Forza Horizon 4 Reviews | PC Gamer

It's autumn. The fields and hills are a sea of ​​reds, browns and yellows. A light rain falls on the screen and small puddles glow at sunset as I cross wind-swept meadows, slipping through a wall and crossing scenic farmland, catching a hill at the right angle to lift floor. combo of skill chains. It's beautiful and it's absurd and, next week, everything will be different.

Forza Horizon 4 is built around the seasons. In its first moments, you drive a McLaren Senna across autumn country roads, run a Polaris RZR on a frozen winter lake, rush mud into a Ford Fiesta in the spring, then return to the Senna for a ride. This road trip is a montage of the ambitious playground of the series, designed here to maximize the differences between its seasonal changes.

It's an emotional journey through what's coming. Once you reach the festival site, you play each season individually through a five-hour prologue that shows the many events of Forza Horizon 4. If that had been the game itself, that would have been enough. You finish events to gain influence and take important steps to progress towards the next season, in the same way as to unlock new festival sites in Forza Horizon 3. But after a complete loop – summer-spring – Forza Horizon 4 reveals its final shape.

Sharing the road

Previously, the online modes of Forza Horizon were strictly separated. Of course, you would encounter representations of AI from other players, named "Drivatars" in the Forza series' somewhat too complex nomenclature, but you could only play with other people if you decide to do it. You can still play this way in Forza Horizon 4, but by default it will be loaded on a map shared with other drives. The seasons progress over a period of seven days and each brings specific events and daily and weekly challenges.

This is Forza Horizon which is regularly in the game world, adopting the trend of big budget games integrating MMO-lite systems to create a continuous relationship, even small. No weekly offer of Horizon seems too domineering. It's a handful of championship races in specific car classes, an incredibly easy daily challenge (get three aerial skills – it'll take less than a minute), and a more complex weekly bonus that requires you to take steps with a particular car. But this raises the idea of ​​a seasonal calendar to more than a simple gadget.

Most of the time, you and the other pilots on the map will do your own thing, driving between solo events, looking for rare cars hidden in barns or crossing a field trying to build combos and crushing sheep. . . You can challenge other players for one-on-one races, or invite them to participate in a convoy to participate in cooperative or PvP events, but unless you are actively grouped together, you do not can not interact physically.

Drive in another drive and you will pass harmless, preventing potential trolls from disrupting your skill chains. This is a subtly different type of fantasy from the single-player sandbox, where American runners boldly move to sell the festival atmosphere, but it makes the world more alive. There is a low-level voyeuristic interest in meeting another player; to see what car they drive and wonder what they're doing at this particular time.

Every hour, the game tries to coax players in the same place with its "#FORZATHON Live" events (a name that stinks in the meeting room). These are cooperative group events in which players drive through speed traps, drift zones or danger jumps, bank points in collaboration with other drivers. Fill them out (with daily and weekly bonuses) and you'll get #FORZATHON points to spend in the #FORZATHON shop, where you buy rewards such as cars, clothes and emotes, which change every week.

The events of Forzathon Live – enough with the hashtag – hijack at first, but never create complexity. Construction points are less focused on skills than on numbers and endurance. None of the associated activities is entertaining enough to support a dedicated permanent event system, which is a shame because the idea of ​​collaborative challenges is strong and offers one of the few reasons to interact with other players on the map.

In the end, the seasonal structure and shared global events are ways to keep your interest in the coming months. But everything is built on another rich racing sandbox that easily offers dozens of hours of running, not to mention challenge events, online competition and general derangements. This time, the action takes place in a truncated version of the UK, containing pieces from Oxfordshire, Cheshire, Cumbria and the city of Edinburgh, all located a few miles away. One of the other. It's a size similar to that of Forza Horizon 3 in Australia, but less dynamic. It is an essentially rural map, full of forests, farmland and small villages, where changing seasons and times provide a changing landscape of mud, ice and tarmac.

On one side, I am less seduced by the decor because of its familiarity. As a person from the UK, these country roads will never be as exotic as the tropical forests of Australia. But there is a beautiful beauty to the representation of Gamesground Games, especially on the northwestern side of the map, as you head from the vast meadows of Cumbrian to the Scottish Highlands. The seasonal structure requires a generally consistent color palette at all times, but the variety of terrain is sufficient to ensure a diverse collection of races.

The race remains incomparable. It's a perfect blend of indulgent arcade manipulation with an obsessive attention to detail that ensures that every car feels just different enough. It is not a perfect simulation, but the weight, speed and torque of each vehicle give it a personality beyond class and category. If you're having trouble with a particular race, you can reduce the difficulty (there are many granular options to do this), but the solution is often to find the specific car that promotes this event.

As in Forza Horizon 3, the map is quickly filled with things to do. You will cross long winding roads, cross muddy tracks, cross fields and sometimes a variety of three, breaking landscapes to draw an uneven path between checkpoints. Outside the race, there are several events in which you receive a car and to which you must respond. Everything, whether it's dealing with challenges and doing race events, designing new paint jobs, tuning cars or even broadcasting on Mixer, has its own individual progress bar . Win street races, for example, and you'll gain influence in street racing. Earn enough money to go to the next level and you will unlock more of this type of event, as well as other bonuses, including money, roller skates, and bounty phrases. discussion to send spam to other players.

Even when you're not racing, you can win rewards by driving carelessly to develop skill chains. In Forza Horizon 4, you gain skill points much faster than previous games, but you can invest them in individual cars, which allows you to earn bonuses when you use this vehicle. This is a good way to get extra rewards from your favorite cars, and most importantly, you are rewarded for what you decide to do. Of course, it stings a bit when a lot of wheels falls on a pair of ugly boots for your avatar instead of a special edition, but you always know that another chance is never good far.

As with his predecessors, it's a glorious game. You drive recklessly through the villages, cause carnage across farmland and you are usually bored, while festival organizers and radio DJs congratulate you for their incredible quality. You are literally given a free house in the first hour of play in what is – in today's economy – the most unrealistic thing I've ever seen in a game Forza Horizon. But while I've always been slightly at odds with the unbearable tone, I can not say that I do not always enjoy myself.

Forza Horizon 3 was a demanding game that struggled to maintain a stable framerate in its most popular locations. Forza Horizon 4 was perfectly fluid in my tests. I played on two machines, one with a GTX 1080 on a 1440p monitor, and another with a R9 Fury X in super-fast, and I did not encounter any problems even when the settings exceeded the recommendations detected automatically. Unfortunately, the game is exclusive to Microsoft Store, which remains a terrible user experience. (When trying to download Forza Horizon 4 on my second machine, the Microsoft Store suddenly decided not to own all games, forcing me to learn how to reset the entire library.)

The best thing I can say about Forza Horizon 4 is that it's worth the pain of the Microsoft Store. But when Forza Horizon 3 quickly established itself as my favorite racing game, FH4 is not as remarkable. It's still an amazing sandbox, with a loop of fun and rewards still satisfying, but its differences will only be visible in the weeks and months to come, and the success (or not) of its structure. Seasonal events. What is already there is beautiful, entertaining and polite, but it is not yet known if this can keep the promise of the festival that never ends.