Forza Horizon 2 (Xbox One)

 

While I try to keep my eye on the general gaming landscape, the Forza series’s rise of prominence as one of Xbox’s biggest brands caught me by surprise. My curiosity was piqued as new Forza Horizon entries were treated as notable releases even outside the bubble of racing game fans, and over time my desire to see what set it apart grew and grew. Luckily, it turned out I already owned one, Games with Gold meaning I got Forza Horizon 2 quite a while back. While I was certainly late to the party, I finally found my chance to see what about the open-world racer captivates so many players.

 

Forza Horizon 2 takes place on the southern coast of Europe, its map split between a large area of Italy to the east and a smaller piece of France to the west. While you can’t step out of your vehicle to see the sights, you are often given full freedom to drive around this space as you please. Large swathes of Italian countryside, ruins and old towns, the metropolitan seaside cities and a more urban city like Nice, it’s not hard to find places that are gorgeous or have their views turn almost distractingly beautiful during a rainstorm or sunset. It is a fairly big map you’ll traverse quite often, but you might not even stumble across a space like the more industrial docks unless you try to plumb all the available activities, and the spaces can offer a range of road types or off-road options on top of being feasts for the eyes. Forza Horizon 2 has off-roading through farmlands and fields feature as an important piece of certain races, but there are also winding roads down mountains, narrow cliffside streets that can be risky to take too quickly, and cities where you can sometimes take your own paths to the next race checkpoint, although the game will reset your position if you get overly cheeky with your off-roading. You may not get any sort of extremely different space like a snowy area, but for its choice of setting, it can have both humbler spaces and the kind of sightseeing areas that you might just want to stop and drink in when you have the chance.

What brings your generic voiceless unnamed male racer to the region though is the Horizon festival. Your part in the festivities is to participate in high octane races with other drivers, and should you perform well enough across the various championships, you’ll get a chance to really show your stuff at the Horizon Finale which takes you across the entire region in one last big race to the finish. To get there though, you must place well enough in at least 15 championships, these being tournaments divided by the types of cars that are driven. With over 150 champonships available you certainly can pick and choose the ones that suit you, the game not really expecting you to engage with them all because while they do divide up the public roads into race tracks, you will start seeing a few familiar courses near the end of your push to make it to the Finale. However, the championships are divided in enough interesting ways that repetition won’t be a problem for quite a while.

 

Comprising usually of a few twists on races like a long sprint to the finish or lap-based courses, the championships are defined by the participating vehicles and you’ll be swapping cars fairly often as you play. Hop in supercars and your races will be defined by high speed courses where accounting for a turn can sometimes need to be done far in advance if you want to take it cleanly, although the racing line that helps warn you if you’re going to fast by turning from green to yellow to red helps you do so without need to be psychic or overly familiar with a whole region. Pop into some of the retro cars though, and you might be trying to drive cleanly as long as possible because your slow climb to velocities past 60 mph is fragile. A Formula-1 car can get going so quickly that the road ahead of you is quickly a blur, but some more reserved vehicles can focus on taking tighter turns or off-roading with turning over. There are nearly 200 unique vehicles before you start including downloadable content that is sadly no longer accessible if you haven’t already bought it, and each championship usually lets you pick from somewhere between 3 to 7 vehicles at least. You can pop into Porsches, Lamborghinis, Ferraris… or Hummers, Volkswagen Beetles, and even a van plastered with Ford advertising. The game has a great deal of sleek and cool vehicles as well as the more out there or bog standard cars to create a wide spread, and the huge range of championship types means players almost never really have to dip into a style of racing that doesn’t interest them.

 

Clearing the championships often is about coming to grips with the assigned type of car across the racing events, and smartly they start off not with a competition but a stress-free road trip. While technically timed, you begin a championship by driving cross-country with only a destination and no need to outpace other drivers. You can start to learn the quirks of the new car type, because jumping from “Track Toys” and muscle cars to off-road or rally cars could be quite jarring if you were just thrown into a new race immediately. Some cars can’t handle crashes or sharp turns quite so well, but while you can certainly dent up your ride, you’ll never be rendered fully inoperable or really feel the sting of a crash beyond losing ground in a race. However, Forza Horizon 2 does offer a very convenient rewind feature that will roll back the last few seconds of driving, and you can even chain together a few rewinds to go back a fair bit if you really need to adjust your driving strategy. There are a few limits, only so many rewinds in a row before you get cut off and you can’t rewind for a few seconds after a race starts, but it is almost too powerful of a trick. Naturally it would not be possible to do it in multiplayer contests before the game’s online had been shut down, so in competitions against human players that trick would leave your repertoire for both standard contests and the more eccentric Infected modes where it’s almost like a game of car tag. In single-player though, the rewind helps you overcome the AI racers that aren’t necessarily difficult to defeat. Technically, the game says the other racers are Drivatars, AIs based on the habits of other people who played the game, although you won’t really feel that unless you crank up difficulty settings.

