Hello and welcome to Rock Paper Shotgun!
Recently, my fellow video person Noa took a holiday to Dragon Quest 11, but I've decided
to spend my virtual vacation closer to home, in the countryside and highlands of Forza
Horizon 4's Britain.
It's as if I've opened my front door and stepped into a videogame, the only difference
being that I don't have a Lamborghini Centenario parked outside my house.
Instead we've got a Toyota Aygo, which is less impressive.
OPENING But that's what Forza Horizon is for: it's an automotive role-playing game
where the role you play is a petrolhead with a billionaire's car collection and miles
of open road to take them for a spin.
Oh, and no traffic cops to stand in your way.
It's a game that puts fun before the automotive fundamentals, and lets you scale it from daft
arcade romp to something approaching a more sophisticated sim.
I personally play at the arcade end of the spectrum - that's the end where cars make
stone walls scatter like freshly popped corn...
...and I can paint a picture of Krusty Burger on the bonnet of James Bond's Aston Martin
DB5.
Imagine Bond's face!
He'd be livid!
I think it's important to note that I'm not approaching this from the perspective
of a hardcore sim player.
I prefer it when cars leave the tarmac and start bothering the sheep.
And from that perspective, I think Forza Horizon 4 is one of the best driving games I've
ever played.
Maybe it's a case of blind patriotism, or maybe I've just always wanted to race a
Hovercraft on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
But i'm going to break down why this game speaks to me, and why I think it'll speak
to you too.
Before I do that, I have a couple of things to flag.
First of all, a spoiler alert: this video does feature spoilers.
They're attached to the car.
This stuff writes itself.
Secondly, if you're enjoying this video as it goes along, please do press that picture
of an upwards thumb, as it makes me feel like I'm walking on air.
And if you really enjoy it, why not subscribe to rock paper shotgun.
Because people who subscribe are sophisticated like this avatar...
And people who don't subscribe are like this dreadful human being…
But enough of his idiot nonsense, let's go for a drive…
The first reason I love Forza Horizon 4 hits you on the starting line: few games introduce
themselves as well as this one.
Playground Games do this really special thing where they hijack the opening ten minutes
as a playable trailer for everything to come.
In those ten minutes you're whipped from a tarmac-shredding road race…
...to a mad checkpoint to checkpoint dash across snow and ice
...before ending up on a mud splattered dirt track race against some bikers on a fast track
to a hospital bed.
You get a couple of minutes of each, just enough to leave a butt imprint in the leather
seat before you're dropped behind the wheel of a very different car.
Playground famously spend about 18 months working on these introductions, picking the
routes and vehicles to capture the essence of their new landmass.
No surprises that Britain is represented with mud, road works and sports cars stuck behind
sunday drivers.
This time, the opening also has to show seasonal changes - more on those in a second - which
flip the world from winter wonderland to waterlogged spring in a blink of an eye.
This doesn't represent the flow of time as it is in-game, but it shows the puppyish
energy of a team desperate to show off their new toys - the weather effects and the terrain
changes.
I wish all developers were this keen to put their best foot forward.
All this might sound like I'm going mad for a glorified tutorial, but to me it crushes
the entire philosophy of the game into ten minutes.
It tells you that this is a world where a lot of different cars can have a lot of different
fun.
On the final straight you see cars of all different kinds joining in to race to the
finish line - this is Forza Horizon 4 in a few seconds, a celebration of all things wheeled
at the expense of realism or sense.
If you only play ten minutes of one game this year, make it this - you can even try it in
the demo.
It's smashing.
Of course, there's more to this than a good tutorial.
The pitch of Forza Horizon is that you're competing in the Horizon festival - this is
a massive party which looks more like Glastonbury than a motorshow.
It's brilliantly obnoxious, with fireworks at night and pounding music around the clock
- one of the best bits of sound design is the way whatever music you listen to on the
car radio is played on stage, so as you drive in you hear the music shift from inside to
outside.
It's great, though I do feel bad for whoever lives in this ancient cottage about two meters
from the festival wall.
This looks like where grandma lives - she doesn't want drum n bass in her back garden
Ignoring the unlikely planning consent issue, the festival has been improved over past games
in one key way.
Instead of unlocking new events by collecting followers, you now level up each individual
driving discipline by taking part in it.
Want to unlock more road races?
Compete in road races.
Want to spend the game spraying mud?
Focus on dirt tracks.
It even extends to non-racing - you can level up in car photography or custom race creation,
- making sure people who dig user-generated stuff have a path through the game.
If you want to spend the whole game stamping pictures of My Neighbour Totoro onto supercars,
Playground have you covered.
It's a nice shift from Forza Horizon 3, where you were forced to eat a more balanced
diet of racing that sometimes sat at odds with the 'do as you please' pitch of that
opening tutorial.
I'm terrible at drifting for example, so now I can ignore drift challenges entirely.
In fact, I've spent most of my time playing it exclusively as a cross country game - just
bouncing my jeep and buggies across hills, ignoring the tarmac entirely.
