With its fastidious approach to driving and fetishistic attitude to cars, Forza Motorsport is the racing series of choice for the Xbox-owning automobile aficionado.
And yet those same qualities have proved off-putting to more casual car lovers, who prefer hair-raising spills to splitting hairs over handling dynamics.
Enter Playground Games’ open-world racer Forza Horizon, a radical departure for the series that promises to bridge the gap between simulation and stimulation and expand upon developer Turn 10’s objective of turning car lovers into gamers and gamers into car lovers.
The heart of Horizon is the tribal gathering. A cross between Glastonbury and Goodwood’s Festival of Speed, it is, as design director Ralph Fulton says: “A place where cars belong... where competition meets culture.”
In typical Forza fashion, Bestival organiser Rob Da Bank is on board to give it an authentic festival flavour.
The bulk of the driving takes place on – and, for the first time in the franchise, off – roads surrounding Horizon. And, while there are plenty of pick-up-and-play elements, with players free to roam the map and enter races where they find them, authenticity is still at the apex of the agenda.
Fulton stresses this is very much an action racing game, but it’s not an arcade one. Forza’s handling and lovingly recreated cars are very much in evidence and it features more than 65 different types of road surface.
Come October, Forza Horizon could top the wishlists of both boy racers and serious petrolheads alike.
