The Final Review of Forza Horizon 4

[Music] there are not many car games in recent history that have broken the barrier from good car game to just plain good game see driving games like sports games are often sectioned off by the majority of the video game community into their own niche but every once in a while a racing game is good enough to reach out and grasp the appeal of gamers as a whole and in 2018 forza horizon 4 just may have achieved the goals set by playground games more than 10 years earlier to turn car lovers into gamers and gamers into car lovers but as is often the case you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain and now with the benefit of three years of hindsight i am here to finally give my review of forza horizon 4. now although i don't want to linger on a history of the horizon series itself i already did that in a different video i think it's important to set the stage for where the community was in the months leading up to the september 2018 release of horizon 4. forza has always been an established name in the gaming world since the early 2000s anyway and with the creation of the horizon spin-off series in 2012 a new fandom was born but one that took a few years to find its own and mature the first horizon was naturally full of motorsport fans and although it reviewed well and was in all terms a success it hadn't really managed to capture a wider audience and was often compared against more established open world greats of the time like need for speed this started to change in horizon 2 where the festival found its footings and was able to really start flexing its potential and finding the style it would more or less retain for every release moving forward it was horizon 3 though that started opening the cracks into the wider gaming world the pc release brought in a massive untapped player base that was tired of bad need for speed ports and obscure simulators and itching for a proper aaa open world racing game horizon 3 delivered this incredibly well achieving massive commercial success on console and pc and setting the example that racing games could be more than just good racing games they could flat out be good games and this was in large part because the focus in horizon isn't just about the racing it's about collecting exploration and discovery hunting leaderboards stunt driving and in all just enjoying a big car playground this automotive playground theme was solidified during horizon 3's hot wheels expansion the buzz was already out non-racing game players were starting to hear that forza horizon was a good game and maybe even fun if cars weren't really your thing but to the general gaming public forza had spent a decade establishing itself as the serious simulation car franchise for die-hard car people and that was a tough reputation to shift but it was done expertly with the hot wheels expansion essentially waving a massive flag to the gaming world as a whole that forza wasn't just a racing sim anymore it could let loose and be fun for the sake of fun so the forza name had successfully evolved its reputation into two parts kind of like a mullet motorsport in the front horizon in the back the horizon word was out people were hearing about horizon 3 and its hot wheels expansion but it was the last expansion in an already aging game so everyone was primed and waiting for a new release and in the summer of 2018 during xbox's e3 presentation horizon 4 was announced building off the success of its predecessor horizon 4 hype was high major news outlets covered its release like they would any other aaa game and the fact that horizon was now on game pass console and pc meant that if you wanted a taste of the festival you could get it alright so here's the point of all this intro i think it's important to know when diving into this review that horizon 4 was gearing up to be the biggest forza game well honestly the biggest car game in a decade at least and it had some big expectations to fulfill with that let's get into the review proper and we're going to split it up into a few different sections here starting with the campaign now the horizon 4 vets among you might be thinking to yourself wait what campaign and yeah that's kind of what i want to talk about what campaign let's bring it back to horizon 1 which pretty much immediately when starting your career introduces you to an important character your nemesis throughout the rest of the game darius flint then you meet a supporting cast alice dak and the other drivers you'll be competing against they all have real personalities and some get some really cool intros and then you get set up with the premise of the horizon festival and your goals within it so right away you've got a memorable supporting cast you know your place in the game world and your goals horizon 1 continues this throughout the whole game giving you an immersive feeling that you're in a world that exists without you these characters keep living when you turn off the game and now the horizon 4 intro keep in mind i've played hundreds if not thousands of hours of this her i no idea what her name is kylie i think her no idea i don't even think you see her again or hear her again in the game i just i don't even know any of these characters they're so unmemorable as i'm sitting here writing this script i was able to name all of those horizon 1 characters by memory immediately i haven't played horizon 1 in almost 2 years i played horizon 4 this morning and honestly i don't think i could tell you the name of a single character like i'm i'm thinking about it right now not one name comes up in horizon four the characters you see and hear throughout the game feel less like actual characters and more like theme park ride operators delivering their rehearsed lines explaining the situation while you sit there waiting for the fun part to begin and it's kind of fitting because horizon 4 is a theme park and i don't think that's unintentional or even necessarily bad in its own way horizon 4 isn't even the first game of the franchise to feel like this to be honest story has taken a limousine-sized back seat since horizon 2. horizon 4's world turns on when you enter it the npc characters spring to life and are only there to interact with you the player the story is really just an excuse during the game's intro to explain how you progress in the game and it fades into obscurity pretty quickly now let me be clear i'm not expecting need for speed style full campaigns here but when i saw darius in a race with me in horizon 1 i felt something i felt the need to kick that dude's ass and that drive and motivation that feeling that these characters are people competing for the same goals i am that the world existed before i booted up the game and continues after i shut it off that's what's missing in horizon 4 to me and that's really all i have to say about it now we've opened here on a negative subject and i want to let you know that i don't think horizon's story is bad it's just missing luckily the game carries itself so strongly through its actual gameplay that you almost don't notice to use a lame analogy and forgive me for this it's like the game is a blt sandwich and let's say the story is the tomatoes you obviously want nice crisp and fresh tomatoes or a good story you don't want rotten moldy tomatoes or a bad story horizon 4 serves you the blt without tomatoes but with really