28.11.2016

I'll get it out of the way at the start - I've never liked 'realistic' racers; games like Gran Turismo, Forza, Project Cars, etc., and whenever I've bought a racing game in the past I've been scrupulous in making sure that it's NOT a serious racer in the vein of the aforementioned games.This is the first time I've ever dipped my toe in the pool of serious racers (I'm aware that some people have called Horizon 3 an 'arcade racer', but they're just wrong. Arcade racers are Burnout, Outrun, Ridge Racer... This feels very little like any of those games, and with the driving aids switched off it's as serious a simulation as you'll find, although perhaps a tiny amount behind the others on the market in terms of realism.)so I can't compare it to the big-hitting driving sims that are out there. I come at this as someone who's never played a Forza or a Turismo before, except in demos. The main reason I chose to get this game is because it received such ecstatic reviews, but I've also long been curious about a few aspects of Forza that have never been available in any of the arcade racers I've bought previously: the car customisation options, the sheer number of beautiful, real-world vehicles and the design tools. Combine these features with its obscene Metacritic score, and the more open, accessible nature of the 'Forza Horizons' compared to its serious, austere cousin 'Forza Motorsport'', and it just felt like if ever I was going to buy a non-arcade-racer it would be this one.The first few days were everything the reviews had promised, and yet everything I'd feared they would be too. For an impatient, twitchy gamer like me, having to brake for corners in a racing game feels...wrong. My instinct is to just drift the car into a horizontal position and slide round every bend at 200 miles per hour. As you'd expect, this approach is not conducive to winning races in the real world(police frown on it too), and it doesn't work in serious racing sims either. I was prepared for this but I hoped I'd learn to deal with it more quickly than I did. The only racing games I've bothered buying recently have been developed by Criterion(the magnificent developers of the Burnout series, as well as the best entries in the Need For Speed series), and as a result my first few days with the game were just crushingly dull and frustrating.If you're an arcade racer then switching to titles like this, which are more and more the norm these days, will require a certain amount of rewiring of your gaming instincts. You will need to pay attention to the racing line, which can be overlain on the track if you need it(and if you're like me...you will), you'll need to essentially ignore your innate desire to drift into every corner...in fact you will have to use this peculiar button which I had no idea existed until now - it's called 'the brake button', and it makes the car decelerate - which means 'go slower by choice'. A bewildering idea to the average Burnout player.So rather than keep the accelerator pressed throughout the entire race and just drift through every corner like you're auditioning for some government 'safer driving' campaign commercial - the kind that ends with a small blonde child's ghost staring at the viewer and chiding them for having driven at 31mph in a thirty mph zone - you'll have to brake hard at corners and take scrupulous care of your approach line as you come up to them. All this is obviously food and drink to gamers who regularly play Forza and GT and Assetto Corsa, but for anyone who's thinking of trying a serious racer for the first time(even if in this case it's a serious racer that involves races against fighter jets and blimps) you will need to readjust the way you play, and it will take a while. I'm still learning and I've been playing pretty solidly since it first came out.But...when you begin to appreciate the synergy between the brake button and the accelerate button, the subtle micro-back-and-forths you need to make between the two as you corner, or as you rip down an uneven straight at 240+mph in a Dodge Viper, you will begin to grasp what makes serious racers worth playing. I have not got any higher in difficulty terms than 'Highly Skilled', which is still three settings below the most challenging AI drivers, I've still not driven using manual gear changes, I still use the driving line and I still feel the need to retain the 'rewind' option(which, a la Prince Of Persia and Codemasters's DiRT racing series, allows you to rewind a few seconds into the past, thus softening the otherwise race-ending impact of a crash)and I haven't touched the 'tuning' options, yet I've been playing and gradually improving for two months. This is the kind of depth and difficulty curve arcade racers dream of.As I say, I haven't touched the tuning options, and I haven't really spent that much time exploring the complexities of the upgrade system(which is extensive) either; what I have spent a lot of time with however are the utterly brilliant design tools, which allow you to create bespoke designs for any of your cars. You can create essentially any illustration/pattern/logo you want using the 'vinyl creation' tool, in which you build up your own vinyl sticker using layers of basic shapes. Imagine a smiley face: to create one in the design suite you would take a circle, colour it yellow, expand it to whichever size you wanted, and then over that circle you would layer a couple of smaller, black circles and a smiley black half circle. This is the basic premise, but it's both sufficiently restrictive that it forces you to think creatively rather than just copy paste something from the internet, and incredibly empowering due to the immense number of basic shapes and available layers. Some of the most fun I've had has come from the design suite. These vinyls can then be stuck onto your car(with a generous limit of 3000 layers), and the car itself can be painted using a ridiculous number of colours, patterns and paint types. Think of the customisation options in GTA V, broadened out to infinity. Any of your shared designs that are uploaded, used and/or 'liked' by other players win you in-game credit rewards.Which brings me to an unexpected quirk of the game - I'd assumed before buying that the huge number of cars in the game would be straightforwardly available, and you'd be able to acquire them all in(relatively) short order. I didn't think you'd be able to just download them instantly but I certainly didn't think that after about a moth and a half of play I'd have acquired only 10% of the full garage. I've played longer now, and I've discovered some optimal routes towards making in-game credits, but for anyone who's used to being able to access everything that's available in a game after a couple of playthroughs at most I warn you: unless I'm missing something embarrassingly obvious you will not have access to anything like all the cars in this game unless you play for literally hundreds of hours. I've managed to buy a couple of extremely expensive Hyper Cars, but only after(I've just checked) 40 hours of driving. That's not factoring in how much time I've spent in the design suite, in customisation, in upgrading, in perks and in browsing the list of cars, drooling at the Bugatti Veyron and the Koenigsegg One:1.This isn't necessarily a criticism: I'm just not used to such a large amount of content being out of reach for everyone but the kind of insane shut-in who can afford to spend twelve hours a day grinding out in-game credits in order to complete their car collection. In fact, after I got over my surprise and irritation I grew to appreciate the fact that getting a hyper car in the game actually feels like a genuine accomplishment, and you take pride in having something that took so much effort in your garage. There are no shortcuts(again, unless I've missed something obvious) - you have to scrimp and save for quite a while just to afford one of the 2M+ credits cars, and there's a sense of luxurious satisfaction in gazing at the absolutely stunning models of the vehicles in your collection(which can be inspected from every conceivable angle in your own private showroom) knowing that you 'own' each one.So the difficulty in getting your hands on just one of the many super/hyper cars may irritate you, and you may think it's unfair given you've paid for the game and a significant portion of its car-content is, realistically, unattainable; or you may appreciate the feeling of achievement this bestows upon you when you finally manage to get the car you've wanted for so long. I'm torn between the two positions to be honest, although I lean towards the latter. I love my Koenigsegg One:1 because it took so long to afford - same with the Bugatti Veyron. They feel expensive in a way that they wouldn't if I'd simply unlocked them for free after completing the first ten races or something.The rest of the features in the game are less divisive: they have simply been honed to utilitarian perfection after two previous iterations in the series. The map is enormous, varied and consistently glorious to look at(and the photo mode is brilliant too), there are a stupid number of things to do, the framerate is solid - although 30fps is the highest it goes on XBox One - and the online functionality is smooth and accessible. The 'campaign', such as it is, is unfocused and perhaps grants you too much freedom and not enough direction, and is a touch bland(you're the head of various festivals and you get to choose what to do, which festivals to focus on first, etc.), but that would be my only quibble.In fact that would be my only quibble overall - there is a slight lack of character, of personality, in the game as a whole: sure there are the ludicrous 'Showcase' events, where you race speedboats and the like, but there are only five of them and they're curiously unsatisfying. They feel more like time trials since you're never racing against another vehicle on the same track. Nothing you do has an impact on the performance of your opponent - they simply float or fly or run on traintracks through a series of checkpoints at the exact same time every time you run the race. They're spectacular but slightly dull.The map is glorious to look at, and geographically varied, but there are no interesting, quirky nooks and crannies to investigate...nothing but uniform suburban houses, small towns and city blocks. There is a ship graveyard but this is the closest the game comes to a memorably unique location. It feels like a missed opportunity. The same can possibly be said for the tasks: with the exception of the bucket-list challenges, which are excellent, they mostly feel like the kind of stuff you're expected to do in the average Ubigame...a bit too much like collect-'em-up, box-ticking busywork. They always add to something useful, whether it's in-game credits or experience points, but again it feels like a slight missed opportunity. The best open world action games have long ago recognised that identikit busywork tasks are not acceptable, and if you're to keep the player interested the single-player 'missions' need to be distinctive and imaginative. FH3 nods to this with the Bucket List challenges and the showcases, but they are few and far between, and the map is signally lacking in personality. There is a beautiful central mountain which would've made for an interesting location to explore, but it's essentially gated off. I would also have like some mountainous, high-altitude races; the kind of races that take place on the sides of valleys, as in Alpine race tracks, but I accept that the Australian location might not allow for that.These are nevertheless minor quibbles considering how far ahead of the rest of the field this game is: the last time anything approaching the quality of FH3 came out(besides other FHs of course) was in the late noughties with Burnout: Paradise, and I've enjoyed FH3 considerably more. It's exponentially more content-rich and its driving model eventually reveals itself to be just as enjoyable as Criterion's, albeit in a very different way.I've played some fabulous games this year: Inside, Dark Souls III, Uncharted 4, Titanfall 2, Superhot for the XB, and I certainly would never have predicted that a racing game would be jostling for my time at the end of the year, but it's true. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a title I've enjoyed more, played more, than Forza Horizon 3.9/10

