Forza Horizon 4

Perhaps the most damning thing that can be said about Forza Horizon 4 is that it's the point where the series, having achieved its very best with the third iteration, starts to tread familiar ground. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; as it turns out, the formula is as exciting as ever. This is a fantastic racing game that really makes up for the genre being relatively empty by just being so good. The Horizon Festival doesn’t feel nearly as fresh the fourth time around, but there’s still no other driving game I’d rather be playing.

Every Horizon sequel has begged the question: where does the festival go from here? It began as an outing in the Colorado summer, like a version of Coachella but with hyper cars speeding by in the background. It then headed to Europe for a road trip in Italy and France. Down to Australia we went for the festival’s third anniversary, where we got to play boss and set our own rules for races. And now it finds itself in Great Britain. Only the question now is: what if this just never stopped?

It feels like the natural evolution of this whole implausibly expensive and lavish event. The game even brands one of the primary menu tabs as ‘Horizon Life.’ And it’s true—rather than establishing new festival sites, a key progression component in the last game, you can now purchase houses around Great Britain that serve most of the same functions as the one main festival site. Admittedly this does feel at odds with the nature of the Horizon festival to have one driver practically owning all the prime real estate in Britain. I would’ve preferred more festival sites, though I do love starting the game at my forest cabin every time I fire it up.

The whole Horizon Life vibe extends to the new inclusion of character customization, complete with various emotes and dances. Fortnite owns the world so you had to see this coming. Your character dances and emotes in the loading screens, post-race screens, and when viewing Beauty Spots in the world. It’s strange, but somehow it works with what I imagine the Horizon festival to be—extremely young, extremely wealthy people dancing the night away before whisking themselves off to become the Far Cry 3 cast.

The Forza Horizon vibes are as strong as ever here and the driving remains excellent, with a great catalog of cars, new and old, to collect and drive. The game, much like the previous ones, practically throws cash and cars at you, so much so that you’ll have more vehicles than you’ll know what to do with. I’ve probably driven 20% of my 300+ car collection, and actually purchased an even smaller percentage myself. Forza Horizon is a celebration of cars, of driving them, not buying them. Money is not an issue in this game.

The progression is what you’d expect: complete events to unlock more events. I found the events to be categorized a lot more clearly this time around, though I could be misremembering how it worked in the past. Nevertheless, there’s a lot to do here, even if it feels like there are slightly fewer races than in the last game. Recently, Playground Games introduced a course creator tool that allows players to plot out their own races, a first for the series. I always thought that the introduction of such a feature would instantly elevate the series to new heights, but sadly it’s not quite there yet. Most of the player-made races are deliberately designed to allow for easy wins. The ones that do take it seriously… let’s just say I really came to appreciate Playground’s course design after dipping into some custom events.

As a map, Great Britain feels nowhere near as iconic as Australia or even Colorado, but it’s still laid out beautifully. My favorite area might be the wide open fields with wind turbines located near the center of the map. Grab a car with decent off-road speed and you can tear through these fields while getting a great view of the surrounding areas. It’s gorgeous.

So generally speaking, Forza Horizon 4 doesn’t play all that differently, save for two significant additions that shake things up. First, the world is now populated with other players rather than AI drivers (though that is still an option for offline play). Interactions with these other players feel a bit limited; you can put out a call to everyone in the session to stop what they’re doing and join you for an event, but no one ever shows up. Still, it’s nice to see other players out and about rather than AI cars all going the speed limit.

The best thing that happens is the hourly Forzathon Live event, where everyone in the session gathers in one spot to begin a series of three challenges. They’re not too different from what was seen in Burnout Paradise. Completing these will reward you with Forzathon Points which can be used at the Forzathon Store to unlock a changing selection of cars and cosmetic items for your driver.

Second, since the Horizon Festival just never ends now, you get to experience all four seasons running on a weekly basis. Every Thursday brings a sweeping change to the map as the game world progresses from one season to the next. Seeing the environment change is pretty stunning, especially when winter hits. The changes in weather and temperature have an effect on handling, though it’s a bit harder to notice outside of the extremes of summer and winter. This is a wonderful addition to the series that I hope is here to stay.

Forza Horizon 4’s biggest shortcoming lies in its multiplayer racing. One of the best parts of 3 was its Online Adventure mode, where players would vote on a series of races based around a car class and race type, and between each race everyone would drive to the next event together. The point system was completely broken and easy to exploit—you could win the entire championship finishing last in every race if you pulled off enough sweet drifts—but it was a lot of fun, with good rivalries forming between players. My hope going into the new game was that they would reconfigure the points system to be fair, but instead the entire thing’s been gutted and replaced with a version of Online Adventure that is entirely team based. Everyone still votes on a series to play, and everyone still drives to the next race together, but with the added annoyance of having teammates who don’t treat you like one. Removing the individual competition is not the way I would’ve gone with it. To make matters worse, the load times have become really hard to deal with, both in and out of multiplayer. The game’s menus often feel like they’re struggling to hold up the weight of everything in it.

Still, there’s nothing better, and I mean that in the best way possible. Forza Horizon has always been brilliant and it continues to be. The weekly seasonal changes are easily the most noteworthy thing here, but even without them this would still be a terrific driving game.