The Forza franchise was synonymous with a simulation-style racing experience for a long time, similar to Gran Turismo on PlayStation. However, when Forza Horizon debuted in 2012, Playground Games proved that Forza could expand into what had become modern car culture with near-perfect ease. The driving mechanics still retained its simulation style driving experience, but eased up the realism just a tiny bit to allow for the campy nature of the game’s world design and race progression.
There’s something about the character and focused nature of the first Forza Horizon game that subsequent sequels just haven’t been able to match. Obviously the influx of brand new cars and doubling the content in later entries is an expected upgrade over the first game, but in a lot of ways, future Horizon games have been an exercise in excess over focused content. There’s nothing wrong with a racing game having a huge collection of available cars, but subsequent Forza Horizon games have been too focused on quantity over quality in many regards.
Obviously, looking back at Forza Horizon in 2020 does make the game seem very dated. Dubstep’s no longer as much of a craze as it once was, and a lot of the brand new cars in that game are either concept car relics or at least eight years old. However, even if the first Forza Horizon was largely a product of its time with the cars/music in the game, Playground Games was at its best in 2012. Horizon‘s fictional version of Colorado was a blast to drive through, and the contextualization of the “Horizon” car and music festival added an element of wonder bolstered by the excellent opening song of Language by Porter Robinson.
That’s part of what Forza Horizon did so well compared to its later counterparts. Horizon sets the stage in an exciting and wondrous introduction that retains that same positive spirit throughout the rest of the game. All of the story events and cutscenes are perfectly campy and never taken too seriously. Even the rival characters set up some friendly competition between players and other festival goers. Forza Horizon‘s ambiance and atmosphere was it its best here, celebrating modern car culture at a music festival that felt lively and full of strange but entertaining characters.
Even to this day, Forza Horizon had some of the best world design and driving lines throughout the whole Horizon subseries. Racing through the canyons in Red Rock, or zooming over the Finley Dam, some of the best racing lines in the whole subseries came from Playground Games’ fictional Colorado. Whether it’s the winding roads through small town Colorado in an all-wheel-drive car, or zooming across highways in your favorite supercar, Forza Horizon‘s map was simultaneously huge and refined. Future entries like Forza Horizon 4 had bigger maps with more terrain, but had a ton of verticality and not much variety in the actual roads themselves.
Progression was also at its best in the first Forza Horizon. The whole “Horizon” festival had different tiers based on which bracelet you received, and players could get higher tier bracelets after finishing first in enough races and gaining enough reputation. Gaining reputation and attaining new bracelet levels actually felt like progress was being made, whereas future Horizon games made everything more open-concept. Forza Horizon 4 was especially guilty of this, as instead of focused races with specific car classes, players could enter those types of events with whatever car they were driving. The freedom was nice, but not enforcing any kind of class variety made races monotonous.
Perhaps the biggest problem with future Horizon titles is that they added content for the sake of additional content. Checking the map in Forza Horizon 4 is a confusing affair of sifting through various race icons littered throughout the fictional UK map. The game’s open concept of progression hurts the most when it’s unclear what race should be done next. Forza Horizon kept it simple: do official events to gain reputation and progress to the next bracelet, do street races for more money/credits, and do the limited stunt races for both. That was it, there wasn’t an overload on content that basically made any semblance of progression through the game meaningless.
Future Forza Horizon games have stepped up the quality in terms of visual presentation and car collection immensely. Obviously the first Horizon game, despite how well the visual design still holds up, pales in comparison to Forza Horizon 4 and Motorsport. However, the reliance on player freedom and its plug-and-play race design just makes the game less interesting. Having a focused and clear progression, a silly but noticeable semblance of story, and intelligent world design is what makes the first Forza Horizon the best in the series.
Forza Horizon is available now on Xbox 360 and via backwards compatibility on Xbox One.
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