good bacon lettuce and bread you might get a few bites in and think wow the sandwich is really tasty before you even notice at all that they forgot the tomatoes and even after you realize they're missing the sandwich will still be good just without an ingredient that could have made it better and that's horizon 4 a really good blt without those story tomatoes alright enough of the food analogies sorry if i sent you to the kitchen to look for blt ingredients let's shift gear into another aspect i would consider is part of the campaign maybe you could consider these side quests in rpg terms but playground games calls them horizon stories and businesses these are great and fit well into the theme park playground style of horizon 4 short drop in story levels with an overarching theme the game launched with three stories stunt driver the racer at horizon and drift club as well as one business world's fastest rentals now though we have eight stories and five businesses these generally consist of 10 missions each some a few less for a grand total of 122 story missions each lasting about five to ten minutes with their own voice acting and their own leader boards even that's a lot of content and i don't think playground games gets enough credit for these they seem to exist in the sidelines a bit and although some stories are worse than others from a gameplay perspective in all these stories are fun ways to experience the horizon 4 theme park at its best especially if you do them with friends in horizon 5 i would love to see these return with more memorable characters and more of a continuing story not just a story premise that essentially gets remixed and repeated for all 10 or so missions again like with the main story you get set up with a premise and it just kind of sits there no twists no character development or growth no progression at all really no desire to play the next episode so you can see what happens every story being told in horizon is just one note simple it's a theme park ride in a big fun theme park with a lot of rides but like i said earlier it's the gameplay that carries horizon 4 not its story or lack thereof so let's talk about the primary element of the gameplay the cars i want to start this section by talking about the car roster at launch something that was definitely a point of contention among fans in the months leading up to horizon 4's release we were getting hints at what manufacturers would be making a return and fan made car lists were starting to come out players were noticing and it was eventually confirmed that both mitsubishi and toyota would not be among horizon 4's 460 car roster at launch the horizon community is full of jdm nerds like myself and this was a heavy blow there were some other notable brands missing as well tesla for example having a specific toyota model missing or only having a few evos is one thing that's passable but mitsubishi tesla toyota these are not small manufacturers and having the missing entirely from a game that prides itself on its massive and diverse car selection is not a good sign but more on that later nonetheless 460 cars at launch is well it's a lot and there's room for just about everything old british classics modern hyper cars jdm legends and american muscle forza is known for its massive selection and it's absolutely one of the game's biggest strengths and something that really evolves the gameplay and separates it from its competitors because in so many other racing games you'll be limited to a full roster of 50 maybe even 100 cars and you'll often be guided into having a very small handful of favorites maybe five at most generally in these racing games you main only one maybe two or three cars throughout the whole game not only is that unlikely in horizon it's effectively impossible the more you play now i do know someone who only keeps cars in their garage that they regularly drive but he still has about 30 cars and that's a tiny garage by horizon standards with seven classes and a multitude of different race styles to compete in from cross country to drag to street racing you're gonna be driving a lot of different cars and that's amazing i love being pushed out of my comfort zone into trying a new car in a new class in a new race style and what strengthens this even more is that most cars can exist in multiple classes and be good at more than one racing discipline if you want a super fast rally spec pagani zonda you can make it you can take a c-class civic swap in a big horsepower engine add some arrow and compete with s2 class supercars there is such an incredible freedom in the way cars are handled in horizon just like in real life you can build these cars how you want and with 460 cars at launch there's a damn good chance that not just one or a few but most of the cars you like in the real world are going to be yours to build and drive however you like in horizon i'm a big jdm guy and horizon 4's roster of japanese tuners is impressive they even added my own car and the feeling of being able to drive your own car in a video game is unmatched personally i've been extremely happy with horizon 4's car list both at and more so after launch but what i and many others still feel is missing are daily drivers like i said the feeling of driving your own car in game is great and i want everyone to be able to experience that and not only that but it's fun to take a cheap boring commuter throw some crazy mods on it and do wild stunts i mean top gear practically made a whole series out of that concept the super cars in horizon 4's roster are great letting us live out our richest fantasies the more accessible muscle and jdm sports cars are great too but in horizon 5 i would love to see more daily drivers and some more obscure old japanese tuners verizon 4 is a game that tries to appeal to everyone and the car community at large is incredibly diverse we've all got some unique tastes so it's funny to think that a game with now over 750 cars still feels like it could add more or even improve on existing cars with more customization or better models by and large horizon forest cars are modeled well and look beautiful but if you dive deeper into some cars especially ones that were originally modeled years ago for previous releases and have since just been refreshed you do start to see some flaws dashboards might not be quite right interior trim might be missing or from the wrong model and in some extreme cases the actual body lines and dimensions of the car are a bit off on top of that and i'm going to keep this brief because this is a very popular topic that a lot of other people have covered many of horizon 4's cars don't sound good simple as that i believe this is due to two issues one being game size verizon four is already something like 80 gigabytes that's a lot and can be tough for an old xbox one to manage in an effort to reduce install size i think playground compressed car audio too much causing it to feel flat and lose depth on top of that again in effort to reduce file size many car sounds are repeated across different models and maybe just slightly tweaked it makes baseline sense yes a v8 sounds like a v8 and not an inline six but that doesn't mean all v8s sound the same but it's easier and keeps the game smaller if you re-use and tweak the same audio instead of adding brand new sounds there is another reason i feel horizon 4's audio suffers even