Twelve for 2012: Video Games Part Six – Forza Horizon

By Louis Rabinowitz on Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

It’s time for part six, the one with the supercars, the rocky mountains, and the mildly annoying amount of dubstep in the soundtrack. Part six, Forza Horizon!

Release date: October 23

Platform(s): Xbox 360

THE GOOD STUFF

I’m a big fan of the Forza Motorsport series – having played Forza 3 and Forza 4 for hours on end, speeding, crashing and spinning out on the goldmine of tracks that the game offered. Alongside the Halo series, the Forza series is an Xbox exclusive that Microsoft can be proud of, with its brilliant physics, top-of-the-range graphics, and the great split-screen mode. But all four Forza games have stuck pretty rigidly to the race format that’s earned success on a major scale, and Forza Horizon finally dares to break that mould, with an open world Colorado to explore, an actual storyline and dozens of off-road challenges. The prospect of open-world, off-road racing coupled with the trademark Forza physics and graphics sounds absolutely brilliant.

Forza‘s never done an open-world before, but Playground Games (main developers of the game, alongside the usual series developers Turn 10 Studios) have picked an excellent location for their open-world – the rocky mountains of Colorado in America. We’ve been promised some extra treats if we actually head into the town itself, and of course, there’s the main attraction – off-road driving in the mountains. Having stuck to the tarmac in previous entries, Forza‘s finally going off-road. And in style, too, not tumbling off the road at full-speed in a supercar. Although with me at the wheel, I’m sure that will that’ll happen plenty of times anyway.

I admit that I’m not a huge fan of dubstep, but Forza Horizon, being set around a fictional music festival called (no prizes for guessing) Horizon, has made a proper effort with its soundtrack, with three radio stations available for your listening at any time – Rock, Indie and Electro. It’s also featuring its own original music – mainly dubstep, as mentioned above – some of which can be heard in the trailer below. It’s not to all tastes, though. Like mine.

There’s no Top Gear content (see below for my extended look at this), but the game has a definite Top Gear flavour to it, with over a dozen special races for you to compete in. One, shown last month at E3, showcased a Mustang vs Mustang race across the roads Colorado – and nope, I don’t mean two Ford Mustangs, I mean one Ford Mustang and a Mustang plane, racing against each other. There’s a lot more of these races, and when you combine that with the random races you’ll be challenged to on the road (although that does sound a tad Pokemon-with-cars), and you’ll almost never be bored. Sound like Top Gear to you now?

THE BAD STUFF

There’s no Top Gear content this time around (for those who don’t know, Forza 4 featured the Top Gear test track and Jeremy Clarkson voice narration), which is a bit of a bummer. I’m nitpicking, admittedly – Forza Horizon arguably contains more ‘Top Gear content’ than before with its plane-vs-car races.

It’s a big risk for the franchise that’s until now played it fairly safe. People enjoyed Forza for its racing on famous F1 tracks as well as the physics and graphics, and to take that away is a pretty large risk for the series, that might just end up backfiring. After all, Forza is probably the most popular and successful racing franchise available right now (Gran Turismo exists in a state of uncertainty and confusion), and to release a radically different spin-off at its prime could work, but if it does fail, it’ll fail spectacularly, and might spell the end of the franchise. I’m exaggerating, though. God, it’s hard to find flaws in this game.

Will it be good?

It’s a no brainer – an open-world, a proper storyline, quirky races and Forza graphics and physics, all together. Of course it’ll be good

Will it succeed?

With no Gran Turismo to crash its party this year, its only rival is Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012 flavour), but Forza has a week more than Most Wanted to flourish (it’s a Forza game, after all) before the Big Three (let’s just call them parts nine, ten and eleven) are released on simultaneous weeks and suck the air out of the video games market.