Forza Horizon 4 Review

When Microsoft stumbled across the absolute banger of a series that was Project Gotham Racing, I instantly fell in love. Having spent a lot of time playing Gran Turismo, arcade, or Simcade racers never really clicked with me until PGR came along. Eventually, though, Forza Motorsport entered the scene and brought with it a level of joy for cars that no other series had accomplished before. It was so well done, that despite leaning far harder into the simulation side of the genre, it pulled in people who would normally not get behind the virtual wheel. While this would eventually lead to the end of my beloved Project Gotham Racing series, it left us in good hands with Forza Motorsport at the helm. Years later, Playground Games joined Turn 10 to expand the series further into the realm of arcade racers to reach an even broader audience and it was a huge success – so much so, that the series has arguably come to overshadow the original Motorsport lineage. Now here we are with Forza Horizon 4 – a much matured series in its own right, and with increasingly higher expectations to fulfill.

Like those that came before, Forza Horizon 4 sits you in the driver's seat of an attendee to the Horizon Festival – a car festival to satisfy every gearhead’s dreams and make those dreams a reality with the help of what’s probably more than a handful of recreational drugs. Horizon 4’s introduction is more bombastic than ever before and immediately sets the game’s tone stylistically – and man oh man is that style a sight to behold. Tossed behind the wheel of an extremely expensive car, you are sent on your way to join others in their journey through the UK countryside as you all make your way to the festival’s hub. Choose your character from a list of increasingly tripped-out attendees, pick your starter car, and it’s time to get to racing.

If you’ve played a Horizon title previously, you’ll loosely know what to expect here in that events and differing racing types open up to you as time goes on and in the early game you’ll be cutting your teeth in various event types, unlocking some new cars, and building up some more of the most important currency of the 21^st century – influence. Yes, it’s all about that influence, isn’t it? Just like the real world, every action you can slap onto a social media feed or someone else’s feed is a great way to get notoriety, and so off you go then you Instastar! It’s not something you need to think much about, in all honesty. Just about everything you do feeds into your influence whether that’s completing races, doing special events like taking a sweet jump for a rip as a stunt driver, finding and driving over influence boards around the map, etc. Just play the game as you please and it’ll all fall in place.

Forza Horizon 4 does specifically that really well. That is, it does a phenomenal job at getting out of your way and just letting you do whatever while still letting you progress with few exceptions. This extends to how fluid the beginning and end of races are. They’re dynamic, they look amazing, and they send you on your way with what feels like no downtime. The only exception to this is that in the early game, you don’t always have a fast travel point readily available to cut the distance down getting from event to event should they be substantially far apart. I never found this to be much of an issue because sometimes the most fun in Horizon 4 is had when gallivanting across the fields and through the woods in your jet engine-powered VW hippy van to reach your destination. This continues with the granularity in which you can adjust the difficulty not only of the assists your cars use but also the level of the drivers you’re pitted against. Like other Forza titles before it, Horizon 4 can be tweaked to suit everyone from first-timers to those who want to go assist free and take on the world.

So, you’ve got some newfound social media cred in which to flaunt in front of your disapproving parents, and you want to up your game a bit. You know, get some flashy new threads, buy a new car or three, and maybe pay someone to teach you how to recreate a meme. Say no more, oh great influencer to the masses! Just step right up, spin this wheel, and we’ll get you rocking a chicken suit while pretending to be John Travolta wielding a Windows XP shutdown noise car horn in no time! While you can buy cars at the dealership or via the only auction house, that’s so very pedestrian. A substantial number of your cars, and also your money, clothing, and other novelty items come from spins and super spins. You’ll unlock these in various ways as you play, and soon you’ll either be shouting in excitement or crying in disappointment depending on your luck of the draw. Either way, the variety of vehicles and the number of vehicles in Horizon 4 are equally impressive. You will be hard-pressed not to find more than a few cars, trucks, or…assorted automobiles that will suit your fancy. Some of the vehicles, however, are DLC-specific and so you’ll have to dig into that piggy bank once in a while. You can grab these individually, in a bundle, or as part of the all-encompassing car pass. Microsoft Game Pass members will benefit hugely here as you’ll be treated to everything the game has to offer at no added cost.

None of this impacts your ability to do much in the game, short of unlocking a multimillion-dollar car earlier than you have the cash perhaps – but even that isn’t a necessity to own thanks to the beauty of Horizon’s blueprint system. Forza Horizon takes that frictionless gameplay seriously, and it wants you to play this game the way you want to play it as much as possible. If that means allowing you to completely reinvent a majority of the events you take part in so you can compete in a juiced-up 18-wheeler then damnit you do just that. Blueprints allow you to completely change the car classes that can be involved, and even the route you’re taking, to make an experience custom to your liking. This effectively lets Playground Games get out of your way and not lock you into having to always use specific cars in specific classes with a specific rating that you might not have or even want. You can even do a lot of these events in co-op – just in case you were wondering.

