(This at a time most other racing games, Forza Motorsport included, are still struggling to consistently include dynamic time of day and weather conditions.) It's a remarkable feat of production - Playground is, frankly, just showing off now. It's all routinely excellent, but is there anything left that can surprise us? There is one major novelty this year: seasons, which transform the look, feel and driving conditions of the entire map across summer, autumn, winter and spring. (That said - I am I the only one still struggling to get to grips with the drifting?) It would, naturally, be insulting to assume that the car handling will be anything other than a characterful blend of grip and slide, carefully tuned to the varied demands of the map, realistic enough to convince but unrealistic enough that driving a sports car across a field or through a dry stone wall will make you smile instead of wince. You can equally take it as read that there will be an eclectic and knowing car list, comprehensive yet curated, embracing absurd hypercars, cult curios and nostalgic fan favourites with a bit of local flavour thrown in (including, in this instance, a white-van-man Transit, a black cab and more than one Austin-Healey). (It helps that it makes Britain so beautiful these days, I'll take any reason to feel good about living here that I can get.) The car collection endgame is all about the very tasty Forza Edition cars: cool-looking, high-performance customs with score multipliers that can't be bought from the main car market.
There will be secrets and spectacle and thrilling, hard-charging circuit and point-to-point layouts to be found everywhere, both on- and off-road.
FULL FORZA HORIZON 4 CAR LIST SERIES
I wrote about the map in my initial impressions last week at this point in this remarkably consistent series you can take it as read that it will be a gorgeous, elegantly romanticised pocket grand tour of the British mainland, big but not too big, balancing brickyard playpens with open moorland, city streets with sweeping coast roads, rollercoaster dirt tracks in the hills with crowded flatland freeways. In literal terms, home to Britain, where Playground Games is based. Forza Horizon can now undoubtedly count itself one of the racing game greats. From the very first game, they have defined open-world racing and embodied the joy of the open road with a formula that was all but perfected by the third outing. Playground's open-world racing games have outstripped their parent franchise, Forza Motorsport, in both sales and reputation, and wowed players and critics ( myself included) with their beauty, technical polish, accessibility, authenticity and sheer fun. Six years and four games in, Forza Horizon would not be out of place on such a list itself.