Forza Horizon 4 Review - Racing Through Britain Never Felt or Looked So Good

Written by Stephen Varner  on September 25, 2018

Reviews: Forza Horizon 4 has an amazing amount of content that will keep you busy for a long time and rewards you for playing how you want to play.

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Britain. Long a hotbed of car culture and racing enthusiasts this is the new home of the Horizon Festival. It's no longer a summer event as this new Horizon life will take place all year round. It's a wonderful excuse to add the biggest visual change to a Horizon game yet and provides a theme on which many of the new features and systems are built. The sister franchise to Forza Motorsport has for four games now carved out a name for itself and stands with some of the all-time greatest racing franchises. Building from the tech used in Motorsport, the Horizon franchise has been the first to introduce some of the biggest changes and features that would be built upon in future releases. From day and night cycles to dynamic weather and now seasons in Horizon 4 the series continually finds new ways to improve with each title.

Forza Horizon 4 feels familiar in all the ways you'd want but at the same time introduces some of the biggest changes the series has yet seen. The cars still have the brilliant handling model you'd expect from a Forza game and every car feels unique in its own way. There's more of them than ever in a Horizon game, this time clocking in at well over 400 cars. There are more Porsche and other exotics than you can shake a stick at. There are a few notable absences including most Toyota's and all Mitsubishi's but there's certainly no shortage of automotive candy to choose from. You'll still have bonus boards to smash (some of which are placed in some devilishly difficult spots) PR stunts to complete and showcase events for which the Horizon series is known for. In each, you'll race against all manner of things that aren't cars. There's five total and each provides its own manner of spectacle that is worth seeing at least once. From there if you want to play them again there are Rivals events you can compete in if you want to take on the top times among your friends or the against the global leaderboard.



Seasons are a huge part of what makes Horizon 4's visual design stand out but it's more than just a visual change. The season will shift once every week on Thursdays and with it, the map will transform, the lighting will change, weather patterns will shift and season-specific challenges and championships will swap out with it. You're not wholly stuck with a specific season during that week though since you can still blueprint any race with any season, time of day and weather event you like. You'll get a taste for each in the early hours of the game as you'll have to qualify for each season before getting set loose on the greater Horizon Life servers. It's a great way to get you acclimated to each season and introduced to all the different types of events and challenges that are on offer. Every event that's available year-round will sport a dramatic shift in visuals thanks to the seasonal shift and dynamic time of day and weather so even racing in events you've already played in single player are worth looking at multiple times. This replayability is compounded by both the blueprint system which has seen its own improvements and the fact that the actual track designs for each circuit and point to point race feel like an improvement over the last game. Drag races are more supported than in the past too with multiple drag strips to unlock as you progress through them in both single and multiplayer. Where Forza Horizon 3 had tracks that kind of blurred together for me even for the significant amount of time I played it, this new set of events just seem more memorable overall. This is thanks in no small part to the incredible version of Great Britain they've built for this game. The map is more vertical than ever with elevation changes throughout free roam and during races that really show off some incredible looking vistas. No matter if you're playing with a vanilla Xbox One or on a monster PC, this is a brilliant looking game. If you have an Xbox One X you can choose between either a 1080p 60fps performance mode or the locked 30 fps 4K mode. Both perform as advertised and you're going to get a great visual experience with whichever one you prefer.

Nearly every aspect of the Horizon formula has been improved, expanded or changed in a way that better serves it as an online world. Before I go any further I should note that you can still absolutely play this game as a single player experience. If you're a solo player like I usually am with these games you can still progress through everything on your own the way you have in past games. Just click on the Horizon Solo button in the pause menu and the world will be populated with drivatars and you can play by yourself. With that said I truly believe that the online world enhances nearly every aspect of the world. Seeing other players driving around makes it feel more alive and it doesn't intrude on my solo events in any way. If network conditions are disrupted you just automatically move to solo play without getting kicked out of your play session or seeing any kind of loading screen. It's totally seamless. From the starting point of any event you can choose to start it as a co-op or pvp event and it will kick out a notification to the map screen for everyone else on the server. This goes for the default Horizon event or any permutation of the race that you blueprint yourself. Want to set up a pvp event that pits handpicked Corvettes vs. Vipers? Go for it. If nobody joins just do it solo instead, there's no additional loading screen or network change.



Music has always been a core pillar of what makes a Horizon game a Horizon game and this one is no exception. The folks at Playground have put together a list of over a hundred tracks across their six different radio stations and you'll get stuff from all manner of genres from contemporary rock to classical. You're bound to find tracks you can't help but tap your foot along to but I don't think anybody will blame you if you want to turn the radio off for a while and listen to the roar of a particularly good sounding V8 as it reverbs in one of the maps tunnels. Sound design continues to be spectacular in this franchise and you'll feel at one with your car using a good set of headphones or a surround sound set up.

The connected world does a lot to bring players together without being victim to the more frustrating aspects of online racing. First and most critically is that other players can not crash into you to mess up anything you are trying to do on your own. You'll see them in the world, they'll interact with the world but if they get too close to you you'll just ghost through one another and carry on going the way you were. You can turn this off by getting into a convoy together but otherwise, nobody can smash into you and mess up that perfect drift zone right before completion. The same goes for AI traffic specifically in drift and speed zones and should limit the frustration some folks felt around trying to complete all the PR stunts after the launch of Forza Horizon 3.