And it's brilliant.
Let's stick on the cross country races for a second because I really am obsessed with
them.
I've always enjoyed Forza Horizon most when it goes off road - I spent most of the last
game bombing around the Australian outback in a Halo Warthog.
But the British countryside is an even better playground.
As the owner of a Toyota Aygo I've come to dread our hilly landscape - I associate
it with creeping up steep roads as the car creaks beneath us.
But in the game, hills are become rollercoasters for more able vehicles.
The cross country tracks whip over ups and downs, taking us up high to give us beautiful
views of valleys and a patchwork quilt of farmland, before the slopes kick in and pull
you into screaming death plummet.
Hills allow for epic jumps, but just in case you don't get the memo, Playground have
littered with ramps for extra encouragement.
Then there's the fields themselves - as unfair as it might be to the farmers, I love
the feeling of punching through hedgerows and stone walls and discovering what thing
is going to get in our way next.
Will I be swerving around hay bales or flocks of sheep?
When there are 12 jeeps all doing this together, it looks brilliant, with piles of rocks and
shattered fences flying all over the place.
Even outside of races I've taken to going off-road whenever I can - I just line up mission
objective markers on the horizon and travel as the crow flies.
It's not suitable for sports cars, of course, but my trusty Coca Cola-branded Alumi Craft
laughs in the face of GPS.
For the record, it was was winter when I added coke-swilling santa to my car.
It just looks a bit odd now that it's summer.
On a tiny side note - it's been rumoured for some time that Playground might be rebooting
the Fable series.
I can't be the only one who sees Britain as a test run for an open world Albion, right?
When you get up to the Scottish highlands, where there are fewer roads, or the forests
around the quarries, it's easy to picture yourself galloping around on a horse.
All it needs is a few farting peasants and the game's pretty much made.
You could even use this idiot as the bad guy.
Just an idea.
With changing seasons, this one lump of Britain becomes four worlds in one.
All the footage you're seeing now is taken from the same track, but played in four different
seasons and weather conditions.
Some of the changes are obvious - pools of shallow water will freeze over in winter,
creating routes that don't exist at other times and slippy slidey challenges that your
favoured autumn vehicle might struggle with.
Of course, if you played Forza Horizon 3's excellent Blizzard Mountain DLC, none of this
will come as a surprise.
Switch to the wetter seasons, like Spring or Autumn, and you'll see dirt roads getting
churned into mud, giving them a very different feel to the bone dry gravel you grind across
during the summer.
It would be laying it on thick to claim every track is reinvented by a change of weather,
but the alterations are substantial enough that you'll want to visit them at different
times.
Or you could skip the wait by using custom blueprints to set the time of year.
It's a very romantic take on the british weather.
As we all know, summer actually means a terrifying heatwave that turned our grass brown.
And when it does snow, we can barely clear the roads to our hospitals, let alone set
up a massively indulgent racing festival.
No, this is weather painted in broad strokes, but it's because of that you'll want to
take a proper tour of the world, just to see the visual changes.
Just to explain, when I say a whole year, I don't mean 365 days of real time.
Seasons last for one real life week before shifting - a big sign pops up saying Summer
is coming in ten minutes, like a more accurate version of the House Stark family motto.
The first few hours of the game actually takes place in an accelerated version of the seasons
so you get a feel for different race types - but once you win a place on the Horizon
roster you're slotted into the real-time world.
I've only played through one season shift myself, but it's exciting - it gives you
season-specific events that only happen for that week, which is a good excuse to check
back in and hoover up some extra points.
Forza Horizon has always done a great job of fostering competition-slash-hatred between
friends, whether they are actively playing or not.
For starters, you race in single player against Drivatars, which are NPCs with your friends
names and racing habits.
I have a love/hate relationship with these guys - they look like my friends, but they
are horrible robot versions, designed to humiliate me over and over.
When a friend's drivatar beats me on the final stretch in Horizon, I end up liking
that friend a little less in real life.
I have similar struggles with leaderboards telling me that my peers have discovered more
roads than me.
Congrats guys - you managed to find a massive strip of tarmac.
I'm in awe of you.
Forza Horizon 4 does all this good Forza Horizon stuff, but it also fills the world with other
humans - it's not unlike Destiny, if all the Guardians were in Honda Civics.
People mostly keep to themselves, though every hour a massive blimp appears and everyone
races towards it, like it was some mad helium filled god.
I love this bit, as everyone ends up in one bit of the map like boy racers gathering in
Tesco's car park.
Here you can ogle exotic cars and show off your amazing novelty horns.
Mine is Halo and goes like this:
The blimp signifies a Forzathon Live event, a team objective for all the cars on the map.
Often it's something bland, like doing lots of danger sign jumps or drifting a collected
distance, but it's worth taking part for the sight of tens of cars tearing across the
world like Mad Max with more exotic motors.
Handily, collision detection is turned off to avoid pile-ups or griefers, though it can
make it look like you've discovered a creepy ghost race.
