Forza Horizon is back and it's as big as ever, hoon around a truncated Mexico for three laps at a time almost without exception in far too many cars for your own good.

I happened to jump into a user-generated race and apparently didn't pay close enough attention because I ended up in a four-lap single-car dirt race over about four minutes worth of terrain per lap, and it really shook me out of realising how samey all the game's standard races are.

Also, the game crashes constantly if you have a Fanatec wheel. lmao. I don't think I'll get much more out of this until it's fixed in the new year, which is a shame.

feeling myself bouncing off this one once the scale of the open world chore list made itself known, it plays well, guns are okay, writing is so-so, but man I don’t think I have it in me to self-direct taking over far cry outposts until the game tells me I’ve won, I guess this is why they got the “escaping from an exploding thing” setpiece out of the way at the start

UPDATE: I played a bit more, and the main story missions take place in more structured, linear interiors and feel a lot more Halo to me, even if the writing remains pretty iffy, and the boss design is frankly kind of irritating. love the one where you clear a room and walk up to the exit door and it opens and you’re immediately eviscerated by two invisible elites with energy swords, or the one where the cutscene ends with you two metres away from a huge guy with a gravity hammer when you have… whatever guns you had more or less drained to make it there

the game is a pretty fun little cross between pipe mania, scissors-paper-rock, and an action game. you’re sent on missions across these brief segments of overworld which link together a series of battles or other events, all in the name of completing your mission on the other side. you fight your opponents by throwing or dropping fragments of the right ammunition type into the tank, which turns it into pieces of ammunition (or garbage if you get the recipe wrong), which are then conveyed along a conveyor belt you build (and later have to maintain if it takes damage) to be fired at the enemy, at which point th enemy can shoot their own ammo to counter, and vice versa

it starts out fairly simply, with each battle being fairly difficult to lose, if anything, but quickly picks up some more mechanics (like conveyor repair and little enemies fired at you which need beating up to avoid them doing damage or slowing you down) and turns into a little more of a challenge

it could do with some minor quality of life tweaks, in my opinion, the biggest of which being showing your player characters before starting the round - you spawn in a seemingly random location, which means while you get to pause and observe the location of the pieces you need to build your conveyor, you can’t really decide where you’ll start moving until a few seconds in when you’ve identified which of them you are and where you are relative to your goals - this isn’t much of an issue, but it feels like completely unnecessary friction

the Switch version has some notable hitches in what were instant loading screens in the PC demo we'd previously played, but otherwise it plays just fine

I also get the sense that, while a good couch co-op game, the designs are built around being somewhat closer to the screen, with the colour-coded player indicators feeling very small from a few feet away, and the characters occasionally ending up easy to mistake for each other in the heat of battle

I really appreciate how much vocalisation of what you’re doing is needed, you have to co-operate on the colour-coded ammunition recipes, which are fairly easy to follow and displayed at the top, and you also have control of which of two lanes your shots are fired in, which you need to swap in order to counter the enemy’s own shots, so many a “hitting the switch” or “firing up” are enunciated on the couch

all that said I’m really enjoying the experience overall, having a lot of fun, and curious to see what further depth it may reveal as we play more!

rolled the dice on the Epic store discount and for nine bucks it’s okay but man, can someone please give Three Fields a little money for the next one, if they’re even still alive at this point lmao

I feel like the people pining for pre-Paradise Burnout got pretty much exactly what they wanted with this one; car feel which would’ve been acceptable on PS2 but feels downright bizarre in 4K, extremely unpolished progression and difficulty (you start with just one event you can enter, which immediately requires you to win the race, with extremely harsh opponent rubber banding going on, in order to even think about playing something else - and some later events are a walk in the park), a stark lack of car options (each “class” just has three to five of the same car with different attachments and subtly different performance), the UI is straight out of the old Burnouts (for better and worse)

oh also it doesn’t have any in-game music, instead offering a “connect your Spotify Premium account” button lmao

the graphics are really quite nice, it doesn’t have that “I am an Unreal Engine game” sheen all over the place, it’s just overall a good looking game, the environments are nice to look at and the tracks are varied, if on the longer side

it’s a serviceable return to that particular era if you’re filled with a deep nostalgia for it, even if (graphics aside) you might be better served by throwing Legends into PPSSPP, but frankly I’m more of a Paradise gal, so this experience may instead compel me to grab Paradise Remastered off Game Pass 🙃