Kinda hard to fuck it up when you change so little from a game as good as Horizon 4. They've added a couple additional player-retention systems that I haven't bothered to understand, but the core draw of "arcade/sim-hybrid car game without the 'grind'" is mostly untouched from the previous entry in the series.
Another thing that's mostly untouched is the fact that the cast is almost entirely British, save for two Mexican characters (one of whom is a non-entity) who are ridiculously grating caricatures of Latino people. "Familia" is brought up an almost comical number of times in these unskippable cutscenes, and while the gameplay still carries a lot of the weight, I'm forced to assume that the writers first learned of Mexico (as a concept) less than two weeks before they started working on the game.
I can really only give this an 8 (at the time of this writing) in good conscience because you can blow through most of the cutscenes fairly quickly and start racing unimpeded. Driving around in the 1983 Audi Sport Quattro feels incredible - even if I'm still bitter about them taking the Lancia Delta from me - and I have spent entire play sessions just carving through dirt roads, observing some of the most beautifully arranged scenery I've seen in a racing game (even if individual details don't hold up to scrutiny). The one star missing from this rating feels massive though, and it's because the annoyances will rear their heads and you will remember them when you're done playing. I don't mind checklists in games like this - it can be nice to kill some time by sitting down, knocking out a few mini-objectives and moving on with your day. But with the new accolade system, there are so fucking many of these little achievements and they're so easy to rack up. I unlocked the entire campaign without consciously engaging with this system a single time, making me wonder why they've even bothered to graft this system onto a perfectly fine game instead of just using a normal XP system (the way it already does for player level). I can only assume it's there to torture completionists with an endless torrent of tasks that take two minutes each, keeping them playing this game until FH6 comes out and they can get started on the new checklist.
I suppose, though, that I can only sound so cynical about these things because the game kept me playing long enough for the little nitpicks to leave a blister. When the game started I wasn't really thinking about the aesthetics of British people airdropping vehicles to set up little outposts on Mexican soil - I was taken with the sense of speed, with the gorgeous environment, with the way the soundtrack's energy lined up perfectly with everything happening on screen. I've complained a bit here, and I could complain a lot more - it's a skill I've mastered over the years - but the truth of the matter is that I started out by putting 33 hours into this game over a 4 day weekend, and I will likely do so several more times before I claim to be done with it. I bounce between racing games but always return to Horizon for its variety - variety in race types, in cars (the ever-desired hypercars and the incompetent novelty vehicles), and in open world activities. The experience of playing FH5 will probably never fully live up to my first experiences of playing FH4, but it is absolutely a worthy successor.
Another thing that's mostly untouched is the fact that the cast is almost entirely British, save for two Mexican characters (one of whom is a non-entity) who are ridiculously grating caricatures of Latino people. "Familia" is brought up an almost comical number of times in these unskippable cutscenes, and while the gameplay still carries a lot of the weight, I'm forced to assume that the writers first learned of Mexico (as a concept) less than two weeks before they started working on the game.
I can really only give this an 8 (at the time of this writing) in good conscience because you can blow through most of the cutscenes fairly quickly and start racing unimpeded. Driving around in the 1983 Audi Sport Quattro feels incredible - even if I'm still bitter about them taking the Lancia Delta from me - and I have spent entire play sessions just carving through dirt roads, observing some of the most beautifully arranged scenery I've seen in a racing game (even if individual details don't hold up to scrutiny). The one star missing from this rating feels massive though, and it's because the annoyances will rear their heads and you will remember them when you're done playing. I don't mind checklists in games like this - it can be nice to kill some time by sitting down, knocking out a few mini-objectives and moving on with your day. But with the new accolade system, there are so fucking many of these little achievements and they're so easy to rack up. I unlocked the entire campaign without consciously engaging with this system a single time, making me wonder why they've even bothered to graft this system onto a perfectly fine game instead of just using a normal XP system (the way it already does for player level). I can only assume it's there to torture completionists with an endless torrent of tasks that take two minutes each, keeping them playing this game until FH6 comes out and they can get started on the new checklist.
I suppose, though, that I can only sound so cynical about these things because the game kept me playing long enough for the little nitpicks to leave a blister. When the game started I wasn't really thinking about the aesthetics of British people airdropping vehicles to set up little outposts on Mexican soil - I was taken with the sense of speed, with the gorgeous environment, with the way the soundtrack's energy lined up perfectly with everything happening on screen. I've complained a bit here, and I could complain a lot more - it's a skill I've mastered over the years - but the truth of the matter is that I started out by putting 33 hours into this game over a 4 day weekend, and I will likely do so several more times before I claim to be done with it. I bounce between racing games but always return to Horizon for its variety - variety in race types, in cars (the ever-desired hypercars and the incompetent novelty vehicles), and in open world activities. The experience of playing FH5 will probably never fully live up to my first experiences of playing FH4, but it is absolutely a worthy successor.
jobosno
8 months ago