compared to past forza games and that is the move towards making the cars sound real instead of sounding good the developers playground games did actually record tons of real cars in the development process but something in the recording process mixing or compression just lost the life that the real cars had and they likely didn't want to fake the sound to make it better so it was left as is it's a bummer because they clearly put work into the audio for the game it just didn't pan out and has absolutely become one of horizon 4's greatest faults alright so like i said i wanted to keep that brief let's move on to another element of horizon 4's cars and luckily horizon 4's handling model is damn good if you don't already know the horizon franchise borrows its physics from its big simulation brother motorsport it takes that realistic yet accessible handling and adds some padding around the edges and turns some knobs up to 11. what you're left with is an incredibly in-depth physics model that is grounded in reality cars behave and react to your input generally in the same manner that they would in real life and every single car has matching specs to its real world counterpart weight distribution power bands spring rates it's all the same and you will feel that in the way each car handles and yet the developers have done such a damn good job at making sure your controller inputs or keyboard inputs are translated perfectly to making sure the cars do what you want them to you are never wrestling with the controls in horizon many cars will have learning curves sure but you can master them with time and it doesn't feel frustrating like you're struggling with the controls or trying to wrangle a car with a mind of its own now sadly there is one major and somewhat strange exception to this and that's when you hook up a racing wheel i'm not sure if it's something deeply ingrained in how horizon 4 handles its car physics or if it's just that they didn't spend enough time tweaking the settings for racing wheel inputs but horizon 4 on a racing wheel is sadly the worst way to play especially from a competitive standpoint most of the top drivers are using an xbox controller and you can be very good on keyboard as well and don't get me wrong if you spend enough time with a racing wheel you can definitely get competitive to a certain aspect but you will always be at a pretty clear disadvantage racing wheels are still fun to cruise around the open world with especially in low powered cars but strangely enough and this feels so wrong to say it feels more natural driving in horizon 4 with an xbox controller or again even a keyboard you really do learn to drive these cars and if you spend enough time with them i don't think it's hyperbole to say that they do feel in a way like extensions of you you understand with your own body where your limits are how far you can push yourself or what you're capable of and you will feel that with the cars in horizon so many other racing games fail at this and you end up feeling like you're just fighting the game's physics at the end of the day but horizon nails what it's like to really drive and race a car in the real world and it manages to do that while being so easy and accessible that nearly any novice without a day of real or virtual sim driving experience can be setting clean laps within their first day of playing i mentioned during the campaign segment earlier that horizon stands not on its story but on its gameplay and this is at the heart of what i mean when i say that the core gameplay of horizon 4 the driving is incredibly well refined it's genuinely fun to just cruise horizon's open world because the driving is satisfying and rewarding even now hundreds of hours of gameplay later i still regularly get the itch to boot up horizon 4 and cruise around in one of the dozens of cars i've spent so much time in and built and tuned exactly to my liking and there is my transition into our next segment about the cars the building and tuning horizon 4 uses essentially the same system it has since horizon 2. building a car is done in two main sections first with the physical upgrades stuff like better exhaust systems wider tires body kits all mods you can do on real cars and then you have the tuning window where you can adjust tire pressures gear ratios spring rates and the like again like you'd be able to do on a real car and what's so great about this is that even though there are hundreds and hundreds of cars to drive every single one has access to the full tuning menu and dozens of performance parts at the least and i want to talk specifically here about visual customization now of course we just mentioned the performance and tuning elements of building a car you know under the hood stuff but what i love is that many of these show up visually as well if you adjust ride height in the tuning menu or camber or tow or even tire pressure those all actually appear on the car's model if you drop the tire pressure to minimum you'll actually see the tire deforming more when taking corners some visual parts even lead to performance changes a different front bumper might reduce drag for example the detail is incredible but of course there's much more to visual customization many cars have real branded body kits for example rocket bunny or liberty walk to name some of the more famous modern brands lots of cars also get individually selectable bumpers spoilers skirts and so on rally cars can often get big headlight kits and mud flaps or even a spare tire mount or fuel tanks these unique visual upgrades aren't available for every car but luckily or maybe unluckily forza arrow exists a default front lip and rear wing that you can throw on pretty much every car in the game here's the problem though the designs for these haven't really changed at all in 10 years and even back then they looked pretty ricey and outdated and the bummer is they are often the only way to unlock downforce tuning something which high-end cars need a lot of the time meaning that if you want a competitive car for online chances are good you'll be rocking this ugly wing and front splitter here's hoping we get some more options or even an nfs autoscope style customization in the future because it really takes away from the personalized feeling of each car if they're all running the exact same front and rear arrow luckily though moving on from that every car also gets access to horizon 4's selection of about 200 different rim styles in multiple sizes and widths and of course every car gets access to horizon 4's incredible paint booth you can paint cars in any color of the rainbow with just about any finish many parts can be painted separately like the hood or mirrors you can adjust window tint or color different parts of your rims individually this alone offers a nice amount of personalization but then we have the livery editor as well this isn't just some simple sticker applicator you can make almost anything you can imagine even though some of its features are starting to get a bit clunky and outdated that has not stopped players from making some unbelievable creations with this editor what this all boils down to is that even though horizon 4 has a huge car roster it also manages to have an overall great customization system that in some cases actually rivals need for speed even the most basic limited customization car in the game still has access