Pressure Drop - Toots & The Maytals

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I was continually following the game Forza Horizon 4. But since the game itself was a bit expensive plus that I was too busy during these months to care about platform games, I never thought about purchasing it (I didn't even get time to post blogs and photos) until I saw on some media on December 1st (or 2nd?) saying that game's price achieved a historically lowest point. I then entered Microsoft Store and found that the sale unfortunately just ended the day before. Big sad.

Game link: https://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/games/fh4

I had to wait until Christmas. Finally I got the standard edition game on December 20th when they had a 40% off. It was 1+ year since the game released.

First impression

Is that this game has a quite perfect optimization and is way too smooth with ultra graphic settings (except the 8x for antialias). My laptop is a MSI gaming laptop with Geforce 1060 6G, i7 8750H, 16G RAM and perfectly runs the game with stable 60fps under 1080P display. It loads not slow with my SSD. At the beginning of the game, it lets the player race four consecutive races to expose them to the season-change system, the most advertised feature of the game. The player will drive a super car to race to Horizon Festival (where game events happen) in autumn and also get in an AWD rally race car on snow to compete with four motorcycles in winter. The control is in-between, it is not inclined to those entertainment ones nor professional ones. The "tutorial" was big good that it tells the major content of the game in few minutes. The final destination The Festival will be the spawn location of the player and now the player is prompted to choose between three cars: Audi TTS C, Ford Focus and Dodge Charger. The player has to listen to some blah blah in the story cut scene.

Then it is possible to start the game formally. The main how-to-play is then basically playing the race events in the game map which you play to unlock more. Most people play the game this way.

It was my first time to "formally" play Forza series and it had been four years since I played a racing game last time (I nailed Project Cars in 2015 and PSVita's F1 2011 in 2016). This was a refreshing experience.

 

World

Well, the game's world was not as big as I thought, or even I heard it became smaller compared to the previous game. It has an open world where players can drive everywhere in it. Various racing events are spread across this map. If one wants to play a race in the story, they have to drive themselves to the location. Horizon takes place in Scotland. Its world has kinds of elements: European-style town (no CBD...), farms, mountains, forests, highways (where people farm money), village roads and so on. GTA series gives this feeling. Most sceneries in this game are pretty detailed so that people call it a "travelling simulator". When I game I like to take screenshots to capture memories, so I keep switching on photo mode in the middle of a race, or driving a set vehicle to a set location at a set time to take photos. Under photo mode the graphic quality is increased slightly (due to motion blur?) so it makes people happy.

It is worth mentioning there are uncountably many props on the terrain that are destructible such as plants, fences and sundries. I sometimes feel "a strong impression of hitting someone" when I roll over fences for hundred meters, which surprises me because I'm in a racing game. But don't crash too many of them, the car's speed will significantly go down!

The dynamic season change is a new feature of this game. At start the player has to earn some points during the racing events to advance to the next season. When all four seasons are played, the "tutorial session" for the player ends. Then the player will connect to online sessions to join a so-called "Horizon life" to be able to play on&offline events. The season will also synchronize with world's players and alter once a week. Different seasons have their own seasonal events and presents. In winter the lake will be frozen so cars can go on it. Except heavy snowy day, a sunny day in winter will cause the game's environment become yellow-ish, which is not very good-looking and I don't like.

Season changes can lessen the dullness. And not only seasons refresh the map, also the corresponding events, stories and especially the control of vehicles will change dramatically. Therefore, some players (and me) both love and hate winter. They love it because the view will be pretty and hate it because the road condition goes trash despite the mission routes are the same, making it difficult to earn three-star (highest clearance level in the story mode). So give up if you face this situation.

If you use photo mode a lot, you might always pay attention to the harmonic among scenery. While you must hate the biggest drawback of this game's landscapes which are trees from the distant even if you have already enabled the highest graphic settings possible. This is because the brushes and trees (branches, leaves) are just crude, unpolished and ugly. Without motion blurring, such elements will ruin your viewpoints to the car that you carefully adjusted. 1/10.

Stories and series

I don't really care about the story (the several storyline chapters. Besides racing events, players need to accomplish certain goals in each chapter). When NPCs are talking, I would one not be paying attention, or two forget them right after listening to them. Their stories do not exist in my brain. Most chapters have crazy and unthinkable ideas, and their difficulty is not trivial unless you know the crazy trick. One chapter related to Top Gear requires the player to drive a car from point A to point B whose route set by GPS (in the game's racing events, the routes are displayed on the mini map) is 10 more kilometers in less than 2 minutes. I thought this was an impossible task when I first attempted this. Yes this isn't possible, but unless you don't follow their given route. Finally one has to rely on a "waterway" near the starting point to finish within the time limit. But no one can come up with this given they are used to using the GPS route when racing other events.

