After careening through six Mario Karts straight in a row, I wanted to take a break and play something more on the simulation side. I gave franchises like Gran Turismo and Forza some serious consideration (and purchased a good number of them), but what really captured my curiosity was the Forza Horizon series. Forza Horizon 5 was soon to release so talk of the game was bubbling up everywhere—and as someone that's only dabbled in arcade and kart racers, I figured there was no better time to strike than now. But anyone that knows me can attest to the fact that I have a bit of a chronological obsession, a problem that would undoubtedly nip while vacationing in sunny Mexico. So instead I stayed in the states, booting up my Xbox 360 to return to where it all began: scenic Colorado.
I'll be frank: the first Forza Horizon is a great game. But its greatness takes on a different form compared to the fiery excellence of other titles like Spelunky and Doom. Horizon offers a subtle and warm enjoyment, radiating contentment like lounging outside on a breezy Spring afternoon. It rejuvenates not with spikes of energy but gentle massaging, applying just enough pressure to exfoliate your worries away. Horizon grips your attention tighter than other laudable diversions like Bejeweled, Hexcells, or Wordle, but it's similarly prone to meditative trances, where minutes just drift away. "Pleasant" is perhaps the best word I'd use to describe Horizon—it carefully soothes like a much-needed phone call from one of your parents.
I'm hammering on this point because honestly, there's not really a lot I can do to describe what gives Forza Horizon its ineffable magic. The game looks great despite being a decade old, the soundtrack is loaded with bangers, and there's enough content to keep you sated for forty hours—or more! But at the core of the experience is a simple promise: you can drive around to your heart's content. Naturally, there's a lot more to Horizon than that—collecting cars and dominating races are also huge draws—but the game excels most from the freedom it hands you. One moment you can be cruising around looking for collectibles, and then the next you can be slamming headfirst into a guard rail during a haphazard street race. Horizon doesn't bring anything new to the open world formula (especially since Burnout Paradise came out four years prior), but somehow manages to feel fresh and rejuvenating, even if "open world driving" isn't your cup of tea. A big part of is the aforementioned indescribable magic, emanating a tinge of... authentic homeliness, I suppose. Though that could just be my rural New York roots coloring the experience more fondly.
Another reason for my fondness is Forza Horizon's ingenious approach to custom difficulty. Rather than throwing the nebulous "easy/medium/hard" metrics at you, Horizon lets you manually tailor how realistic you want your racing to be, rewarding you with additional credits for each handicap removed. This is an absolutely brilliant approach that keeps the ball in the player's court, letting them customize their experience beyond cranking up the CPU's cheatometer. Of course you can still do that—expect the AI to maintain impossible leads on Hard and above—but modifying your own controls to increase the difficulty helps to keep races interesting, and more importantly: RNG-free.
While driving around Colorado is an exquisite experience, I have some gripes with the systems that surround and unfortunately pinch the game. Forza Horizon's biggest issue is its menus—more specifically, how obtuse they can be at times. Obviously the "pay real money to fast travel anywhere" feature is a terrible inclusion, but it's the game's needlessly restrictive behavior that's worse. For instance, once you start a race you won't be able to tweak AI difficulty, modify driver aids, change cars, or purchase new upgrades/vehicles without first backing out. And then you'll have to load the world map, start the race again, load the race data, and then you can change what you need to. Several times I wanted to test out a handful of cars for a particular track (or at least nudge the AI difficulty up/down) but each instance required a multi-minute load time, even with the game installed on my hard drive. Therefore I settled on a handful of vehicles as my dependable go-tos, ironically betraying the collectible mentality of the Forza series.
Another problem I routinely ran into was trying to figure out what cars were viable for which events. Some of the descriptions are self-explanatory (it's not hard to guess what's required for a "Toyota only" event) but there were a bunch I had no clue for, like decade-specific events, price-specific events, and drivetrain-specific events to name a few. Horizon will notify you whether or not you need to buy a new vehicle, but you won't be able to see an eligibility list—that is, unless you personally drive to the event to start it (which incurs yet another load time.) And while the game is nice enough to let you purchase directly from the eligibility list, you can't manually tweak the cars or even take them for a test drive!
Note that all these grievances have a commonality: they burden you with load times that keep you from playing the game. Forza Horizon would undoubtedly be improved if these problems were fixed, but at worst they render your experience inconvenient—not insufferable. Plus I imagine the more one knows about cars and racing, the more these issues would come across as speedbumps rather than roadblocks. The core of Horizon itself—the controls, the engine, the visuals, the music, the atmosphere—are all encased in solid gold, not only standing the test of time but managing to frequently impress a full decade later. Forza Horizon is a stunning, priceless package; I feel as though I've missed out on nothing by jumping into the first entry instead of the fifth.
I would have never expected Forza Horizon to be the ideal dessert to my painfully fickle Mario Kart entrée, but here we are. Horizon showed me the perks of serious racing without including too much simulation to drag down my integrity, keeping my cruise light, breezy, and blissful. Plus I got to learn a little more of the automotive world, realizing which manufacturers and models I prefer (Audi R8 GT baby!), as well as which types of vehicles and events I detest (hatchbacks and rally racing—it's not fun sliding around everywhere.) I enjoyed my time with the game so much that I went out of my way to complete every racing event, as well as drive across every road. Even after exhausting the non-repeatable content, I didn't feel like the game dragged on too long or lacked enough to do—Forza Horizon was genuinely the perfect drive.
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Images obtained from: amazon.com, forzamotorsport.net
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