Forza Horizon 4 Review

Forza Horizon 4 is an open-world racing game developed by Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games and is published by Microsoft Studios. The 4th installation to the Forza Horizon series is available on Xbox One and Windows 10. Since Forza Horizon released in 2012, the Horizon Festival, a celebration of music and cars, has traveled around the Earth from Colorado, to Southern Europe, down to Australia, and has now made its new home in the United Kingdom.

Forza Horizon 4 not only has an incredible location, but brings a load of new features along with it. One of the biggest new features is the addition of Route Creator. With it comes character customization, Forzathon Live, Quick Chat, purchasable houses, and the list goes on and on, all of which will be touched on later in this review.
Not only is there a large collection of new features, there are an unbelievable amount of vehicles. One might hope there is, due to it being a racing game. There are over 450 incredible vehicles for you to try out.

Welcome to Forza Horizon 4

If you played the Forza Horizon 4 demo, you will remember driving through the 4 seasons in the McLaren Senna, RJ Anderson Pro 2 Truck, and the Ford Fiesta GRC before arriving at the festival and choosing your character. That is the same for the full game. Unlike Forza Horizon 3, you are not the boss of the Horizon Festival, so you start off as an unknown rookie. There are hundreds of names to choose from for your character including 'Sausage,' 'Noodle,' 'Potato,' 'El Pollo Diablo,' and 'Beefcake.' After you choose your name, you get to choose your first car. The choices are a 2015 Audi TTS, a 2017 Ford Focus RS, and a 1970 Dodge Charger R/T. After that, the incredibly long introduction begins.

During this introduction, you get to try out all 4 seasons, and you get to try out a wide variety of cars. You earn influence (in-game XP), and qualify for each season, by completing races, and PR Stunts.

There are 4 main racing series in Forza Horizon 4. These include the Road Racing Series, the Dirt Racing Series, the Street Scene, and the Cross Country Series:

Road Racing Series: Officially sanctioned races hosted by the Horizon Festival on the roads of Britain

Dirt Racing Series: These races take you off the streets and into the world of unpaved roads

Street Scene: Unofficial street races not endorsed by the Horizon Festival that take place at night

Cross Country Series: A mixture of the Road and Dirt Racing Series with a few fields involved and widespread destruction of fences, and stone walls

Drag Racing against Drivatars is a new feature to Forza Horizon 4, but they are unbalanced and it's a guaranteed win no matter what car you take. Moving to the Horizon Stories, a brand new portion of the campaign.
The Stunt Driver: These put you behind the wheel of some unique cars and give you a task to complete for a film.
World's Fastest: This is the business that forces you to drive some of the fastest vehicles to a location to a client in time.
LaRacer @ Horizon: With LaRacer, a famous streamer, you get to drive some of the most iconic video games from the past.
Drift Club: This club let's you drive pre-tuned drift cars and basically complete extra large drift zones.
Showcase Events are back as usual in which you race a hovercraft, a train, a team of dirt bikes, a fighter jet, and a special crossover with Halo. You get to escape a few Banshees and race to a pick up point. Showcase Events are a great way to earn some money and quite a bit of influence.

Influence has replaced the traditional XP from previous games in the Horizon Series, but is fairly simple. It is split up into 26 categories and your level is the sum of all of the categories. For example, if you do a Road Race and earn 4,000 Influence, your Road Racing Series category will increase by 4,000 Influence, and so will your level. Leveling up these specific categories earns you exclusive cars, Quickchat phrases, Wheelspins, or credits.  There are categories for things such as Car Collector, Painter, Street Scene, and a lot more.

One category that is extremely controversial is the Mixer category. This earns you influence by watching a Forza Horizon 4 stream, or streaming it on Mixer. It sounds like a great idea, but it is already being exploited. The majority of the Forza Horizon 4 streams on Mixer are influence streams, giving players Influence without playing the game.

Moving back to the campaign, once the introduction is completed, you are free to do whatever in an open, online world. This puts you into the season that is taking place during that week. Seasons change every Thursday. At launch, it was Summer, and every week has a new set Forzathon Challenges. Players can complete these challenges to earn Forzathon Points which can be used in the Forzathon Shop. The Forzathon Shop changes weekly, but always has Wheelspins and Super Wheelspins available for sale. Every week a new clothing item, horn, exclusive car, and rare car are put into the shop.

Forzathon was given a large improvement compared to Forza Horizon 3. Forzathon Live is a brand new component to Forzathon. Every hour, every player in the session are alerted of a Forzathon Live event. The players in an online session have to work together to beat a target on a Speed Zone, Speed Trap, Drift Zone, or Danger Sign within 15 minutes. There are 3 challenges that get progressively harder. The completion of this will give players 30 Forzathon Points.

The UI

The User Interface is much different from previous Forza games. Personally, the pause menu is quite messy because none of the boxes are the same size and it isn't squared off. However, once playing the game for a little while, it's easy to get used to. The "Home" tab in the Pause Menu contains just about everything a player needs, the weather, the song that is playing, the map, Drone Mode, Quickchat, and change car. One thing is missing, photo mode. In order to access photo mode, you have to press up on the D-pad. It is one minor issue that will most likely be fixed in a future update, but for now it is a little inconvenient.

The loading screens are much different. Instead of screenshots, you are in a white room with your car and you are dancing, which is quite entertaining. The only problem is that the loading times are too long. Sometimes it pans around my player and my car for close to 2 minutes before I can even start the race. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you are sitting there watching your player do The Macarena for 2 minutes it gets a little boring. A major improvement in the menus is the car selection menus. The transitions are quick and snappy and is a huge improvement from Forza 7.