Well, the story chapters themselves are OK, except the talking between NPCs and player characters, which I hate the most. Whenever the player enters or replays chapters, they are forced to watch the blah between people in order to drive. This blah blah is not skippable. An acute player will burst after retrying a chapter N times by this. They say the game has to load so the story is shown. I doubt this.

In compliment with stories, there are racings and events. Racing series include dirt racing, cross country, road racing and street racing. Most of them are not happening in closed circuits but streets, while some road and dirt ones are circuits where players go around. (The Horizon Festival place itself is a circuit) Here I do not recommend players to be addicted to super cars as different kinds of races have their own best car implementations. The game will spawn AIs' cars, ranging from low speed to high, based on the player's car to let the race be fair. The faster the car, the harder it is to handle. So if the player is not skilled enough, they have a hard time. The game provides a rewind feature: when players make mistakes they can go back one or two seconds ago to restart, which is very convenient but easy to abuse. This feature is not quite controllable because you can only go back to certain points, ie pressing onces moves you to one second ago, twice for 2s ago, three times for 3s ago... One cannot keep pressing and go back to any point they want. So if they rewind, they might need to re-run some parts they don't need...

The game has many AI difficulty levels... Normally players start from Average until they win enough races, when the game will prompt them a chance to increase the difficulty for bonus credits. AIs in this game are different. In higher difficulty levels, the starting grid of the player is very backwards. At this time the player will be blocked by AIs. Except the two AIs at the front, the rest of them are just for blocking the players to let the first two AIs get far away. These rest AIs aren't hard and will be left far behind by the front two. So the player should quickly overtake all AIs once the race starts, otherwise they absolutely lose the chance of winning. In high levels, the first two AIs are crazy that they never slow down and make mistakes at corners. They may have an old 90s version GTR but still get past the player who is at 300kph (note AI's cars are just looks. The level determines the average lap time of them). Hence for a super car-class race, make sure one has the car upgraded well so it runs fast, or the player will be tortured by those AIs in the straight section of the lap, which cannot be remedied by any skillful tricks. For low speed-class race, one has to have a good racing line and style of passing corners, as perfect as AIs do. However the difficulty does bring limited extra benefits, so it is enough to have a difficulty above average just to unlock events.

The game's world also has lots of challenges such as jumping, drifting and speed traps. One example is at a corner where the challenge triggers, the player has to pass this section with an average speed of 240kph to accomplish three-star. Another example is to jump on a cliff to achieve a horizontal distance of 200m. These challenges don't need to loaded separately like racings but embedded within the map, and will eventually fill up all your map as you progress.

 

Growing character

Players also have levels for each racing categories. When the player advances to the next level, new races can be unlocked or some presents are given. These unlocked racing events, are the same pattern that they give players "influence" (for leveling up character and category levels) and "CR" (credits). With CR in hand, players can buy better cars, customization parts and housings. It is obvious why it is beneficial to buy cars, while buying different houses gives different special benefits. Some houses, after purchasing, can grant the player special skills or give them massive "lottery" chances (wheelspins. players can obtain spin chances by participating events). For example, buying "Fairlawn Manor" gives the player 10x super spinning wheels and the feature to teleport to any location on the map. The 10 lotteries may cover the cost of buying the bouse. Given such benefits, the houses in Horizon are not cheap.

Then there emerged many credit-farming techniques. As the player progresses through the game, the game itself becomes time-consuming and requires effort. Everything will orient CR and seasonal prizes by now. Players now may have to keep trying seasonal events (refreshed every week) or making CR in some player-defined "blueprint" event for the satisfaction of getting limited edition cars. The game will become less interesting. Though I only played the game for two weeks. I do not recommend playing it this way.

 

Horizon Life

When you really have finished the "tutorial session", I think the game now displays its original side, being an MMOrpg game. Many special online-only items (cars, clothes), races, events (dungeons?) in the game make up the online world described as "Horizon life". Online events are categorized into co-op (team up with players to race against hard AIs), versus, games (playground events) and so on around the map. Every (climate) season change is the start of a new (championship) season, which provides opportunities to get new seasonal items. I played this game late so I missed Civic Type R. If one sees an item or car they love, then there is no other choices but make efforts to gain it. Although some of them can be obtained in auctions (player to player), the rest are extremely rare.

