappy car and I’m in my Lexus that is completely maxed out. I’m going to smoke you no matter what. Sorry A.I. opponents, I guess the lack of variety in upgrades cuts both ways. This is to say that some of the cars did feel both underpowered and overpowered. I’ve had an Enzo Ferrari in every version of Forza since it first appeared and this one was definitely the most underpowered version of any of them.
Some of the touches that Forza Horizon had to make so the open world was more manageable were not universally good. The Outposts for instance, these are areas that have events and some features of the main hub; like garages, paint shop, etc… You must clear all the events in these hubs to fast travel there for free. But I found myself just fast traveling back to the main hub for free and then driving back out to where ever I was. This to me, was a huge oversight considering many of the events at the Outposts really weren’t worth doing. This would have been made easier if the regular events somehow tied into the Outposts and doing THOSE would allow you fast travel there for free. I did really enjoy driving every single car in the game however, so I guess it was just as well that I hardly ever used fast travel.
Forza Horizon promises a deep, open world, racing game; on this it delivers, I just wish there was more of it. The longer I played Forza Horizon the more the sense of running out of things to do began to creep in. I even bought a treasure map to find all the hidden cars; thinking perhaps I was missing some large part of the game. I was not… At it’s current length, I wouldn’t call Forza a short or small game; clocking in at over 25 hours to finish the main campaign if you are rushing and probably another ten hours if you are not. The online provides you with some new cool modes to play around with. But these I had my fill of in around 5-7 hours. This is definitely not a short experience. But in comparison to games like Need for Speed Hot Pursuit and Forza Motorsport 4 which I spent over 40 hours on each. I felt like a wasn’t exactly getting my money’s worth. Playground Games is made up folks that worked on everything for Project Gotham Racing to Grid and this definitely shows in Forza Horizon. I loved this game and while I have a lot of problems with it, I do think it was the BEST RACING GAME OF 2012. That said, while I love season passes, I keep getting the sinking feeling that large parts of this game were broken off for DLC. 9/10…
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