The Map

After Playground Games revealed that the map was going to be roughly the same size as Forza Horizon 3, it was a small let down, but the map has a lot of verticality and has to be rendered 4 times, one for each season. The map doesn't feel like chunks of Australia thrown together, it feels like they pieced together parts of Britain very carefully so that the transitions were smooth, and they were. The stone walls on the side of the roads are easily breakable. Both events and PR Stunts are evenly throughout the map.

You may be thinking, 3 of the 4 seasons are practically the same and only Winter will make the game feel different. It turns out, you are completely incorrect. Not only do the seasons bring new events and content to the game, Winter completely changes everything. Everything has a blanket of snow and the entire map looks different. Spring brings more rain and if you head to the mountains in the North part of the map there still will be patches of snow scattered throughout. Summer brings an array of flowers and long grass. Autumn turns all of the leaves into vibrant colors and all of the fields are cut shorter.

Since the map is huge, there are so many hiding spots for bonus boards and barn finds. There are 50 Fast Travel Boards and 150 Influence Boards, bringing the total to 200 bonus boards throughout the map. There are a total of 15 barn finds, 10 that you can find by just playing the game, 1 for each season, and 1 for the purchase of a specific house. You can find the barn find locations and the cars inside here.

Speaking of houses, that is one of the new additions to Forza Horizon 4. Houses act as Fast Travel points or mini Horizon Festivals that give you access to the autoshow, the auction house, and your garage. There are 12 total houses, one of which is the Edinburgh Castle, for 15,000,000 CR. Each house gives a specific perk, such as drone mode, skill songs, and double Forzathon points. We covered all of the houses in a previous article here.

Cars and Customization

Forza Horizon 4 contained over 450 cars at launch. This is, by far, the most cars we've ever seen in a Forza game, and it is one of the most diverse lists out there. The list contains the usual hypercars, trucks, and SUV's, but also has things like the Mercedes Unimog, or the Peel P50. Once again, the car list has been covered in an article here. There are even more customization options in Forza Horizon 4. If we look back on Forza Horizon 3, we saw the introduction of Australian car manufacturers like Holden and all of the Utes. The same goes for Forza Horizon 4, many classic British sports car manufacturers like Austin-Healey, Triumph, and MG are present in Forza Horizon 4.

Now that we've talked about the cars present in Forza Horizon 4, let's talk about the ones that aren't. Toyota and Mitsubishi left the Horizon franchise, sadly. However, the Toyota Arctic Trucks are still present. This means no Supra, AE86, Evo, or LFA. The only bad thing about this is now Subaru is completely unchallenged in rally races. 

Although Toyota and Mitsubishi are gone, more room is made for new arrivals, like the McLaren Senna, the Volvo Iron Knight, the tiny Peel P50, the Mercedes-Benz Unimog, new Forza Edition vehicles, James Bond cars (DLC), and much more. Forza Edition cars are fairly simple, each car has it's own unique perk, for example Credits Boost, meaning after each race that you use the Forza Edition, you will get extra Credits.

In Forza Horizon 3 and Forza Motorsport 7, there were widebody kits, and they are back with even more. The new ones include the Ford Focus RS, the McLaren 650S, the Jaguar F-Type, and more. Offroad Bodykits are something new for Forza Horizon 4 as well. Most SUV's support this kit and raises them up and adds extra fenders and lights.

Forza Horizon 4 continues the customization of car horns with some new ones. These include the Windows XP Shutdown, Sheep, the Sea of Thieves Theme, and the Halo Theme. All of the car horns can be unlocked through wheelspins as well.

Car Mastery is another new feature for Forza Horizon 4. Skill Points are earned by doing stunts and drifting and can be used to unlock perks for specific cars. Some of the perks reward Influence or Wheelspins. 

Other Features

Photo Mode and Drone Mode are back and the menus for them are pretty much the same compared to previous games. Quickchat is a new way to communicate to others in the open-world. There are hundreds of preset phrases that you can change in the pause menu that include, "Hi," "Nice Driving," and my personal favorite, "Wheeeeee!" It may seem useless but you will find yourself using it more often than you think. 

ANNA returns with Blueprints. Blueprints allow you to set the conditions of your race as well as car restrictions. You may have heard about Route Creator, sadly, that has been delayed to October 25th. You will be able to create your own race routes and place checkpoints when it does release.

Emotes are new to Forza Horizon 4, allowing you to do the Macarena and the Dab as much as you'd like. They are just about worthless, but it is fun to watch your character do the Hotline Bling. Emotes are unlocked through Wheelspins or leveling up the Horizon Life.

Clubs in Forza Horizon 4 are extremely controversial. They are linked to Xbox Clubs, which makes it messy. One positive of this is that the maximum club size doubled to 2,000 members. The worst thing about this is that people who don't even own the game can join the clubs.

There are now 2 types of wheelspins in Forza Horizon 4. There are wheelspins, which are the same as previous Forza games. There are also Super Wheelspins, which have better rewards, and 3 wheels. Sadly, for the first few hours of playing, you'll only really get clothing items.

We already covered the Soundtrack as well, you can check out that article here.

Conclusion

Forza Horizon 4 is easily the best racing game of 2018 and possibly of all time, as of right now. In total, I have already spent over 1 full day playing the game and I haven't even completed it yet. There is so much to do in Forza Horizon 4 and there is no reason to be bored while playing it. Without further ado, let's break down the good and bad.

The Good:

• Incredible graphics
• Over 450 cars to collect
• Huge open map of Britain
• Great customization options
• Variety of race types
• Excellent soundtrack

The Bad:

• Mixer exploits
• No photo mode in pause menu
• Clubs linked to Xbox Clubs