If you’ve ever collected a gigantic amount of miscellaneous toy cars and raced them all around your room or—if you’re like me—around your grandmother’s kitchen, then you’ll firmly understand the Forza Horizon 2’s knack and need for endlessness.
Endless amounts of cars, endless customization, endless freedom to tour around the Horizon Festival—the game is practically a nude magazine for advocates of past and present automobiles and perfect for those wanting to cross off test driving a Lamborghini Murcielago in the countryside. Cue Kanye West’s “Mercy” for a good chuckle.
Forza Horizon 2 is all about getting that fix for a never-ending summer vacation, and what better way to do that than to travel to southern Europe? Once you pop the disc in, you’re thrown into a vast beautiful world where road trips, street races, offroad adventures and exquisitely rare whips demand every bit of your attention. Depending on who’s behind wheel, Forza Horizon 2 is an arcade-sim racing game and possibly the best one in today’s early next-gen standard of console gaming.
Combined with the Xbox One graphical capabilities, Forza Horizon 2 dominates in the cosmetics department. While racing games like Midnight Club and Need for Speed count on adrenaline pumping, fast-paced racing to hide the plainness, and sometimes ugliness in their setting, Forza Horzion 2’s French-Italian vacation spot shines with vibrant colors, unique characteristics in tournament location and of course, the cars themselves.
It’s more than just eye candy, though. Whether you’re racing through the inner cities of Nice in a Chevorlet Corvette Stingray or doing insane drifts around Sisteron’s radiant plantations in a mighty Jeep Wrangler, the visuals remain stunning. Harsh weather changes add both realistic environment reactions and challenge. When it rains, it gets dark. The pavement is slippery and wet, making a race with 11 others through narrow, tough-turning tracks while driving a high-speed Ferrari Enzo a not-so-easy feat.
Raw competition creeps at every corner in Forza Horizon 2 thanks to the new Drivatar system. If you’ve played Forza Motorsport 5, then you certainly have had a ghost rider hitting the streets already. As you win out a few Horizon Festival championships and try out some more rides, you can easily do quick one-on-one races with virtually anyone else’s Drivatar. Some Drivatars seem to be concocted by the game itself while others are purely man made, and it goes without saying that the latter of the two are aggressively gunning for first place just like you so expect some snide bumps here and there. Since the system separates each driver by how skilled they are in the Forza universe, racing and besting against highly-skilled and pro players begets higher XP and in-game currency payout.
The tournament races themselves are enticing at best, but quickly become a tad dull and repetitive once you begin to win a couple of them. This wouldn’t seem like much of a problem if Forza Horizon 2’s single-player story progression didn’t fade half-way through the first 13 of those races. The setup is quite vague and hard to even call it a story: like all drivers in the Horizon Festival, you’re a driver who needs to score enough podium-placing positions in order to secure a spot in the grand finale. Yeah….thats pretty much it. You travel throughout all these gorgeous places and just race them. While the scenery may be enough to merit a couple of championship wins, it doesn’t fully reinforce any need to partake in them.
On the flip side, Showcase races are a different story. As a side show for the fans watching the festival, you’ll be asked to race against a bullet train in a vintage Lancia Fulvia Coupe or glide past 373 hot air balloons in a Lancia Stardale. Completing these exhilarating, one-off races unlocks the cars you rode and unveils more of them as you progress further into the game.
Barn Finds and Bucket Lists also relieves the boredom of the races. Whether you’re discovering an old and busted Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage or racking up enough airtime on a golf course, both of these little tidbits in the game do a better job of enhancing the feel of an intense car-studded vacation. I spent more time trying to clear off a bucket list that consisted of carefully maneuvering through a heavily tree-ridden forest in a Bowler EXR-S than I did the actual races. It offered a feeling of intensity and challenge, something that I couldn’t gather in the regular Horizon Festival races.
Luckily, Forza Horizon 2’s open-world begets freedom and exploration. While the Road Trip feature itself may be enough to keep players entertained when it comes to soaking in the visuals and learning the ins and outs of the control system, I was surprised how there was little Horizon 2 emphasized the attention to eclectic amount of customization options for every car in the game’s roster. With an open opportunity to completely revamp the breaks, tires, rims, paint job, engines, gears and plenty of other adjustable auto parts, this feature is sure to strike an interest with creative minds.
On that same note, Forza Horizon 2 fails to branch further on the customization of your own character. As noted a bit before, nearly every driver in the Horizon Festival is the same. Same generic face, same generic hair, same generic white guy. It hardly makes any sense that there are so many ways you can tweak the car, but not the driver. Skin options and naming the guy would have been nice, but that seemed to be a bit much for Turn 10 and Playground Games.
The rewind button is a subtle touch in the game that wouldn’t have received a pass in racing sims like Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport. By correcting a wrong turn or erasing the failure felt hitting face first into a tree with a click of a button, this helps Forza Horizon 2 cleverly reassure players the need to relax and enjoy the scene like any tourist-racer would. With this, you rarely feel the need to learn a race track to a T. You are on a special getaway in Europe, after all.
Horizon 2 also reassures those looking for an actual challenge and real progression with the use of the difficulty settings. Though not the most blatantly obvious tool in it’s shed, it’s definitely the most handy when it comes to switching to a preferred experience. On the fly, gamers can change the game’s mechanics from lighthearted arcade style racing to realistic, true-to-life car handling. Higher XP payout is rewarded to those who choose to burn rubber with no handicap. The “medium” and “pro” settings allows for an easy-going cruise while “Insane” turns off Stability and Rewind. Either way, everyone’s happy.
Lastly, Online mode is a lot more exciting than it’s counterpart in solo campaign. The transition between one to other is seamless as it also carries the time of day and the car that you’re driving from the solo experience to the online sessions. There are no lobbies to wait in and very few moments of stall time while matchmaking with other drivers. In Online Freeroam or Road Trip, the game chooses which four events to play through based on the highest voted tournament location. Aside from the typical point-to-point races, online play also features car-colliding competitions in “Infected” and “King” mode. There’s also a small jab to the Halo series with a race that crunches all competitors into Red and Blue teams.
At the end of the day, Forza Horizon 2 excels in providing a rich, free roam experience with some fast, high-end, drift-heavy and gorgeous looking cars. In a sense, the races don’t offer much outside of exploration and the story–or lack thereof–will try to offer a pretty desperate premise to motivate you into racing in them. Placing first in these 12-man contests nets you some sweet amount of credits, XP and a newly colored wristband if you end up reaching a particular level. Heck, for every location in the game, there are about a myriad of championships to complete and they’re all separated by car class. Competitions, rejoice. If you’re aren’t into all that. There’s some nifty little side adventures for you to try out. Go nuts.