14.11.2016

So I write this as my first review of an Xbox One game. I'm 10 hours in now, but will be sure to keep you posted!The first dissappointing (but predictable) thing that happens when you slot the disk in is that it tells you there's a 2GB update required, and a 48GB install. This took nearly 2 hours on my PC. I guess this is the norm now, but it's oh so frustrating! I know for a fact that I'll be sticking any Christamas present Xbox games in to the machine on Christams Eve before I wrap them now!Right, so the game's installed and you're straight into the action. A high speed Lambo run introduces you to the fantastically rendered cars and scenery.

15.4.2017

Forza Horizon 3 is the best racing game I've ever played, I've never contemplated getting DLC for any game before but I'm looking at the Blizzard Mountain expansion pack for this.For me personally this is the best racing game I've ever played. I've had Project Cars, Forza 4,5 and 6, Project Gotham Racing, All Need for Speed titles, Grand Turismo 3 onwards and all previous Forza Horizon games and nothing compares to Forza Horizon 3.For those who don't know Forza Horizon 3 is a open world racing game based Australia. The concept behind the game is a festival which involves a lot of racing. In the game you are the big boss of the festival and the aim is to gain as many fans of the festival as possible.

18.10.2016

My first Forza Horizon title and I didn't really know what to expect, I bought the Ultimate Edition off Game for £80 with the Steelbook and I have been so impressed with it this may even be one the reasons to purchase an Xbox One, why Sony haven't tried to create a Driving Simulator with an Open World to explore with a thinly veiled RPG element (earning Experience points) I literally have no idea.Forza Horizon from my initial impressions seems to be a driving festival held around the world, in this case Australia, with the map allegedly twice the size of Forza Horizon 2 with Dusty Desert Plains, Sandy Beaches and Dense Rainforests all with Shifting Weather Patterns aimed at keeping you on your toes.

5.5.2017

You will notice I call this a car driving sim and not a racing sim, this is because it is not just a racing game, you choose whether you want to race or just drive around australia taking in the scenery.The graphics are fantastic, whether you are driving in the outback or in the cities you get a great feel of being there and not just in a game.I like the vocal guide that pops up every now and again with suggestions of where to go and what to do, a pleasant female voice tells you if there are any races near by, or if there are any cars that you could challenge, it does not matter if you are in single player mode or playing on line there are always plenty of things to do.The main aim of the game

2.12.2016

I have been a fan of the Forza Horizon series ever since I got the first one and after playing each game that game has become my favourite racing game. This game isn't an exception. The game itself is in my opinion the prettiest I have ever played and there is a wide range of biomes that have never been seen in previous Horizon games (jungles, deserts, high rise cities to name a few). All these allow you test the versatility of the car list which has a very wide range of cars from specialised offroad buggies to top of the range hyper cars, all of which completely explored in the autovista mode. One problem with Forza Horizon 2 was the single player which was very repetitive because it was just doing championships of 4 races over and over again,

30.9.2016

The first thing that strikes you is the graphics which when standing still sometimes look photorealisric...but of course this is a racing game so you're meant to be moving at speed! Everything holds up beautifully, no sign of slowdown though the textures sometimes seem a little blurry for a fraction of a second which does little to detract from the overall majesty of the experience - no racing game has looked better.The classic Forza handling makes a welcome return, balancing realism with fun as always though the tuning and customisation aspects allow for a broad spectrum of difficulties should you desire stiffer competition.