Don't get too freaked out.
Of course, all these extra bodies can join races, and playing with humans is recommended
- they bring a hint of chaos and unpredictability that feeds into Horizon's more madcap take
on the racing game - and a lesser role for the rewind function means the results feel
purer too.
Another small but welcome tweak are Forza Stories, which replace the random bucket list
tasks from previous games.
These are fixed challenges wrapped up with some story - one group has you pulling off
stunts for a man who sounds just like Sean Bean.
If it's not actually Sean Bean, then he should probably contact the police, because
someone has stolen his voice with that magic voice shell from The Little Mermaid.
His tasks tend to involve dangerous driving, though I'm not sure what films he's making.
This one is all about pulling stunts in a rally car in a quaint English town - unless
there's a new Fast And The Furious meets Miss Marple mash-up, it doesn't make much
sense.
I'm also not sure I'd pay money to watch a car swerving around shipping containers
in a tunnel, but I enjoy the task.
The pleasant surprise was the new Drift Club.
As mentioned before, I tend to avoid drift tasks as I struggle with the controls, but
this chain of events does a great job of explaining the basics - it's the kind of drift tutorial
the game has always needed.
I'm not going to pretend that it made me good at drifting - as this footage reveals,
I'm a drifter and a part time hedge removal man - but it gave me a feel for it that I
haven't had before.
If anything, it's a bit odd that it doesn't unlock until you hit level 30.
If I'd had this lovely welsh teacher talking me through drifting in the opening hours I'd
probably spend more time travelling at right angles.
The best Forza Story involves working for a popular YouTuber to help recreate her favourite
racing videogames.
She's got a couple of hundred thousand followers, so I'll admit I was bit jealous of her to
start with, but her missions are so good I agreed to help in the end.
It's really great to see Playground openly acknowledge the games that inspire them.
This is meant to be a bit like racing around in Edinburgh in Project Gotham Racing - Forza
Horizon's skill chains aren't massively unlike Gotham's Karma points, so it's
a nice nod to those roots.
Although project gotham racing would be less impressed by my wiping out bus stops.
And this is meant to be us jumping around the Crazy Taxi from Crazy Taxi.
The handling is slightly less comic book, but the feeling of gliding through the air
is right.
Here I'm trying to slide a Ferrari Testarossa around sweeping bends like in the legendary
Out Run.
Drifting is easier in OutRun, which explains this sorry performance.
Back to drift club for me, I think..
And with all that virtual countryside it would be rude not to include Smugglers Run as you
scream across bumpy fields in a buggy.
It's a such a lovely, respectful idea - packed with nerdy in-jokes about each game that sound
like the work of authentic fans.
It shows a generous spirit that runs through the entire game.
Actually, generosity would be the perfect word to sum up Forza Horizon 4.
Everything in the game is big, from the ridiculous blanket of icons across the world map, to
the ludicrous showcase events that see tiny cars racing against hovercrafts and trains.
I mean, who would ever want to return to the boring loops of Forza Motorsport after doing
this!
But it's more than the amount of stuff.
It's the sense of discovery, that the more you do something, the more you'll get of
that something.
Even if you ignored everything and just drove around you'd eventually start finding barns
filled with classic cars to restore - a way of celebrating forgotten gems and subtly filling
your garage with beefier toys.
It's a generosity felt in the zip and buzz of the wheelspins, a fruit machine that might
spit out a supercar, or might just teach your avatar to do an annoying dance.
It's the way the game plays with every feature Xbox has to offer - from rewarding streamers
who use Mixer, to sticking your gamerpic on a massive billboard at the end of the race.
I will never not laugh at my giant face.
But it's also a generosity towards racers of any skill.
To understand where I'm approaching Forza Horizon 4 from, you have to know that in real
life I failed my driving test 9 times before passing.
That's right, only one in ten driving testers think I should be on the roads.
Forza is happy to let a maniac like me behind the wheel, punching up all the assists until
my car pretty much drives itself.
But it does a lovely thing where it gradually suggests harder driving - nudging down assists
for better rewards, or nudging up the drivatar difficulty if you make it look too easy.
I can't speak for how it holds up at the technical end of the simulation spectrum,
but as a more casual racing game fan, this is a beautifully made game.
I know it's bold and hyperbolic to call anything the best of its kind, but for me,
Forza Horizon 4 is exactly what I want in a racing game.
Truth be told, I don't play many of the things - I find them drab and po-faced.
Who wants to be limited to endless loops of tarmac when you could be shredding someone's
back lawn?
I've bought into Forza Horizons vibe for many years now, but I really think this is
Playground at the height of their powers.
It's bold, generous game, incredibly alive despite starring a cast of metal boxes on
wheels.
I hope this list has helped explain the game to you - if you have any questions let me
know in the comments.
And if you did enjoy this video, I'd love it if you subscribed - we've got loads of
videos on all things PC gaming related, so hopefully you'll find something else to
enjoy.
Thanks for watching and hopefully see you again soon.
Goodbye!
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