Game Review: Forza Horizon

 

 

 

This game only slightly resembles the sim racers for which Forza is known. Developer Playground provided a story which centers around a newcomer to the Horizon Festival. The newcomer meets some disingenuous opponents, and then systematically beats them all. End of story...I didn’t say it was a great story. The festival hub, like any good hub, is conveniently located near the center of the map and serves as sort of a ground base for the game. At the hub players will find a car show that sells cars, a garage to upgrade cars, race central where players find the leaderboards and collect wristbands necessary for single player advancement, the paint shop, the marketplace, which is essentially a place to buy DLC, and the player’s club headquarters. Fast travel back to the Hub is always free, from any point on the map. Players can also fast travel to Horizon Outposts, for a fee.

 

Race Central is a lease on life, of sorts, for the single player side of the game. This is where the leaderboards are kept, and more importantly, a direct-access leaderboard for rivals events. Every single-player race in Forza Horizon stores a ghost and leaderboard time. Players can visit the rivals leaderboard and improve their time, set a new ghost, and compare themselves to their club, friends, and the rest of the world to see how their time stacks up against the competition. 

 

The garage works similarly to the way it works in other Forza games. Players pay for upgrades to cars that they purchased, earned through competition, or found in a barn. There are several “barn finds” in the game and those abandoned gems are sent here to be transformed into something driveable. The upgrades are quite expensive at first. Players receive discounts for smashing discount signs scattered around the map. There are 100 discount signs located throughout the game. 

 

 

The Auto Show features a very limited selection of about 50 cars to purchase...I have more Chevys than that in my Forza 4 garage. Despite the stifling number of available cars, the selection seems fairly cool: a handful of classic muscle, some AWD rally cars, Euro sport sedans, and high-end Exotics. The Porsche brand is, once again, conspicuously absent, but super-tuner RUF is represented with a few high-horsepower, 911-based models.

 

The paint shop works about like it did in Forza 4, and any saved vinyls from Forza 4 can be applied to Forza Horizon cars. Most of the same paint options are still there, and designs can be bought and sold as usual.

 

 

 

It was good to get off the same tracks that I have been pounding for years. Forza Horizon, if nothing else, brought something new to the franchise. Set in the state of Colorado, Horizon offers Forza fans the chance to tear up some new pavement. Most of us know every nuance of every curve on every track in each of the numbered games, so giving us some new roads to race down is no small thing. The landscape is astounding and rendered about as well as Forza 4, only there’s a lot more of it. 

 

Speed traps are set up all over the map. Traps record your fastest speed and record that speed to a special leaderboard. Speed zones are also in place to record your average speed between two speed traps, and consequently have their own special dedicated leaderboard. Setting a new speed record in either a speed trap or speed zone sends a message to all of your Horizon friends whose speed you beat.

 

Driving from race to race across the map consumes quite a bit of time, but fast travel is provided to several Horizon Outposts, which are generally located near clusters of race events. Fast travel to these outposts will cost 10,000 cr. PR stunts can be performed at each outpost, which reduces travel cost, and ultimately allows free travel once all the PR stunts at that outpost are completed. These stunts consist of one speed trap, one photo op, and a skills event. In the speed trap event a player must exceed a certain mph at the trap to complete the event and earn a 25% travel discount. The photo op also offers a 25% travel discount if the player can drive a particular car to a designated landmark, without damaging the car in the process, and snap a photo of the car with the landmark in the background. The skills event requires that the driver rack up a certain amount of skill points by drifting, executing near-misses, two-wheeling, or sustaining top-end speed which also nets a 25% discount in the process.

 

 

The race modes in Forza Horizon are a bit different than races in the numbered series. In single-player mode, the player must obtain a colored wristband and advance through the events, facing a color-coded AI rival, before vanquishing that rival in a one-on-one pink slip street race. The player can then advance to the next level wristband and color-coded adversary. The event races can be off-road, asphalt, a dirt and asphalt mix, circuit, or point-to-point. I favored the street races, which net larger cash rewards, but involved street traffic in addition to the racers: a sudden head-on collision on a blind curve can change the desperation level of the race in a heartbeat.

 

The playground events, available in multiplayer mode, feature the best new game environments in the series. Games like tag, virus, and cat and mouse are fun on a Forza track, like Road Atlanta or Sebring, but are an absolute blast in a Horizon steel mill or on a golf course. Players can also participate in any race event in multiplayer, but there is also a free-roam mode that rewards successful completion of special multiplayer challenges.

 

 

 

Despite the newness, the open-world aspect, and multiplayer rowdiness, there are a few notable places where Horizon comes up short when compared to the rest of the Forza franchise, and suffers from some of the same drawbacks that other open-world racers suffer from, most notably the Need For Speed and Test Drive Unlimited series.

 

After playing Forza for several years my Horizon garage feels like a ghost town. The Auto Show offers a comparatively sparse selection and cars earned through competition are often duplicates of cars I already had. The lottery system for doling out rewards for advancement in multiplayer levels seems to either give players paltry sums of cash or an unwanted gift car. Oh yeah, what is the deal with Porsche? In Forza 4 we forked over $20 for some Stuttgart stardom...you owe us, bitches! The cars do not really drive like Forza cars, they drive like Midnight Club cars with better physics. This is not a problem if you are an arcade racer fan, but hardcore sim racers will immediately mourn the loss of their favorite car’s personality. The inability to tune cars in the garage, even to adjust things like downforce or tire pressure, will cause Forza tuners to wrinkle their noses in disgust. Constant messages about speed trap times and rivals events is also a nuisance.

 

 

The storyline is ridiculous and the single-player adversaries are uncouth stereotypes who are apparently there to incite hatred: mission accomplished. The black guy is a super cool dude with a little something on the side. The chicks emit an over-confident machismo in an apparent personality compensation of owning a vagina while competing in a “man’s sport.” The Arab prince is a condescending ass while the tech-savvy European is cast in the role of cheater. Here’s the deal, Playground and Turn 10, most black folks don’t act like that, not all women have penis envy, and foreigners are not always dicks or cheaters. You can like, or even relate, to a personality without stereotyping. As the persistent clans and garages of Forza competing with one another for several games now have proven...you can like someone and still put them in the rear view, or against a rail.

 

The last grievance I have with Forza Horizon is the fact that I won’t be playing it very long. I burned through the single-player story in just under 30 hours, and the only thing sustaining my playtime right now are the multiplayer and rivals events. By contrast, I put over 1500 hours into Forza 4 and still haven’t completed all of the event list races. Your game looks pretty, but it has short legs.

 

 

 

I like Forza Horizon, but only slightly better than Midnight Club, Test Drive Unlimited, or Need For Speed. I always love open-world racers, but the short legs, limited car selection, and inability to tune cars was a deal-breaker for me.