Photo Credit: Forza Horizon 4. Screenshot by me. The Lamborghini Veneno, my dream car in this game, as I have fond memories of it from another. Finally saved up for it, and modified it heavily including the chameleon paint job.
I have Forza Horizon 4 on Xbox Game Pass, and am having much the same experience I had with Horizon 2. I love playing it. It is almost the same game, with some unexpected improvements. Horizon is an open world racing game, using a lot of the same principles as the Forza Motorsport series. The game is also massively-multiplayer, so there are other players about the world you can interact with. It has arcade-style driving physics as opposed to the Motorsport simulator. Lots of street and rally racing.
The game takes place in a fictionalized northern British countryside. Estates pop-up all over the map for sale, where you can keep your cars in and teleport to, but don’t worry about any of those, you won’t be buying them. The estates are laughably expensive. Truly only there for hardcore players with nothing left to spend money on, while banking abusive hours yet in the game at an impressive scale. It just boggles the mind how the game thinks players are going to want to grind their way to massive fortunes to save ten minutes driving .
There is a very nice selection of cars in the game, interesting choices like the Lamborghini Veneno, which looks like an alien spaceship and is extremely fast. Among a list of other Lambos, of course. My favorite car right now is an Audi R8 V10, which I have souped-up. She can do 220 mph, and native 4WD means she can launch, and control in the winter snow and spring showers.
After level 20, the player joins the main game progression in which they exist in persistent seasons. This is such an interesting touch, in my opinion. All gamers are experiencing the same weather. It brings them together, and you get a completely different experience from winter to summer.
The races are very fun. I started at a low difficulty, and the game prodded me on to higher difficulties because I was winning easily. I’m so glad I did. Not only do you win more cash and “influence,” (determines player level,) but in addition you have more challenging races which are intrinsically more rewarding. It means you spend more time doing the absolute dreaded thing of restarting races, something I hate so much it makes me turn off the game. The game does give you a limited ability to rewind time to correct small mistakes, as long as you are not playing against real players, which you have to vote to be. To this point, it is somewhat difficult to find players to join you, so being on Game Pass, hopefully, brings friends together.
Graphically this game is stunning. I love that in this installment, you can easily smash your car through almost anything. Small trees, fences, guard rails, stone walls, it all comes flying apart against you. The stone walls lending a particularly cool graphical effect.
HereticDerek 