The first 3 or so hours of Horizon Chase Turbo is a pretty awesome experience. A back to basics arcade racer in the vein of games like Outrun or SNES Top Gear with tight, fun handling, a decent soundtrack and beautiful stylised 3D graphics that evoke the style of the aforementioned retro racers with a modern sheen.
The problem is that Horizon Chase Turbo is just too basic for its own good, and it starts to lose its appeal towards the end of the roughly 10 hour long campaign. You can tell that the devs tried to mitigate this with a "quantity over quality" approach as there are hundreds of race tracks in the campaign, lots of cars to unlock throughout and other modes like tournaments and a roguelike-ish endurance race mode for Tens Of Hours Of Content™. The problem is that none of this icing really makes up for the lack of meaningful content in Horizon Chase Turbo.
The other issue is the difficulty balancing. Again, this game is mechanically simple to the point where driving by itself is a pretty brainless activity, so difficulty is injected into this gameplay style with some questionable decisions, such as a plethora of gimmicky, extremely narrow tracks and stupidly aggressive rubberbanding AI for your opponents. The even more questionable thing is just how much this difficulty is eradicated towards the end when you unlock the most OP cars like the AE86 and have all of the vehicle upgrades. Seriously, India (which is just past the halfway point of the campaign) is by FAR the hardest region but everything after that goes back to being pretty easy despite the attempts to be dramatic at the end.
I'd still recommend this game to anyone else who is a fan of arcade racers, but with a more tentative recommendation than what I started out with. I would say I have high hopes for the development team Aquiris in the future but they recently got acquired by Epic Games, so we'll just have to see what that future holds in store for us.
The problem is that Horizon Chase Turbo is just too basic for its own good, and it starts to lose its appeal towards the end of the roughly 10 hour long campaign. You can tell that the devs tried to mitigate this with a "quantity over quality" approach as there are hundreds of race tracks in the campaign, lots of cars to unlock throughout and other modes like tournaments and a roguelike-ish endurance race mode for Tens Of Hours Of Content™. The problem is that none of this icing really makes up for the lack of meaningful content in Horizon Chase Turbo.
The other issue is the difficulty balancing. Again, this game is mechanically simple to the point where driving by itself is a pretty brainless activity, so difficulty is injected into this gameplay style with some questionable decisions, such as a plethora of gimmicky, extremely narrow tracks and stupidly aggressive rubberbanding AI for your opponents. The even more questionable thing is just how much this difficulty is eradicated towards the end when you unlock the most OP cars like the AE86 and have all of the vehicle upgrades. Seriously, India (which is just past the halfway point of the campaign) is by FAR the hardest region but everything after that goes back to being pretty easy despite the attempts to be dramatic at the end.
I'd still recommend this game to anyone else who is a fan of arcade racers, but with a more tentative recommendation than what I started out with. I would say I have high hopes for the development team Aquiris in the future but they recently got acquired by Epic Games, so we'll just have to see what that future holds in store for us.