Let’s start with the overall mark which will be a ‘Poor’ rating.
This will not be popular but with reviews so far being so lopsided I believe having a different opinion available is a good thing for people still to play the game.
So let’s get into what works and what doesn’t in a game so popular that it makes people think twice before they criticise any of it.
The Good – It looks gorgeous
The game looks amazing. The cars are as always fantastically detailed and with the addition of rain in this iteration, they look even better glistening in all their glory.
The landscape also is breathtaking with a myriad of different settings to visit. I love also the daytime rota which makes driving in the sunset or night time an experience.
The driving is pretty good too. Certain cars feel very different and are nice to drive and it’s quite satisfying when you hear the motor roar in unison.
In short Forza Horizon 2 is your perfect pick if you don’t drive or can’t road trip in southern Europe and wish you could. Take your time to slowly drive down a coastal road and take in the sights, occasionally stop and take a picture. Unwind and relax in the beauty reproduced.
The Bad – Racing is abysmal
Drivatars are meant to be one of the unique features and unfortunately is worse than ever. Whether you are only freeroaming for the sights or racing, they will always hit you or ram you for no good reason. In a game that is meant to reward skills and punish bad driving, it is annoying to lose a great skill chain because the bad AI implementation hit you from behind, without you even braking that is.
And this is another bad side of the system, it can’t actually be immersive when certain cars go faster than you no matter what. I’ve seen a beetle avoiding my overtaking whilst full speed on a McLaren during a road trip. For a change I did have a sense of speed in the game, but that speeding beetle was making no sense. So many times have I also had cars slingshoting past just to stop dead when in front and repeat the loop.
Other games do that too yes, so at least this is no reason to put this one above the rest.
The freedom and choice the player is meant to have also plays against it. There is no sense of progression as you go from slow to fast to slow cars. It does not feel good and more like padding and wasting time.
You get bored most of the time and can play this while watching TV, which is not a good sign.
Races themselves are badly done. I base that mostly on the checkpoint system. There are certain races with none of them but that can still tell you you’ve gone off course and reset you back on track, while others will let you take any shortcut you want. The inconsistency is unexpected and baffling.
Races with checkpoints don’t fare much better as I’ve often had issues with the next checkpoint not requiring me to follow the race line, or not showing up until I got really close and missed it, forcing a rewind. It could have easily been picked up during testing and fixed by showing two next checkpoints rather than one, but it wasn’t done.
Another example of bad event design are bucket lists that have a long leading part before getting to the challenge part. With the rewind disabled at the very end it can make you having to unnecessarily replay a long boring bit. I suppose that qualifies as an ugly side though…
The repetitiveness of the races alongside the behaviour of the opponents in the guise of drivatar, makes the whole racing experience dull, boring, and mostly devoid of fun.
It is no better than the previous one, even worse at times.
One example is the difficulty. I have many times found myself tailed the whole race no matter what difficulty I picked, whilst others I’d be racing way in front. It didn’t feel the difficulty parameter was working as it should and instead was only there as a mean to try to earn more credits.
If parameters don’t work as intended they can be considered broken.
Then comes the autoshow as another good example or bad and worse design. In FH1 I can filter out cars I already own; here I cannot. In addition the filters reset after each purchase, making bulk purchases a pain and terrible experience.
The Ugly – It takes the mick
New road trips have been created which force you to drive from one place to the next, often across the map. It slows things down and gets frustrating fast. Even after buying a fast travel anywhere these can’t be avoided.
The map is big, but after completing 20 championships you’ve already started to feel like you’ve been repeating yourself. So with an achievement that asks you to complete 168 championships, it is just obnoxious.
When buying a new car and choosing its colour, the palette is right in front of the car. Still. Hasn’t been fixed since previous games and shows a lack of care.
With the game being one of the main exclusives, much beloved franchises and able to leverage the ‘power of the Xbox cloud’, this still has currently disabled or broken features. To me this feels either sloppy or insulting.
Final Word
A good car and road trip simulator but a poor racing game that won’t satisfy everyone.
2/5 (Score based on an even scale, not my personal one)
(written on August 15th, 2018)
Kerman's World 