The Forza Horizon series is set in an open world so you can drive wherever you see, rather than from just point A to point B. That’s different.
Welcome to One-Hour Reviews, a feature we're trying on GamePad that's dedicated to you, the sophisticated, pressed-for-time gamer. You don't have countless hours to spend playing games, nor do you have time to read overlong reviews. Here, we play these games for an hour and succinctly tell you what you need to know about the important releases. No scores, no filler, just the answer to one question: Is it worth your time?
What is this thing? An open-world racing game.
What it's about: Driving cars in and around a music festival set in Europe. Huh?
Why should we care: The Forza Horizon series lets drive wherever you see, rather than from just point A to point B. That's different.
What happens in the first hour: Like any good racing game, we start with some good car porn – a video intro featuring sexy glam shots of gleaming sports cars barelling through beautiful locales. Nice cars, nice scenery… nothing we haven't seen before.
Cue the sexy female narrator, along with the hot babes in bikinis. Yup, it's pretty clear who the target audience is.
Then we see the Horizon music fest itself: live bands, raves and trippy skyscapes. Suddenly, I'm getting that awkward feeling of being the oldest guy at the party.
We shift to the action and the British narrator, whom we later learn is named Ben, jumps in to tell us what to do. It seems we have to drive our fancy sports car to the festival itself.
Fortunately, racing games require very little in the way of tutorials: one trigger accelerates, the other brakes. And don't forget to steer.
Thumping techno pop accompanies me to the festival and the sun sets on the drive there. Ooh, dynamic lighting (that's a next-generation console thing where you can start off at one time of day and end at another).
The festival has pounding music, neon lights and even ferris wheels. It occurs to me that driving a car around might be the least fun thing to do there.
For the first race, we get a choice of a basic BMW, Chevy or Toyota. I opt for the Beamer because we are in some non-descript European country, after all.
Ben tells me to get to the first race so I follow the GPS navigation instructions, which is highly realistic because it only tells me directions selectively – "turn right," it says, while neglecting to add that I need to turn left immediately afterward. I crash.
As the first race starts, Ben tells me there's no artificial intelligence – that all the competing cars are "drive-atars" copied from real-world players. My mind boggles at what that means – if there's no AI, how will I ever manage to win a race with my pathetic driving skills?
The fear comes true as it takes me two tries to qualify in that first race. I'm curious as to how this silly-named drive-atar system works, and will it get exponentially harder as the game goes?
Day turns to night and night turns to day, whereupon Ben greets my driver and says, "Some night, huh?" implying that some debauchery was had. Well, if there was, I saw none of it. How about a game where you really get to experience a music festival?
There could be mini-games to see how much ecstasy you drop, or a Guitar Hero-like rhythm test to see if you can hit the toilet with your vomit.
Okay, one more race to go – this one goes through some wheat fields, which shows off the whole open-world concept.
Mid-way through, the narrator tells me I'm earning skill points for fancy driving, and that this unlocks "perks." I get an extra-experience perk, but I can't help but wonder when I get to unlock airstrike and care package. This is officially Car of Duty.
Highlights: The open-world is cool. I drove up a steep hill just to see if I could. I could, which is something you can't do in most racing games.
Lowlights: Like the first game in the series, it's trying too hard to capture that "youth" feel. It's a chore to listen to all the narration and storyline bits as a result.
Time suck factor: There are more than 700 events to take part in, plus endless car customization possibilities, so you could play forever. On the plus side, the bite-sized-chunk structuring of racing games like this one is ideal for the time-pressed player.
Worth more than an hour? If you've played one racing game, you've played just about all of them. But if you haven't played one in a while, this one is better than most current competitors. It's just too bad they didn't include the ecstasy and vomit parts.