been playing forza horizon 4, what a wonderful and vibrant game. steam review describing it as a “larger, more colorful world than our own” was right on. this is one of the purest video-gamey video games i’ve played recently. concept like, what if the entire world was about automobiles (positive)? what if you could do collecting and exploring and rallycross and street racing and photoshoots and stunt driving and Lego driving and monster trucks and … girlfriend watched a few minutes and declared it “pokemon with cars” which feels right. really wonderful and I’m glad I picked it up on sale before they delist it from Steam. Favorite car so far is, of course, the Ken Block classic, Hoonigan Gymkhana 9 Ford Focus RS RX 2016 - ‘Welcome Pack’ edition, which is ridiculously torque-y and grippy at the same time.
i’ll say it: i love open world collectathons? like i’m one of those people that got all the little feathers and treasure boxes in assassin’s creed 1. this one is both a collectathon in the typical ways (go here, do this quest, get item) and also specifically a car collectathon, sort of a love letter to automobile history (somewhat belied by the physics). very tempting to get into completing your car-pokedex. i’ve set my initial goal as collecting all the famous rally cars and ‘rally monsters’. i wonder how much you can collect proper Le Mans cars and stuff like that.
the driving is very goofy; the fact you get points for destroying scenery sort of throws out any pretense of being not-arcadey, and the temptation is always to steamroll everything in front of you, but i have the ‘simulation’ damage setting turned on, so while it’s far from actual damage simulation my top speed is invariably capped more and more as i bash into 20 telephone poles in a row. nevertheless you do have some passingly-realistic things like taking a proper racing line, having braking points, etc; altho the grip model is way off ofc. still very fun to literally drive a car up a side of a mountain. but generally speaking i don’t love the racing, it’s way too contact-oriented and feels like a bit of a crapshoot. maybe that’s just my lack of skill idk
multiplayer: the mp integration is really wonderful. the last festival playlist is going on right now, i just got a taste of the ‘forzathon’ live events, it was really fun to see a massive gaggle of multiplayer ghosts gang up and do the stupid challenge of the day like drive off a cliff as fast as possible or run through a speed zone at top speed etc. the sort of silly-multiplayer-without-actual-contact that builds a lot of camaraderie with anonymous strangers. i haven’t really experienced that kind of culture since peak halo days (the mid oughts, let’s say) and so it was very refreshing to hear that a similar culture apparently developed among fh4 players. the levity of the thing really carries it.
overall just really impressed with the attention to detail and level of polish in this game, can easily see how people end up playing just this for 500 hours. Get the Ultimate Edition before it’s all delisted on December 15, the DLCs have already been delisted from Steam and you won’t get the fun Lego World and other licensed tie-ins without it.