Forza Horizon review

Imagine a company trying to take some characteristics from several acclaimed games and put everything together in a single game. Often the result is a hell of a mishmash that ends up pretty half-baked, but sometimes they get it right, and when that happens, man …
Forza Horizon is delicious to play, it is everything the good open-world racing games have to offer: lots to do, places to visit and secrets to discover, that is, it hooks you with its gameplay, like any good game.

As I said it brings elements we’ve seen in several other games, but in a well-thought-out and well-built way. We have a perfect blend of the simulation of Forza Motorsport and its countless vehicle configuration possibilities with the more carefree feel of any more arcade Need for Speed.
The game has a story like the good Black Box NFS games, but here it is just a backdrop, without influencing the play too much as in The Run for example, and it fits perfectly with the gameplay, giving meaning to the many possibilities the game offers and keeping everything tied up nicely.

Throughout the game we get the chance to perform actions like near misses, drifting, drafting and so on in the best Burnout style, which give us points and help us “level up” in the game, which in this case is how popular we are becoming at the racing event that takes place and gives the game its name, and we can even chain combos of these, which is simply delicious and something that hooks the player so much that they forget the game’s main races and spend hours just free roaming.

We have a huge map and although it isn’t that open, it is full of possibilities; we can look for signs and smash them like the billboards in Burnout Paradise, with the advantage that here we earn discounts at the garage, we can look for abandoned secret cars, in the best Driver 2 style, speed traps or speed zones scattered along the roads as in Most Wanted or simply challenge other racers on the road, but the coolest thing for sure is the atmosphere.

A giant map that lets you travel from one event to another is nothing new in racing games, it began I think with NFS Underground 2 and has been explored by several games of the kind over the years until we got to monstrosities like The Crew, but one thing few managed was making all these kilometers of streets, roads and access routes into something engaging that encourages the player to actually travel all these paths and routes.

To this day I have found only two games that managed to make me “get into the game”, live the character and go from point A to point B without using any kind of fast travel, enjoying everything the road between them can offer. One was Test Drive Eve of Destruction and the other is Forza Horizon. There is Assassin’s Creed too, but that’s beside the point here lol

Do you know Eve of Destruction? I love it, a hell of a great game for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox that ended up not getting the recognition it deserved; fortunately Nintendo saw the game’s qualities and brought the guys from Monster Games under its wing, the ones responsible for the excellent ExciteTruck and ExciteBots on the Wii. I have been looking for games that gave me the same feeling as Eve of Destruction for a long time without success; of course Forza Horizon has little to do with that game, they are games with quite different aims, but both have this characteristic of creating a setting, an atmosphere of their own, and I love that, especially in racing games.

As far as I’m concerned Microsoft could focus more on this Forza spin-off series instead of the “main” Motorsport, because besides having a completely different feel, it has enough quality to hold not only those who like a more arcade style but also the crowd more focused on simulators; you just have to add more racing elements and official events, because the technical side more than does the job.