Well since Prey was a hard towel of dried spunk that left a taste in my mouth so bad that I wanted to play a casual relaxing game, I turned around and settled on a little driving game. I say little cheekily because Forza Horizon 3 is fucking huge.
The idea behind FH3 is that you and all your apparently billions friends invade Austrailia to set up a country-wide street racing festival with no regard for wildlife or property damage. It's a racing sandbox game, as much as a racing game can be a sandbox. There are races, stunt points, and secrets littered all over the map each one granting you levels, fans, bonuses, and 100% completion. The idea is that every stunt and race you win, you are granted fans and the more fans you attract the bigger your festival grows.
Now racing is just a baseline for you in this game. Because the game doesn't want you to just win, it wants you to score a bunch of points while doing it. So the game rewards style points for just about everything you do, points for crashing, not crashing, passing opponents, wrecking trees, fences, signs, drifting. Literally everything grants you points in some aspect or another, and continuously driving with style, multiplies all these things together. Which turns every race into a crazy level a fun, because you no longer are just trying to win, but you are trying to do as many tricks and destroy as much shit along the way as possible. It does wonders to make every single race exciting.
Outside of races you are free to drive around the open world which is lovingly crafting to never be boring. You can drive through the desert of the Outback, jungles of which i didn't even know austrailia had, beaches, or grasslands. To add to this freedom, roads are merely suggestions rather than requirements, and you can literally drive anywhere in any car, plowing through trees and fences is rather interesting when you are plowing through almost everything in a Ferrari like Paul Walker with God Mode enabled. It's a roaring good time, and this exploration has a purpose. All over the world there are sign boards to break, which offer either experience points, or fast travel options, though im not sure you need fast travel when driving around is as fun as it is.
Experience points come in two forms. SKill and Level points. Level points grant you slot machine spins after every level, which grant you money or cars. Skill points grant you perks that come in varying degrees of granting you more points.
So the premise is good, the driving is fun, and I haven't said anything bad yet.
Well here comes the bad. You are 90% likely to win more money than god very quickly with your level up spins which you can use to buy new cars to drive, but you don't ever need to buy any cars because the game throws free cars at you ever five minutes as you progress anyway. I guess if you want to drive a very specific car then go for it, but the game is actively telling and encouraging you to mix it up all the time that I never felt the desire to do that. Plus every car that is given to you is interesting, and mixed so I never found myself lacking in things I wanted to drive. The second car the game gave me was a fucking Lamborgini SUV...I didn't even know they made that shit!
Whenever the game gives you a free car it gives you a selection of options to chose from. The problem here is that the cars might all be the same category but they aren't the same power level. So I always just went with the most powerful car because I'll be damned if I'm going to handicap myself on purpose. It means that they aren't really giving you a choice, especially if you bump the AI difficulty up, you'll need the best car you can get to have a chance.
The grievances I have with FH3 are frankly minor. There isn't a lot to really say about an open world racing game. The racing is good, and driving the open world is fun. Pretty much case closed if you ask me.
The music could be better, but that's more personal taste than anything else.
If you like racing games, and are looking for something fun to drive away boredom, then you can't do better than Forza Horizon 3. 8/10
The idea behind FH3 is that you and all your apparently billions friends invade Austrailia to set up a country-wide street racing festival with no regard for wildlife or property damage. It's a racing sandbox game, as much as a racing game can be a sandbox. There are races, stunt points, and secrets littered all over the map each one granting you levels, fans, bonuses, and 100% completion. The idea is that every stunt and race you win, you are granted fans and the more fans you attract the bigger your festival grows.
Now racing is just a baseline for you in this game. Because the game doesn't want you to just win, it wants you to score a bunch of points while doing it. So the game rewards style points for just about everything you do, points for crashing, not crashing, passing opponents, wrecking trees, fences, signs, drifting. Literally everything grants you points in some aspect or another, and continuously driving with style, multiplies all these things together. Which turns every race into a crazy level a fun, because you no longer are just trying to win, but you are trying to do as many tricks and destroy as much shit along the way as possible. It does wonders to make every single race exciting.
Outside of races you are free to drive around the open world which is lovingly crafting to never be boring. You can drive through the desert of the Outback, jungles of which i didn't even know austrailia had, beaches, or grasslands. To add to this freedom, roads are merely suggestions rather than requirements, and you can literally drive anywhere in any car, plowing through trees and fences is rather interesting when you are plowing through almost everything in a Ferrari like Paul Walker with God Mode enabled. It's a roaring good time, and this exploration has a purpose. All over the world there are sign boards to break, which offer either experience points, or fast travel options, though im not sure you need fast travel when driving around is as fun as it is.
Experience points come in two forms. SKill and Level points. Level points grant you slot machine spins after every level, which grant you money or cars. Skill points grant you perks that come in varying degrees of granting you more points.
So the premise is good, the driving is fun, and I haven't said anything bad yet.
Well here comes the bad. You are 90% likely to win more money than god very quickly with your level up spins which you can use to buy new cars to drive, but you don't ever need to buy any cars because the game throws free cars at you ever five minutes as you progress anyway. I guess if you want to drive a very specific car then go for it, but the game is actively telling and encouraging you to mix it up all the time that I never felt the desire to do that. Plus every car that is given to you is interesting, and mixed so I never found myself lacking in things I wanted to drive. The second car the game gave me was a fucking Lamborgini SUV...I didn't even know they made that shit!
Whenever the game gives you a free car it gives you a selection of options to chose from. The problem here is that the cars might all be the same category but they aren't the same power level. So I always just went with the most powerful car because I'll be damned if I'm going to handicap myself on purpose. It means that they aren't really giving you a choice, especially if you bump the AI difficulty up, you'll need the best car you can get to have a chance.
The grievances I have with FH3 are frankly minor. There isn't a lot to really say about an open world racing game. The racing is good, and driving the open world is fun. Pretty much case closed if you ask me.
The music could be better, but that's more personal taste than anything else.
If you like racing games, and are looking for something fun to drive away boredom, then you can't do better than Forza Horizon 3. 8/10