Rewinds can maybe make some of the championship races less challenging, although you will still have to get a knack for properly taking turns and building up speed if you don’t want to be spending more time rolling things back than rolling forward. However, there are other activities in Forza Horizon 2 that the rewind benefits immensely because they feel built more around honing your skills through tricky challenges. As part of the Horizon festival you’ll sometimes be picked to race vehicles that aren’t cars, and having to outpace a train or reach a destination before a plane requires more thought since simply taking the streets your GPS suggests won’t cut it. You’ll have to figure out corner cutting and off-road tricks, properly set up drifts to cover tricky turns, and the rewind lets you hone your skills to clear these tricky challenges. The Bucket List can provide even more excitement that isn’t undercut by rewinds too. A fancy car will be placed somewhere for you to attempt a unique challenge in it. While perhaps not close in design to what a real driver’s bucket list would be, they include things like driving at high speeds and just barely avoiding tons of traffic, tearing it up on a golf course with a range of fancy maneuvers, or having to figure out a path through the forest at night to just barely make it to your destination in time. While you will become less reliant on rewinding in the regular racing as you come to grips more with the feel of the driving regardless of vehicle, these extra challenges feel more like they were structured around the feature, providing something that benefits from the ability to test your ideas and feel your way through a unique driving test.

 

There are a few other tasks and extras to flesh out your time in Forza Horizon 2. One way the game tries to discourage overusing rewinds is through an experience system based on how you’re driving. Chaining together techniques like drifting, getting air, nearly missing other cars, or even just driving at incredible speeds can compound the earned experience points, and while you will have your chain end and lose all your points for crashing or rewinding during it, you can also get some points for taking the risk and smashing through objects like those lovely seaside cafes or foliage if you’re off-roading. Some challenges are based around these “tricks” and maneuvers like the golf course one, but the pay out for filling out your experience and leveling up is the Horizon Wheelspin. For the most part, acquiring new cars in Forza Horizon 2 is not free, and the coins you earn through competitions must be spent on a new ride to enter the next one. However, the prize wheel can grant you plenty of coins or even some free cars, and it’s not the only way to get a new ride. Sometimes the mechanic Anna will tell you about an abandoned vehicle potentially being in a barn somewhere in the region, and should you find it, she’ll refurbish it for you and let you use it. Barn finds can be a bit slow in some areas, but the Wheelspin can provide some extra income and surprises, although the perk system is a bit weak. You’ll earn skill points over time and many of the perks you can spend them on just make you earn experience more quickly, and while some have a material effect on multiplayer modes, very few feel that exciting save for maybe the high end reward of being able to fast travel to anywhere on your map. There is a fast travel fee though, but around the map are boards you can crash through for experience or discounts on fast travel, with some placed in little alcoves or narrow streets that do require a little work to get to. They help add a little bit to the open world, as do options like challenging passing Drivatars to money races if you need some extra scratch, but it does feel like more optional activities in the vein of the Bucket List would be what could really flesh out the open roads to make exploring them outside of competitions more compelling.

THE VERDICT: Forza Horizon 2 takes you to a lovely region on the European coast that works for sightseeing and hosting plenty of racing championships, and thanks to the huge range of cars you can pick from playing a bit differently, the racing has some good longevity as you come to grips with the differences between them. The Bucket List and special challenges provide greater excitement since the rewind feature feels like it enhances their potential for unique designs rather than just letting you roll back bad turns and crashes, and while more could have been sprinkled around the open world to spice things up, the unique locations and vehicles do keep even simpler races engaging for the time it takes to make it to the Horizon Finale.

 

And so, I give Forza Horizon 2 for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. The rewind is perhaps a bit of a contentious feature since you engage with it as you please and it is definitely more convenient to just undo a few seconds of a race rather than having to restart it entirely, and the opposing racers are able to remain competitive and play fair because there is this safety net of a way to overcome the times they could otherwise gain an advantage you might not be able to overcome otherwise. Regardless of your thoughts on the feature though, the driving is certainly well done and the focus on having you swap vehicles so often gives Forza Horizon 2 its liveliness and range of difficulty. It may not be so exciting to be in that slow Ford van that has to claw its way to the kind of speeds that other cars hit before they’ve left the starting line, but it is a unique twist on the racing style and one you can opt into rather than being forced down that slower road. You might find a certain car type slippery and unwieldy certainly, but you won’t be spending too long in it and elements like the racing line and road trips help you to adjust. The rewind certainly helps if you’ve committed to a car type you don’t end up gelling with, but there are plenty of speedy supercars and more modest rides to make for more typical high speed vehicle racing so you’re not always thrown into gimmick rides or tough to handle speedsters. The Bucket List and other similar challenges like racing the train feel like where Forza Horizon 2 should maybe have invested its attention more though. Having a huge range of championships and cars is great and allows for you to mold your experience, but more challenges that push the game design beyond races to be first would help the open roads provide more appealing tasks to attempt between the main Horizon events.

 

Now that I’ve managed to play a Forza Horizon game, I can certainly see how they’re enjoyable, but why they are considered a potential cornerstone Xbox brand with broad appeal still escapes me. The rewind feature certainly expands the potential reach since it eases up on the difficulty, and the racing is responsive with most of the tuning for more realistic or challenging driving made an optional feature for car aficionados to dabble in if they so choose. The appeal of a road trip in a lovingly realized space based on a real region certainly comes through and the breadth of the car offerings and the championship system relying on exploring them keep things varied, but I’m surprised the world doesn’t have more to do or more adventurous challenge designs that would push this game farther beyond being mostly a racer. Funnily enough, now I’m left wondering if its later entries are where it really finds its stride, meaning my curiosity is not sated, but at least I found a good driving game if not all the answers I’m looking for.