My exact post on Forzaplanet.net.
I rented and played Horizon for about 4 hours last night. Messed around with vinyls for about 2 hours. So far I am enjoying Horizon. I will post my open minded positive and negative feedback for the game like I do with all games.
First Impressions.
I have always been a huge fan of T10 since the first Forza. So I am always looking forward to their games. I went into this knowing its their first attempt at an open world racing game.
The physics are amazing and thats the main focus of Horizon is to intigrate great physics in an open world game. They nailed it for sure. The physics are not quite as sim as F4 but not as arcade as other open world games. Its a nice balanced combination of both worlds. While there are no tuning options, you can swap a wide variety of parts to improve the performance of your car.
The vinyl system is 100% there from Forza 4 just with a different user interface. The game even loads your vinyls from F4 directly from your hard drive. You cant load entire car paint jobs but you can load all your vinyl groups from F4.
The graphics are really good. Scenery graphics are hit and miss but the cars look great. Obviously toned down from the F4 graphics but still look really good. Day night cycle is really nice especially when you see your headlights and dash lights turning on. Also seeing the sunrise is a nice touch while cruising around. No weather effects at all.
The co-op can be fun but overall is a bit disappointing. While you are in the co-op mode you can not get money for drifting, oncoming traffic, near misses, damage or anything else. You can only get money by completing co-op objectives. I believe there are about 15 co-op objectives. Draft someone for a certain amount of time, trade paint, drive from point A to point B. But while you are doing that, you can not make money. Plus, you can not get barn finds together at the same time. You can be sitting right next to your friend while he gets a barn find, but you cant get it. I believe this it tied into your rank but I am not sure. Regardless, you cant go cruising to find them together at the same time. Then once you unlock it, you have to go back to the single player to pick the car. Then come back to the co-op to drive your new car.
For those that argued until they were blue in the face about the map not being 63 sq miles, they are incorrect. It is indeed only very close to 63 sq miles. To top that off, you can unlock EVERY road in the game within 2-3 hours. I had 2 friends in my party last night that were just cruising around and within 1 hour my friend had half the roads unlocked. Another hour later, 90%. Half an hour after that 99%. The map is very very tiny. About 1/3 the size of Burnout Paradise. Which is fine because I knew it would be small. But some people were in denial about how small the map is. I will post more about this in the map size thread.
Overall Horizon does seem to be focused on a more laid back generation of gamers in a good way. Its much much more forgiving in many ways and that takes the edge off at time and adds more of a fun factor to the game. If you are in the middle of a drift and spin out, you are not punished. You can even bump some walls or AI and stil maintain your combos. Very generous which will reduce frustration for many people new to the series. Those expecting a massive full free roaming TDU2 experience might be disappointed. But if you go into Horizon expecting a more laid back casual Forza experience in an open world environment, you will enjoy it. 👍