to dozens of performance parts full tuning including ride height and alignment adjustment the entire library of rims the forza default front lip and rear wing and the full livery editor even need for speed heat with less than a tenth of the car list has quite a few cars with less personalization than that verizon 4's car building systems are an immense strength of the game and give each player the ability to build something truly unique this whole car building system which is shared between motorsport and horizon gives horizon a lot of credit with people who prefer a more simulation focused game it's really the only open world racer today that uses reality based upgrading instead of vague rpg style upgrades like a level 3 turbo package generic wide body kit or nitrous that fills up when you do stunts this means that horizon which would otherwise be considered much more arcade instead has a really respectable simulation backbone even if the physics aren't spot on to real life beginners to the world of cars can focus on more simple upgrades or even just download pre-built tunes from other players whereas big car nerds like myself can spend hours under the virtual hood running hot laps looking at the telemetry data and tweaking every setting to perfection so many games end up crumbling as a result of trying to appeal to both casual and hardcore players but horizon has cultivated an environment where both sides feel completely at home and you see this duality everywhere in the game one game mode might have you playing capture the flag or even a goofy battle royale mode all in cars and right next to it you'll see the rivals challenges where the best drivers in the game are running hundreds of hot laps fighting for leaderboard world records this duality speaks so well to the way the cars handle and how the upgrading works it's accessible and easy to learn but also has so much depth and an incredibly high skill ceiling what helps with this is horizon's class system every car is given a number representing its performance the performance index or pi for short pi ranges are then grouped off into different classes b-class represents cars with a pi value of 601-700 a class is 701-800 for example new players can stick to the lower slower classes and still be competitive in those respective classes more experienced players can jump into high class s1 or s2 racing where reaction times have to be lightning quick the problem here though is that horizon 4 doesn't really tell players this it lets you right out of the gate by any fast hyper car and throw every possible mod on it making it essentially undrivable especially for a new player that doesn't know how to tune and of course why wouldn't new players do this it's like starting an rpg walking to the shop and being able to buy the best end game armor right away thing is though that's not how horizon really works an x-class car isn't better than a b-class car because they can't ever compete against each other as someone who focuses his channel on trying to help new players i have seen so so many people fall into the trap of buying the fastest car they can right away modifying it to be even faster and then complaining about the handling in the game because they keep spinning out and can't take any corners in my opinion it might be a bit harsh but horizon needs a license system something that maybe restricts new players to lower classes and makes them work their way up or at the very least explains clearly that it's okay to stick to the lower classes where you can make a few more mistakes react a bit slower and in many cases largely avoid the tuning system until you're more familiar with it instead just focusing on building cars near the top of their class without having to consider tuning yet at all what's interesting here is that tuning won't affect your car's class or pi so mastering the tuning system is a great way to squeeze a bit more performance out of a car that's already at the top of its class so if you aren't familiar with it it does put you at a disadvantage there is a real skill and talent to building good cars and i do love that you have players in horizon who are great drivers but may not understand tuning that well and just buy the best tunes and then there's also players who make a real in-game career out of building high-performance meta tunes for specific events or classes but here is where i want to talk about some of my issues with the tuning system as with most games players are great at finding the cracks in a system and exploiting them horizon 4's handling model isn't perfect and has led to a tuning meta that in no way resembles what works in the real world many if not most of the fastest cars in the game have their tire pressure turned down all the way their sway bars min max to the differentials fully locked these are small exploits of horizon force physics that have sadly gone unfixed and for a real-life car nerd like myself it saddens me to see that these strange unrealistic tuning methods end up being so incredibly fast on top of that in the actual upgrades menu pretty much every car in the game can be swapped to all-wheel drive and since there's no restrictions in online racing for what drivetrains are or aren't allowed and the all-wheel drive swap itself is considered cheap usually in terms of bi damn near every car gets swapped to all-wheel drive i mean why wouldn't you right more grip on launch and in corners and if you get bumped off the road which definitely does happen regularly in online racing you won't be at a huge disadvantage because all-wheel drive is better off-road i've spent a good bit of time in the past 10 or so minutes complementing how well horizon 4 allows you to customize your cars and how many options you have but sadly you still end up with an online meta where everyone has these same goofy tuning setups all-wheel drive swaps and the same default forza arrow in a game with so much potential creativity it's painful to see everyone get shoehorned into the same repetitive build for almost every online race now speaking of online racing let's back up a bit here and talk about horizon 4's online experience as a whole because it did expand quite a bit over its predecessors there is a lot to do online starting of course with the open world which puts you in an online lobby of up to 72 players the problem is you can only ever see 12 of those 72 at any given time so the game has to try and intelligently decide to load in players around you to make the world feel populated and it doesn't do a good job of that generally when cruising the open world i only ever see three or four players around me and maybe a few more name cards scattered across the distance even in hot spots like the highway festival site or needle climb it's extremely rare to see more than a small few players it makes the game feel dead which isn't even true hundreds of thousands of people still play horizon 4 regularly even now but when you never see more than 5 of them at a time what's a player supposed to think the open world online could have been a perfect way to make horizon 4's world feel so alive and like it doesn't just revolve around you sadly though this is an area where playground games has not met my expectations there is of course more structured online however you can participate in playground games eliminator drift adventure online adventure or rivals playground