Forza Horizon 4 is an open world racing game. This time, it is set in Great Britain. The controls and gameplay are what you’d expect of a typical racing game. You’ll accelerate and brake, and that’s pretty much it. You may need to get used to the handling at first but it’s quick and easy to pick up. Plus, there are a bunch of accessibility options that you can tweak such that you get the difficulty that’s perfect for you. For example, you can toggle the racing lines, drop down the AI difficulty, traction control and other driving assists.
Naturally, the game is made to wow you with its vast open world and it succeeds. The game looks fantastic, and while the setting is not exotic, it looks nice with its familiar elements. There are both dynamic weather and changing seasons. Each affects the way the car handles on the road. The rain during autumn means it’s a lot more slippery, and this does affect how you’ll tackle the courses.
The game’s single player revolves around the Horizon Festival. It’s mainly used as a setting and reason for the various events. You’re a participant and your aim is to participate in events to gain enough influence to get into the big showcase races. A neat thing is that there are different stories, complete with their own cutscenes, that shows off different events and gives the game some variety. The purpose of the beginning of the single player campaign is to give you a glimpse of what’s available and once you’ve earned enough influence, it’ll change to the next season before finally letting you loose. It's a shame that afterwards there’s no way to manually change the seasons though.
Events will quickly unlock one after another on the map. You’ll have to select and then drive to them to start the event, but it’s fast and it doesn’t feel like a chore to travel to each new event. Completing an event will give you influence which is used to level up and also credits to buy cars and houses. You’re also given some cars in the beginning, with a few customization options. As you level up in a particular event category, it’ll unlock more events and tracks.
There is a nice variety of events including normal street racing to off-road and cross country tracks. The cross country events are probably some of the most fun in the game, purely because it embraces the arcade racing the most. The terrain is varied and you usually don’t do laps. You’re encouraged to smash through fences and trees, which is weirdly satisfying. Doubly so since if you do that in other normal races, you’re penalised as your car slows down from hitting things and getting damaged. And then there are the crazy events where you end up racing against hovercrafts and trains. While they’re like scripted set pieces, they’re still a rush of adrenaline to play.
Each tracks have regular checkpoints to ensure that you don’t deviate or try to take massive shortcuts. Hopefully you don’t miss any of those checkpoints because if you do, you’ll either have to rewind, or if you’ve disabled that function (for higher multipliers), you will be sent back in four seconds. If you do get sent back, you can say goodbye to any good positioning you had as you’ll be so far behind the pack it’ll be difficult to catch back up.
It’s not all good things though since there are the usual open world flaws such as the dead time from traveling from one event to another. Although the beautiful scenery does help to alleviate that. The street races are terrible since it’s usually a combination of night racing (poor visibility), rain, oncoming traffic that pops out of nowhere, and a prevalence for tight cornering in the routes. It’s horrible and to add salt to the wound, the AI will race perfectly by defying physics and never crashing.
The game has received a tonne of updates and there are plenty of free cars. Although if you’re a new player, the abundance of menus can be confusing and overwhelming. It’s also quite aggressive at advertising its DLC including the expansions by playing unskippable cutscenes or windows that keep popping up to prompt you to purchase them. It also annoyingly displays cars that come in DLC packs, which you can only tell by a small little icon in the corner, so you might not notice it and want to grab that car only to find out you can’t using in-game credits.
Getting to the Horizon Festival in the single player campaign is quick and easy. It’ll only take around five hours or so but that’s not even scratching the surface of the game as it has a lot of content left. There are Horizon Stories that has cutscenes telling a little story which can be fun and you get to try out a lot of different cars. Progressing through the game is great because it uses the influence (i.e. points) system so that you don’t need to come first or second or even third in the events. Even if you come dead last, you’ll still get some influence to help you keep moving forward and unlock additional events. If you constantly win or lose, the game will ask if you wanted to increase or decrease the difficulty so that there is always a bit of challenge but never becomes impossible.
Overall, Forza Horizon 4 is a great racing game. The large open world, the breadth of content and the huge variety of cars, it all combines into a very robust racing game. The graphics look amazing and while the environments can be a bit samey at times due to the setting, it’s no less impressive. The huge amount of customizable to allow the player to decide how hard they want the game to be is fantastic and makes it much more enjoyable.
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