Forzathon Live is a mentionable event type. It holds every hour on the hour. After players driving to the event location, all players from the session can join the event. The contents are doing small challenges together such as jumps and drifting where all players contribute their scores. Some points (that can be used to buy seasonal items) are given based on completion. This is one of the few opportunities where strangers can gather. And it is fun.

The games also releases a battle royale mode (called Eliminator) where normally 50 and more players play in a session. A player can "challenge" (after challenging, the system gives a destination location and the first player of the two arriving wins) another player and eliminate them. Players can also search the map for better cars randomly dropped. With the circle shrinking and players eliminating, the last player stand will have the chicken diner. I played this mode only once but got 5th, it was fun! (note: this mode does not have robo players)

 

Handling and customization

Similar to those pro racing games, the players can choose to turn on/off the driving assists, ie ABS, TCR, steering/brake assist, line tips, etc. Players can disable them for some more credits. In my actual experience, except driving line/braking point tip, I do not feel whether these are on or off makes much difference (different from Project Cars). Probably it is easier to drive cars. I normally use Dualshock 4 with a compatibility tool (https://code.google.com/archive/p/ds4-tool/) with only ABS and braking point tip on. For high speed cars, you always end up losing control when it is too fast no matter what setting. Well, also since there are a lot of grassland/mountain/snow terrains, I had to get used to the violent shaking of my joystick. Another mentionable point is in this game, the only setting that significantly impacts the controlling is probably auto transmission vs. manual.

The game provides a rich and hardcore collection of vehicle customization options. Every vehicle has its own score based on their condition, maximum 999 points. Every 100 points marks a class. A race can be played only if the participants' cars match on classes (some seasonal races have limit on car types, so players have to buy the required vehicles!). I am impetuous so I don't want to research about tuning cars and I just find a hot tunning shared by other players to install on my car, thanks to the in-game online community.

Also, there are two major camps for chassis: RWD and AWD, while RWD has long-axle and short-axle types. Different layouts result in completely different handling experience. It is very easy for an RWD car to handle drifting races, but a disaster in winter with a high-horsepower engine. So to make the life easier, I mainly drive AWD. As for FWD, it exists in the game but lacks attention.

Besides capturing, I love the customizable livery system. Players can make up own shapes to assemble, or just download liveries from the community like tunning. You can build a "vinyl group", containing many other shapes, to form a group of shapes to resemble logos, etc and paste & reuse it to the car, which reduces the workload of making liveries. Players can almost stick the shapes everywhere on the car. One can prevent having the exact same car as others by a good DIY.

 

Things left to blame

As a screenshot-taking enthusiast, I want to blame the game characters' clothing. They are all way too casual. None of the obtainable clothings look good to me. Even to obtain them I had to play seasons or spin wheels. Also the game does not have a single acceptable racing equipment (helmets, gloves) (they do have ones for motorcycles, which apparently don't fit. The game's Stig's helmet I think might be usable, only). We can only see, clearly through the bright translucent windshield, the character (gangster), with round-frame sunglass and T-shirt, sitting on the seat of a GT racing car, ruining the shot. As a result, I am always forced to possibly use those fixed camera view points in order to cover the driver...

 

Tips

When playing, I never looked up for guidance so made some mistakes. Iet me share some points to notice for newbies:

• Every race can be replayed any time for credits. The online Creative Hub provides massive user-generated races. You can grind highway blueprints for easy money in relative shorter time.
• Make buying housings the first priority. Getting them has you various kinds of presents and skills. The "Fairlawn Manor" at the center of the map is highly recommended.
• Instead do not buy vehicles at the early stage of the game. You will have many opportunities to get wheelspin counts which will give you many CR and good cars. You can possibly get the car you want in the store from spins.

After playing a while, I purchased the Ultimate Edition Addon from MS store just the day before the sale ended (well, I could just buy a single ultimate edition at the beginning, instead of standard edition followed by the addon, which ultimately cost more $). It was a wise choice to have an ultimate edition and I found buying only standard edition was an unsmart decision. So if you are buying the game, get the ultimate edition please. Having the ultimate edition can unlock you two more big DLCs with new racing events (though I haven't tried many of them) and give you for free a considerably big amount of new premium cars to make the game experience easier. It also gives you a house with special skills. Most importantly, it also comes with a VIP privilege which doubles your in-game income, making your grind for level and money a lot easier!

 

Game

The next page has screenshots.