games things like capture the flag or infection are supposed to be goofy and somewhat relaxing ways to enjoy horizon 4's car playground a way to take the edge off serious racing and have a fun casual online experience this is usually not the case though sadly playground games are plagued with cheesy builds and map exploits rage quitters and creepers good games can occasionally be found but sadly most people just jump in for the monthly festival playlist requirement and then leave eliminator which was added a while after release is a battle royale style game mode putting 72 players on the map and having them 1v1 to the death until only a handful of players are left in which case they all race to a single point on the map first one there is the winner this game mode was definitely met with a lot of confusion at launch and it did get some widespread media coverage because of just how goofy and unique it was nobody really knew how a car battle royale would work but honestly it kinda did eliminator took on the challenge that playground games couldn't and created a fun largely casual game mode that you can jump back into over and over again without getting angry at griefers or dealing with the whole opposite team quitting eliminator may have been met with some confusion and eye rolls but it really has found its place in horizon then we've got drift adventure an offshoot of online adventure that scores you on how many drift points you can get in one lap of any course this was added a while after release as well and although i was initially so excited to have competitive drifting in horizon 4 this one turned out to be a bit of a dud since the scoring system is based on how many drift points you can get in one full lap your first lap is generally never going to be your best so a smart player will often try to fly through the first lap as fast as possible without really drifting and then you get maybe two or three laps tops to post a good score but once you get a run you're happy with you can just kinda sit there in fact i often do i'll burn through my first lap set a score on my second and then just sit off to the side for the rest of the race i understand the devs had to cobble something together with the scoring systems they already had in place but drift adventure just doesn't really appeal to the drifters in horizon 4 at least not to me now let's talk online adventure more classic racing the real bread and butter of the horizon 4 online experience you can compete in free-for-all or on teams unranked or ranked for this i'm going to focus on the ranked experience and there is one word i want to focus heavily on rammers at launch the ramming problem was awful and you often saw wall riding as well even in team racing you would get rammed by teammates regularly good clean driving rarely got the win luckily an anti-ramming and wall riding system was put in place a while after launch that did help to curb these issues it worked really well to discourage wall riding by slowing players down when they hit a wall and in high-speed ramming it ghosts your car so high-speed collisions are a thing of the past clean drivers still have to drive defensively but they have a good chance now the problem still though lies with players who know you can still gently push other drivers out of a checkpoint or to the outside of a corner ruining their line and in some cases causing them to trigger the wall riding slowdown and this is a difficult problem to solve collision in racing is good it adds challenge when passing there's an element of skillful defensive driving and blocking but the problem is there's no penalty for taking things too far and the rewards for pushing an enemy player out of checkpoints are huge you can send someone from first to last by getting them to miss a single checkpoint and ending up with a bad rewind it's hard to train the game to understand who's at fault in a minor collision and if you take collisions away entirely well you may as well just be doing rivals there's no easy solution here i'll admit that but i really hope the developers put a lot of thought into how to stop griefing and ramming in horizon five honestly i think one of the issues and potential solutions lies in the fact that online racing only takes place in a class and above or b and above for rally neglecting the slower classes means beginner players might join their first ever online adventure and immediately be placed in an s2 asphalt race in the rain something completely above their skill level even for a seasoned player like myself s2 is often just too fast for good racing s1 can be great on the right track layout but a class is really the sweet spot there is a lot of fun to be had in low class racing but i would guess in an effort to consolidate the online player base and reduce wait times playground games have cut it this is a huge mistake online racing should be class selectable even allow players to select multiple classes at once or lock players out of higher classes until they've hit some certain milestone in game i feel that a large element of the ramming and wall riding problem stems from players just not having the skill level to drive at the highest race classes which is totally fine again even i think it's often too fast the problem is there's nowhere for these players to go you flat out can't queue up for ranked online racing below b-class if you want slower clean and fun racing you have to make your way to a private lobby and set it up with your friends and now quickly i do want to say that private and even some unranked matches especially with friends are a blast it's racing as it should be often with way less overpowered meta builds and way less ramming if you want to experience fun racing find some friends to play with and jump into private adventure for some custom championships or unranked online now there is however one other issue i want to discuss with online adventure and that is free roam rush one of the absolute worst decisions playground games has ever made in building its online if you don't know frr is a game mode placed in between online races where you must race to the start of the next race thing is there's no checkpoints so off-road driving is not only encouraged it's a must this must have been added as a way to break up the seriousness of online racing and give it a horizon twist and i can respect that to a point but who in their right minds wants to race s2 track spec hyper cars through forests over rivers and across fields it's an awful uncontrollable experience that ends in hitting trees or houses almost every time and if you don't know the route because of course the game doesn't tell you you're pretty much screwed luckily frr was removed from asphalt racing and now only exists in rally and cross country where it makes a bit more sense but still it's scored as if it's a real race which is the real crime here if frr was just a unique way to relax in between races while traveling from one race event to the next cruising with your fellow teammates or competitors it would have been great i would have loved that but someone at playground had the harebrained idea to make it count as much as any normal race completely ruining it and honestly sort of spoiling online adventure as a whole to me this is an area where horizon trying to appeal to everyone has failed you don't need to casualify online racing you don't need to