27.9.2016

I bought a Xbox One S so I could play this game! I love racing games, and after seeing the glowing reviews for Forza Horizon 3 (it currently has a Metacritic rating of 91 from 71 critics) I just couldn't resist. There is so much to do in FH3, and it looks absolutely fantastic. My trusty PS4 will get a well earned rest now whilst I play this and catch-up on the rest of the XB1 back-catalogue.UPDATE (13 Nov '16);Well, I have been playing this almost every day since it came out nearly 7 weeks ago now, and I'm still really enjoying it. I have maxed-out all 4 festival sites, but still have lots to do, including a plethora of championships to complete, Bucket list challenges, and more!

5.11.2016

After previously buying Forza Horizon 1 and 2, I thought I would give Forza Horizon 3 a try and I'm glad I did. Forza is one of the greatest racing games around and it's one of those games that gets you hooked and keeps you hooked throughout the story mode. Forza Horizon 3 is set in Australia and it twice as big as the map in Forza Horizon 2. This game brings a whole different style to Forza and takes you through forests, mountains and on the outback.Forza Horizon 3 still contains the XP Boards and Fast Travel Boards but this year brings the addition of 5 new Barn Finds, making there 15 Barn Finds in total! As Forza Horizon gets more developed, the Bonus Boards become harder to find and this year,

11.1.2017

I have played and hugely enjoyed both of the previous Forza Horizon games, preferring them greatly over the main Forza games as their slightly more arcadey approach suits me and my preferred played style.I initially left this as I had some other games on and decided to wait for a clear backlog and hopefully a price drop. Last weekend I got both so decided to go for it.I'm pleased to say I'm really pleased with it. It looks and sounds fantastic, it is very smooth and the choice of Australia leads to some varied and different landscapes compared to the previous 2 games.The structure and progression has changed from earning wristbands to winning fans and expanding the festival,

7.10.2017

This is my first venture into racing games and after one race I was hooked. The graphics, gameplay and soundtracks are superb.The whole process from the second you put the disk into the machine is straightforward, it tells you it requires a 9 Gb update almost instantly when installing from disk but you can play at around 40 %.The game is immersive and I take on-board the comment about driving, but like you said chap, its a driving game! The quality and detail that goes into even the smallest thing is fantastic, every aspect of the cars and scenery is perfect in all the view modes. The speed at which you drive and the scenery change is flawless whilst maintain quality.The crash effects are funny,

27.9.2016

As I'm usually awful at racing games I tend to stay away from them, however after seeing the reviews and perfect scores this game was receiving I wanted to give this one a try.Having spent nearly 8 hours playing the game I can honestly say this game is so much fun! Considering this isn't an rpg or a rockstar game it has an impressive sized map. Right out the gate you find yourself racing a helicopter in a buggy and after that horizon just gets better and better. The graphics are some of the best I've seen to date; doing 170mph on a straight in a lambo while skrillex is playing is just adrenaline fulled fun.I recommend this game to all gamers if you want to play solo you can if you want to play

9.1.2018

I'm no gaming addict or expert but I bought an XBox One S based on this game and its reviews/YT videos etc. Also bought a 4k TV to get the max effect, and very glad I did spend all that money! The game is incredible, the speed, clarity and detail of the graphics are quite unreal to a middle aged fart like me.I just love the fact you're not tied to track racing, you can drive wherever you want to go - straight through the rainforest, or across the desert - no problem! Or hack through a banana tree plantation for the sheer hell of it. The range of things to do is large and the customisation options are just about endless, as is the range of cars you can get to own or drive.Drive to your own music with the Groove Music App,

29.12.2016

Really great game I would of given the game itself 5 stars but I couldn't because of this reason. Blizzard mountain a game add on you must pay more for, the game is forcing it you down your neck. You really get into the atmosphere of the whole sunshine scene of Australia. Then every loading screen yes every one is advertising blizzard mountain. It spoils the whole atmosphere of the game. Then when I was about to open my 3rd festival site a video came up about blizzard mountain trying to sell it to me again! Not only that there is now a place on the map to go to access the mountain. On the pause menu a big sign is for the expansion. Just leave me alone jesus! The other slight problem is drivatars.

2.1.2017

I received this game for free with a new xbox one s. I was planning on selling it, as I've never been into racing games (well, apart from the original wip3out on the ps1!), but I read some reviews and they were overwhelming positive, citing that it was simply more than a racing game, so I kept it and I'm really glad I did. This game is fantastic, it's a massive open world set across Australia, driving through forest, beaches, cities, loads. Its not simply racing either, I've done cool events such as racing against a train and timing jumps over it topgear style, racing against a jeep being carried by a helicopter etc. The racing itself is fantastic, there's a huge range of cars from the 1950's to modern,

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