One of my favorite aspects of the connected world is the Forzathon Live events that start at the top of every hour. You'll get a notification about ten minutes before anytime you're in free roam and with one button press set the route to the starting point. The staging area will be clearly marked on your map and in the world by a Horizon blimp floating overhead. It's a great way to get a bunch of players on the server to congregate and show off their cars before sending them out to complete a set of three challenges together. Each event you'll work as a group to bank a collective score in order to move on to the next challenge. This might be a speed camera, a drift zone or just a designated part of the map where you need to perform a certain number of a specific skill maneuver. There's no pressure or intimidation factor because individual scores aren't shown. There's a meter at the bottom of the screen that fills up as a group and your individual contribution will be highlighted for a brief moment but you're not being compared against everybody else on the screen anywhere. It feels genuinely like a group of strangers just doing cool stuff in cars together and as a reward, everybody that participates will get Forzathon points to spend in the Forzathon shop. Here you'll be able to buy rare Horizon Edition cars, horns, clothing or wheelspins with the points you've banked. If you really don't want to play with other people you can still earn Forzathon points by completing daily and weekly challenges that are always displayed under the Horizon Life tab of the pause menu. It's a great way to tackle PR stunts more organically as you'll be doing them a few times as a group anyway to complete the challenge. Every star you earn on a given PR stunt will feed back into your overall progress and you'll be rewarded for it accordingly. So if you get a great score in a speed zone and 3 star it as part of Forzathon you might level up your Horizon life progress, earn an additional reward and unlock new PR stunts of that type.



This style of progression is present across every aspect of the game. You can drive the way you want and race in events that you like best and continue to earn influence (XP) to level up and unlock things according to your style of play. There are four primary race disciplines (Road, Dirt, Cross Country and Drag) as well as unsanctioned races in the "Street Scene" and "The Drift Run." Each has its own progression set, level, and rewards and once you complete every race of each type and it's respective finale event you can continue to level up and work towards rewards such as driver gear, wheelspins, and sometimes legendary level cars. You can earn these rewards as a painter, photographer, tuner, through multiplayer, exploring, collecting cars or by completing Horizon Stories. Every discipline is easily viewed under "My Horizon Life" in the pause menu where you can easily filter relevant events and activities on the map just by selecting it. You'll see how much influence you need to make the next level and the reward you'll get for doing so. No matter what you're doing in the game you're progressing something in Horizon Life and so there is always a steady stream of rewards to earn and another carrot to chase in some other area of the game. It goes even farther now as the skill page has been replaced with car perks. Every single car in the game has a unique tree of perks and rewards to earn by spending skill points. You can apply these to any car you own, however, the points themselves are just banked to your driver. You can earn a bunch of skill points in one car and buy a totally different car and buy a bunch of the upgrades right away if you like. It's hard to overstate how valuable these rewards have the potential to be. You can unlock everything from bonus earnings from performing specific skill maneuvers to instant cash to wheelspins that might get you a free car. I had a couple of instances where I'd buy a wheelspin on a new car and end up with a free one that was 5 - 10 times as valuable as the one I just bought. Given how easy and constant skill points come I never felt afraid to dump everything I had into a car I wasn't sure I'd like because there's always a couple of rewards that feed back into progress somewhere else in the game. There's also more to buy. Gone are the Festival sites placed all around the map and in their place is a property you can buy to earn you perks and a place to park your ride. Functionally you can do just about everything you can at the Festival site but it's nice to have a spot on the map you can call your own. The only thing missing is a big garage where I can walk around a small selection of my favorite cars. It's an addicting and seemingly endless loop of spending and earning that hasn't gotten old even dozens of hours later.

One final point on the restructure of progression is the removal of the Horizon Bucketlist. The spirit of The Bucketlist lives on in Horizon Stories. There are four separate 10 chapter mini-campaigns that will have you play the stunt driver for a movie that is filming nearby, join a drift club, own an exotic car rental business and take part in a countdown that pays homage to some of the greatest driving games of all time. Each chapter in these stories will put you behind the wheel of one of the best or most interesting cars in the game just like the former Bucket List did but the challenges are contextualized better and offer some far more interesting designs than simply checking things off a list. These stories will level up just like everything else in the game and you might get a chance at earning some of the cars you got to drive along the way.



Forza Horizon 4 rewards you for playing the way you want and provides so many kinds of ways to play that I don't see myself getting tired of it any time soon. Even after dozens of hours, completing every event in the primary race disciplines and most of the Horizon stories I still feel like there's so much to do, see and anticipate from this game. There are fewer barriers in both a literal sense on the map and from the standpoint of bringing players together in a shared world that everyone will experience at the same time. There's no shortage of competition to be had if that's what you're looking for but playing online no longer means you're at the mercy of drivers that just want to wreck your day. This is the best Forza Horizon yet and while that's already a high bar to clear I firmly believe that this is the new bar for driving games in general. If you have even a passing interest in cars or racing you owe it to yourself to play this game.