Product Description:
Coming this fall for Xbox 360, Forza Horizon combines the automotive thrills that Forza fans expect with a gorgeous open-road world that begs to be explored.
Product Details:
- COMPETITION MEETS CULTURE: rivalries and leaderboards baked into the world, online playground games like "cat&mouse" or "tag", never made more sense, and set in an automotive music festival, find multiple radio stations curated by Rob da Bank (BBC One DJ and festival promoter).
- FREEDOM OF THE OPEN ROAD: race on some of the best driving roads in the world including pavement and dirt, explore reimagined Colorado with broad environmental diversity - red rocks, aspen reservoir, and small towns, and discover hidden challenges and collectables like barn finds.
- THIS IS ACTION RACING: smash through fences and picnic tables or drift through civilian traffic at high speeds to gain fame, race against planes and helicopters in showcase challenges, and race at night with full 24hr light cycle for the first time in the Forza franchise.
Customer Reviews:
Great balance of simulation and arcade racing, flawed by F2P cash grabs By Anonymous
Ill start out the review by saying they did a great mix of simulation and arcade racing to get a nice balance. You can purchase upgrades for your vehicle and the vehicle class system from the previous Forzas makes a return, but they removed the ability to fine tune the parts like the transmission, psi of tires etc. (unless Im just totally missing something, someone correct me if Im wrong)
There are less vehicles than in the previous Forzas and car damage seems to be lower and this time only cosmetic, but theres still a fair amount to choose from including Ferrari and Lamborghini.
The soundtrack is surprisingly not bad either with a lot of decent tracks added in.
The graphics arent bad, though not up to Forza 4 quality. However the environments are large and varied which is nice.
So why the two star review? The big complaint I have about this game is the horrible cash grab this game has turned into.
You pay $60 for the game itself, then they ask $50 additional for a season pack for more cars. The advertising is starting to get a little obnoxious too. Every time you get in game achievements you get a popup with a sponsor like Adidas or Oakley with their logo at the bottom showing your progress. Not only that, they added the token system where if you dont have enough money to buy in game cars, you can use real money to get them instead. You can also spend real money to uncover the map to find secret locations. This is such a horrible idea and a slap in the face to customers. Instead of doing races to build up your money it just makes you feel like youre wasting your time because you can just use real money and get what you wanted much faster.
Maybe you could get away with this garbage if you released this as a $10 Xbox Live Arcade game, but not a $60 release.
Shame on you Microsoft.If Forza and Dirt had a baby... By Christopher Pike
I've got to play almost 3 hours of Forza Horizon so far. Initial thoughts are that it feels like a blend of Dirt and Forza series in one. The menu's resemble Dirt, and the feel of the cars is a blend of both simulation and Dirt-like arcade feel. I love the handling, but it's definitely not 100% realistic. It is very easy to drift cars and that makes it a blast to drive. In real life, it's much more difficult than that. Unless you're drifting AWD in snow, that's easy! I've turned off all assists, and in doing so have doubled my winnings per event from the bonus you get for turning off assists and other difficulty settings.
All the upgrades are still there, the liveries, etc. The open-world is pretty awesome, but not even close to as big as I was expecting it to be. A good 2 hours of my playtime was spent driving around exploring, and I've already covered a little over half the roads in the game. If I hadn't of stopped so frequently for participating in the minor tasks I probably could have driven every road already.
The awesome part of this game is that it doesn't take long to get into some good cars, unlike most racers. You can choose between an '11 STi and an Evo X within the first 20-30 minutes of play. You have to choose one for an offroad race event early on. I chose the STi, as I owned an 08 WRX until recently, and loved it. I left it stock for the first hour of play. It sounds just like a Subie should! I found a golf course fairly quickly and proceeded to 2nd gear drifting all over that place for a couple minutes. Man that was fun! There are key areas all over the map where you can find good spots just to have fun drifting. There's also plenty of dirt-road sections to have fun on. The developers did a great job of making these surfaces believable. You can feel the bumps, and really see how the road surface effects the gas pedal/acceleration of the car.