When you do find yourself in a spot where you want to perhaps get a bit more specific about your car class, or just juice up your current ride, Horizon 4 allows you to do just that in the level of detail you want. If you’re completely oblivious and just want to press a button and take your car from a B class to an A class, you can totally do that. Want to choose how you get from B to A? You can do that too, though not all cars allow you to change everything. Want to take it a step further and perhaps buy some parts to fine-tune your suspension? That’s also an option, and while we’re not talking about mainline Forza Motorsport levels of granularity here, there’s more than enough to cover a broad range of players – especially given this is a more arcade-leaning experience.

Co-op and online functionality play a pretty big part in Horizon 4 in that ideally, you’re hooked up to an online session at all times. While this isn’t a necessity and you can play entirely solo, when you’re online you can run into other players around the map and challenge them or team up to take on events should you choose to do so. If you’re in solo mode, you’ll see the Drivatars of your friends who also own the game driving around the map instead, and you can also challenge them to races any time you come across them if you’d like. Other online community features abound, like the incredibly popular livery marketplace for those who are cultured and want anime on every car they own, or the Super7 which sends you through seven community member-created challenges built with Horizon’s editor (your mileage in which, may vary). There is an absolute mammoth number of things to do in Horizon 4 that aren’t directly the campaign experience and I have to hand it to Playground Games for keeping the community so engaged for so long with more events over time.

Speaking of the campaign, if you want to call it that, Forza Horizon 4 has enough to keep you busy for an extraordinarily long time – and I mean that. Series for circuit racing, off-road, cross country, drag racing, drifting, nighttime street racing, and more are all on the table. Special events like racing a train, or a plane, or a hovercraft, are all stupid fun and well-balanced to make sure you enjoy them. Tie-ins like the Top Gear series, Cyberpunk 2077 event, or the Halo event are a blast and tastefully done. The Halo event especially is a real winner, and arguably did Halo more justice than 343 has in recent times. There’s even a freaking Battle Royale mode now, for those looking for absolute mayhem! If I’m being honest, there is almost too much to do sometimes. The overworld map gets absolutely littered with events and just when you think you’ve started to clean it up – you get served up twice as much as you just completed. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that Horizon 4 doesn’t give you a heck of a lot of direction. That’s to be expected with an open-world racer like this, of course, but when you couple that with the veritable sequin-esque tapestry of events on that map that would make Elton John jealous it may overwhelm some players.

If you do manage to work your way through the main game, you have more to look forward to with addons like the Lego Speed Champions expansion, and the Fortune Island expansion. While the Fortune Island expansion is a great piece of content in its own right, the Lego expansion is exactly the kind of well-crafted lunacy you’ll come to expect from Playground Games. Having many of the objects made of Lego that can be suitably driven through and destroyed is as satisfying as you’d hope – especially the sound effects that accompany such recklessness. To top it all off you can get your hands on a full-fledged Lego supercar, and park it in the one place it belongs – the Master Builder’s house. Perfection.

Despite only having just arrived on Steam, Forza Horizon 4 is getting on in its years. Originally released in 2018 for the Xbox and PC via the Microsoft store, you might imagine that it would start to look a bit rough around the edges. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, however, as Horizon 4 is still one of the best-running, best-looking games you can get your hands on. Not only does it scale remarkably well across all sorts of hardware, but if you’ve got one of the five Xbox Series X machines lying around, you also get phenomenal HDR implementation at 4k60. Not all games do a great job with HDR but if you’ve got the right TV, you’re in for a real piece of eye candy. The general styling of everything in the game is remarkable, if not sometimes sensory overload. Everything is so slick looking, and the level of detail to be found in nearly every aspect of the game – even the menus – is truly impressive. All the cars sound fantastic, even if they aren’t always spot on to their real-life counterparts, and the soundtrack is broad in genre selection and quality stuff all around with fun hosts on each of the radio stations to boot. There are very few games that can approach the complete audiovisual package that Forza Horizon 4 brings to the table.

I keep coming back to this point, but Horizon 4 really does refine and employ the core pieces of what makes Forza, Forza. That is, it takes a love for cars and driving them and provides that in a meticulously presented package that gets out of your way and lets you just enjoy yourself and your cars. It wants to attract those who aren’t big into racing to begin with as well as those who are already part of the culture and I think Horizon 4 continues to achieve those goals masterfully. If there was anything to nitpick here it might be that it’s a hard pill to swallow seeing the game and all its add-ons continue to be full price on Steam. I think this would have been a phenomenal time to drop the price of everything across the board to get even more people interested but I’m also shocked it’s on Steam to begin with. It’s also possible that Microsoft wants this game to be a big seller of Game Pass because as mentioned before, those with it get everything Horizon 4 has to offer – and that’s a lot of game indeed. In a genre that traditionally struggles to reach a broader audience, Forza Horizon 4 presents a nearly flawless package that continues to have broad appeal and proves that the Forza franchise is in pole position for a reason.