put a theme park spin on it it's okay to have a place for serious online racing and sadly that is not online adventure most of horizon 4's serious racing actually takes place in the rivals challenges in my opinion the best aspect of horizon 4's online and it's not even really online you race against the ghost of a driver who is faster than you and then if you beat that driver's ghost it loads up another faster one for you to beat all the way up to the global number one position because there's obviously no ramming or wall riding here it all comes down to pure player skill rivals is a great place to hone your driving ability and i'm glad they pushed the feature more in horizon 4. it did exist in past releases just not quite as front and center horizon 4 encourages you to do a new rivals event every month and make sure you set a clean lap it's no force to license test before you play online but it's a good way to regularly encourage players to drive well hundreds of thousands of people participate in the monthly rivals challenge even now and it does really show how healthy the game still is and the funny thing about online leaderboards is that it's a really easy way to prolong the life of a game and in a way add a cheap end game people love climbing leaderboards and horizon 4 figured this out i mentioned it a bit earlier but everything in this game has a leaderboard attached to it all of the open world pr stunts like drift zones and speed traps the horizon story missions all have them online adventure and of course rivals if there is something to do in this game it has a leaderboard attached to it and that is genius because it means everything has a competitive element to it if you want to compete to just see how fast you can get your car to go on the highway there's a leaderboard for that how far you can jump your car off a mountain well there's a leaderboard for that too these simple fun open world challenges that net good rewards every now and then for casual players also contain these little microcosms of the competitive community where players are gunning for the world's best drift score around a few hairpins or highest average speed inside of a speed zone again it all comes back to how incredibly well horizon 4 manages to create a fun low pressure environment for casual players while also fostering these healthy competitive scenes in the same space it's so simple but it's so damn smart alright so we've been talking about what you can do in the map and about the open world a bit but it's time to actually discuss the map design itself the forza horizon series has an interesting take on how they build their in-game maps they all start with and are inspired by real locations even including plenty of real landmarks however the distances between places geography and landscape and roads themselves are essentially all made up using only inspiration from the real world locations it's sort of like a greatest hits mashup of the real chosen area horizon 1 took place in colorado a state i'm fairly familiar with and love to travel to horizon 2 bordered france and italy on the coast and was a gorgeous destination for the festival horizon 3 matched that with its australia map giving us an amazing coastal city of surfers paradise as well as the untamed wilds of the outback and the jungle these locations are all places people really do dream of traveling to and are well known for their beauty horizon 4 takes place in great britain this isn't a location instagram influencers travel to for the best shots and it's definitely not the most exotic destination but there is some real beauty to the island and the early release footage did a great job of showing that off i've never been one to care much where the new horizon festival is as long as it's pretty and the roads are fun to drive on horizon 4 does have some great roads and in my first few months of playing the landscape seemed great there is absolutely beauty to be found in horizon's rendition of great britain not only was it a big change up from australia the addition of weekly changing seasons kept the world feeling new and fresh for quite a while for the first year or so i'd never had any complaints with the game world or location decision outside of maybe feeling that edinburgh was a bit too bland quiet and cookie cutter for a main city especially compared to surfer's paradise beyond that though i'd never really heard complaints from other players either people seemed at the least content however and this is going to be the tip of an iceberg for a much larger conversation later in the video we have been driving in great britain for three years now without a new game we've never had to wait longer than two years between horizon releases and there's always been a motorsport release in between to tide players over if you will three years in a game world that was probably never intended to last that long and you start to see some of the cracks and flaws in the world's design what once felt like a huge shift from australia now feels like just more of the same fields and forests day in and day out the seasons which once gave variety to the world now feel like simple re-skins and a way to mask the fact that great britain's climate and landscape is largely the same instead of the seasons giving motivation for players to return they usually just avoid the seasons they don't want to drive in you don't get the contrast that we saw in past games that contained dense jungles barren deserts sprawling modern cities and beachfronts all in one map i will confidently admit now that great britain was never the best choice for the next horizon festival but i also strongly feel that the player base as a whole would never have felt this map exhaustion if forza maintained its regular release schedule in a similar vein to the map exhaustion and i won't spend much time talking about this because music is very personal horizon 4's soundtrack was something i was really excited for and loved driving to i've always liked odessa and churches and hospital radios beats are always banging but there comes a point where you've just heard a song too much and honestly it saddens me that players have started turning on horizon 4's soundtrack because i personally believe it has some great tracks and was well selected we've just heard it on repeat too much so like i said we're not going to spend too much time on that i do want to talk though about horizon 4's map design from a gameplay perspective and it's something i think horizon 4 does really well see many open world games racing or otherwise fall into the trap of just using the open world as a way to get from one gameplay segment to the next not really taking into consideration the gameplay of the open world itself horizon 4 however nails this especially for a racing game where it can be difficult to create content that isn't just more racing pr stunts are perhaps the best addition to an open world racing game ever near release when i was still discovering the map there would be so many times i would have a goal in mind and be casually cruising towards it only to find myself passing through a speed zone and suddenly picking up the pace then once i got to the end thinking oh hold on i can totally do that faster let me swap out my car here and mess with the tune and run that again it's like stumbling on a random pack of monsters in the witcher you may have a