Before my second hour of exploring, I decided to do some minor upgrades to my STi. I chose exhaust, new fuel injectors/pump, CAI, lowering springs, front & rear swaybars, etc. Everything I chose to upgrade was mimicking how I had my prior WRX set up. I tried to simulate the same estimated power. I'll have to try driving the I-70 interstate in game and seeing what the top speed is. Speaking of speed runs, there are some hidden race tents you can find that unlock and act as fast-travel stations if you wish to use them. Each one, so far, has three events you can opt-in to complete, and in any order. Winning these events gives you a discount for fast-travelling to that station. Win all of them, and you can travel there for free! One of the events let me drive a Bugatti Veyron and I had to achieve a top speed of 235+. I hit 246mph, which I thought was very high. The sensation of speed after you hit 200+mph is simply insane! That's crazy fast, but then I heard on the radio about one of the computer guy's breaking 256. Wow!
Speaking of radio, you have three stations, including an off position. You can switch at any time by pressing right or left on the d-pad. One is an electronic style/dubstep mix. Another is rock, and the third is bass/pop heavy songs. The soundtrack is great! I usually turn off racing music as I hate the soundtracks to most of them and usually only want to hear the engine of the car I'm driving. I initially turned the music down to half, and fairly soon turned it back up to full. You can still hear the roar of your car's engine, but you also get the music. It sounds really good coming through any decent set of speakers, and especially so with the right surround sound and subwoofer. Enjoy it!
The events in the game unlock according to your rank, which I think you start around 265 or something like that. I've already broke the 200 barrier. I think the end goal of the game is to become #1. It really seems like I could blow through this game very fast, as I'm under 200 already with just under 3 hours played. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as the online can always take up way more time. I have only done a handful of events so far, so I'm not sure yet if you are even required to do any events in order to rank up to #1. So far, I've simply been exploring the map, and have gotten most of my rank increases from burnouts, drifts, smashing street signs, close-encounters with traffic, excessive high-speed, etc. You automatically rank up after accruing a set amount of these points.
There are 100 red signs hidden around the map. If you drive through one, you receive +1% off all auto-part upgrade costs. In theory, if you find them all, every upgrade is free for all cars. I'm already up to around 27% off upgrade costs. Also, randomly on the radio there will be an announcement about a hidden car in a garage nearby. I know if you drive to the garage you unlock that car, but I haven't yet found any of these. I think I've found a couple barn locations, but I am thinking that you have to go to the one that is announced specifically at the time it is announced in order to get it. I'll find out as I play more.
I believe all the A.I. cars you see driving around are real-world vehicles. I've seen your standard buses, trucks, rear-ended a Ford, and I think I've seen the new Subaru BRZ driving around a couple times as a random civillian. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that I can get that car eventually. I want one of those bad. All the other A.I. racers in-game are driving their cars around in real-time as well. If you get up behind one of them, you have the option to challenge them. You'll immediately get put into a race 1 on 1 to a random location on the map. The GPS will help guide you there, but it doesn't matter how you get there, as long as you get to the finish first!
The GPS in the game is actually quite good. It's a little annoying listeng to the turn-by-turn directions when a good song is on that you are trying to listen to, but the GPS does a great job if getting you where you need to go. You can open the map at any time and change the location of your GPS tracker, or turn it off. The world-map is great, although I do wish I could zoom in/out just a little more.
So far, I'd give the game an 8/10 in my book. Initially it's been very fun, but only time will tell on how my opinion changes, especially when compared with the upcoming Need for Speed: Most Wanted, another open-world racer due out next week, 10/30. For Forza fans, if you're looking for a realistic, simulation like all the other Forza games, this really isn't it. For fans of the Dirt series, there's plenty to like, and you'll feel more at home with the handling. It's still a good blend of the two. The driving feels fun and that's what's most important for an open-world racer!35 of 43 Horizon will be a great $10 bin find By Steve K
Horizon is alot of fun, but it should have been a $30 downloadable add-on rather than marketed as a full game. It feels far more like a Need for Speed title than anything close to a previous Forza. The game play is quick and easy to get used to, however it's also quick in that only takes about 2-3 days to complete the game. The scenery in the game is the best thing that Horizon brings to the table, it leaves you wanting to build cars just to roam around the map. This would be great if the average car company offered more than 2-4 cars, would have been a HUGE improvement if they integrated the real Forza car catalog but it's more of a demo range of cars.
This would be a really good purchase if you found it in the $10 used bin at your local Gamestop.
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