completely different goal in mind but once you see the monsters well you gotta head out of your way prepare a potion maybe and clear out the pack before you can return to your original goal these open world distractions are a great way to break up the gameplay and keep things from getting stagnant and horizon 4's world is absolutely littered with them it's not only pr stunts either you've now got super 7 challenge cards scattered around the map photo spots houses and barn finds as well as hundreds of smashable billboards that give you xp or make fast travel cheaper and some of those billboards are pretty fair challenges in themselves they also have the perfect balance of reward to effort they don't feel like a pointless collect-a-thon but they also aren't so important that you feel like you need to smash them all they are usually just great short distractions for you while driving around this world does not serve solely as a way to get from race to race it exists strongly on its own and is honestly one of horizon 4's best elements here's to looking forward to mexico though alright it is now time to cover our final topic in this very lengthy review and it's a bit of a lengthy topic horizon 4's post-launch support as i alluded to earlier we've never had to wait this long between forza horizon games let alone forza games in general historically the pattern has always gone like this a horizon releases shortly after release we get our first expansion then in another six months or so we get a second expansion after that the game slows down and height builds up for the release of the next motorsport title after a year of motorsport we get another horizon game and the cycle repeats again it's fast paced and there's always something forza related around the corner and that's how it's been for roughly a decade and i think originally that was the plan for horizon 4 as well but it was announced that motorsport would be taking a break from the bi-yearly release schedule and that put horizon 4 in an awkward position things started how they always do in fact even stronger only a few weeks after release we got a major content patch adding the route creator we wouldn't see this in its full glory until a while later but that was still a great feature to add post to launch the first expansion fortune island was well received by the fan base as a whole and i loved it too it hearkened back to the old days of horizon 2's storm island it offered a great way for players to make some extra cash the map was just very pretty in general and possibly most importantly it gave us the best driving road ever to grace the horizon franchise needle climb to this day if you travel to fortune island 90 of the players will be congregated on needle climb i was hoping horizon 4 would do away with having loading screens between expansion maps and instead start connecting them to the main map but that was of course not the case when an expansion is tucked behind a loading screen and not visible from the main world or map view it just makes me so much less likely to play it because i have to make that conscious effort to head to fortune island i can't just cruise around and end up there or see there's an event i want to do there from the main map this is i feel the biggest downside of horizon expansions they're always so compartmentalized and don't necessarily feel like they actually add to the main experience unlike smaller car and feature dlcs and patches which do feel like they add to that main game after launch cars were releasing as part of the purchasable car pass but just a month after the release of fortune island we got mitsubishi back and for free this is one of my favorite horizon memories to be honest hearing that we'd not only be able to get our evos back but the eclipses and gtos too it was a great sign that the devs were listening and were working behind the scenes to try and get these cars into our hands it was a good omen for the future of the game with this update also came free-for-all adventure before update 5 you could only race online as a team which was just a weird design choice so i'm glad solo racing was added back so quickly just after that update we got a new story skill streak not my favorite of the horizon stories but it was good to see them adding these post to launch and then on march 12th we got what is possibly the most game defining update for horizon 4 the festival playlist it's almost hard to imagine now that for about five months the festival playlist wasn't a part of horizon 4. it is so integral to the game's experience now the playlist gave us daily and weekly challenges remixed events and multiplayer championships incentives to compete in rivals and other various events harder versions of pr stunts remixed showcases and so much more and the rewards for completing all of this were among other things free new to the game cars i mean what better way to keep players coming back day after day and week after week this was definitely horizon's answer to motorsport taking time off and it was a great idea but not without its early flaws see every week you're given new challenges some even refresh daily and for each challenge you complete a certain percentage of your progress bar fills up some rewards would unlock at 50 percent but in order to get the big rewards you needed to complete 100 of the challenges throughout the month since there was a new daily challenge well every single day that meant you had to log in every day every month to get the final rewards which was usually an extremely rare car like the ford capri forza edition needless to say this caused a big backlash and was quickly patched to only require 80 in order to receive your final reward a very good change since then the festival playlist has been the best way to deliver new content refresh old content and honestly just keep the game going again it's hard to imagine the game without it and i hope the festival playlist returns with a new coat of paint in horizon 5. our next feature update rolled out on april 8th my birthday and i got a lovely gift from the horizon devs the addition of a new online game mode drift adventure although i did have a lot of fun with this mode near its launch i'll admit it lost its appeal quickly once i realized its implementation just wasn't that good like i mentioned earlier once you've set a high scoring lap you can just idle for the rest of the event i kind of found this fun at first because i would usually set my lap early and then for the rest of the event park slightly off course at a big corner and watch all the other drivers slide by it was a cool dynamic but one that ended up getting pretty boring once you realize you're spending all this time finding players loading into the event skipping your first lap and then idling a few minutes all just for one good drift lap either way with this update also came a much requested drift camera a pov driving cam that would turn based on the car's momentum giving first person drivers much better viewing angles while drifting a month after the drifting update came a mixed bag of positive updates starting with the first of horizon 4's online adventure anti-griefing measures this implemented the wall ride slowdown and the high-speed collision ghosting it definitely still needed some tuning from here but this was the start of a very positive change for horizon 4's online also in this update came the car file story one that i found fairly entertaining as well as another new online mode custom adventure something that definitely should have been in from launch but hey happy it made it in at all the next few months would see a whole host of new content being added to the game we got the star card system a sort of end game progression reward the horizon life timeline to track our progress in the game and class-based rivals finally was added back after being mysteriously missing up until this point you could only do rivals in specific cars under specific conditions there was no way to compete in any class on any track this update was huge for competitive rivals players like myself we also got the top gear horizon special in july of 2019 which in my opinion is the best story in horizon 4. another small update came out around this time something to do with legos or something i don't know anyway moving on august brought some great changes to okay fine we'll talk about lego speed champions this was horizon 4's second and final expansion released on june 13th before the reveal there was a lot of speculation as to what this expansion would be and one of my favorite ideas was a goodwood festival of speed themed expansion it would have made so much sense i mean for one festival is right in the name already it features all sorts of different cars and even some stunts it would have fit right into the horizon vibe there were some rumors of a lego themed expansion but many players me included dismissed them as being too ridiculous so i and many others waited for the big reveal at e3 2019 the world premiere screen appeared followed by the horizon 4 logo part of the stage lifted up as smoke billowed out revealing a lego model senna my heart sank listen some people see the new star wars sequels as a stain on the star wars franchise some see the hobbit movies as a stain on the otherwise incredible lord of the rings franchise well lego speed champions is my stain on the forza horizon franchise and it's not that i don't like lego i do i grew up loving lego but sometimes two good things put together don't make another good thing a standalone lego speed champions game using the forza engine would have been fine in fact i probably would have bought and enjoyed that but not only does lego just not fit into horizon's universe the expansion's execution felt half-baked with only a tiny handful of new cars and a world that was still realistic but just injected with a lot of lego props so it all just felt a bit off there are some good concepts in the expansion i do like the lego currency progression system and the improvable house those would have been great features if not for the whole lego part of them and hey maybe i'm being a bit too harsh here i mean as the saying goes if you don't like it just don't play it and i don't to this day i'm pretty sure i still have less than 10 total hours spent in lego valley but for me it just felt like wasted potential we would eventually discover that this expansion would truly be the last of horizon 4 and i would have loved to see it get sent off on a stronger note however although it was the last expansion we definitely did still get a lot more horizon 4 content over the next two years on top of the tons of minor features new cars and horizon stories we also got new game modes like the eliminator the battle royale but with cars and although this may have been met with some eye rolls from the many people tired of every single game adding a br mode in the past few years eliminator is like i said earlier actually pretty fun and i think it fits well in the horizon setting we also saw the return of toyota revealed live to us on a devstream with mike brown walking through the studio out the doors and up to a beautiful mark iv supra it was a really cool reveal and one of those moments that i'll always remember fondly when thinking about horizon 4. there's tons of other additions to the game that i don't even really have time to talk about here horizon promo horizon backstage new achievements tons of showcase remixes this game has had some killer post-launch free content and i do think that goes relatively underappreciated and that also leads us to our final major feature update in december of 2020 super 7 and the blueprint builder what better way is there to inject more life into a game than by giving players a map builder this was a great way to end cap the feature set for horizon 4 and although it never really felt feature complete it's clear now that this was more or less just a taste of the much bigger events lab we're getting in horizon 5. so super 7 dropped at the end of 2020 and since then it's been clear the game was winding down instead of four new cars each month we were getting three and then two the dev streams that showcased the new month's updates were getting shorter and didn't have much of anything new to show it was getting clear that this game which was only ever meant to live a year or two had been on life support long enough sure it got some great new leases on life with feature updates like eliminator super 7 and eventually super 7 high stakes and they did great at keeping players coming back regularly with the festival playlist including new cars and new challenges but eventually it just wasn't enough we'd all been driving the same roads for too long and the cracks in the game's design although initially small only grew with time the map started to feel bland the car sounds felt more and more repetitive rewards barely meant anything because our garages and our wallets were full the public opinion started to shift and it became popular to rag on the game instead of praise it at the end of it though horizon 4 was and is an amazing game it's incredible looking back at it all now how much horizon 4 has evolved and improved over the past three years i've said it throughout this video but this is the longest we have ever gone without a new forza title and although on the surface that sucked it also gave this one game the chance to stay in the spotlight to continue to grow and for us as players to form more memories in it from the honeymoon period at the game's launch to the idle mixer servers that gained you levels in game the return of mitsubishi and toyota and the addition of eliminator and super 7 i may remember the other horizon games very fondly but it's all kind of just one jumbled memory horizon 4 has been an experience that lasted so much longer and because of that it doesn't just feel like one game it's felt like an ever-growing shared experience something i've usually only felt with massive established mmos in the past and it's incredible to think that i've been talking this long about horizon 4 and i still feel like i've missed so much but i think the length of this video alone is a testament to just how much there is to this game and how much it means to me and maybe some of you guys too horizon 4 holds a very special place in my heart and once we've all moved on to horizon 5 for a while i really do hope that horizon 4 is remembered more fondly it deserves it thanks everyone for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and i'll see you all in mexico you

Channel: HokiHoshi

Views: 26,449

Rating: 4.969481 out of 5

Keywords: fh4, review, thoughts, video essay, ending

Id: 5Hu9KJEEGBU

Length: 65min 40sec (3940 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021