Britain boasts some awful weather but beautiful countryside. Seriously, when I visited Edinburgh in the middle of July, the highest temperature in my week there was 18 Celsius. That’s pretty much our winter low, during the height of their summer. Honestly, how is anyone supposed to live like that? Fortunately, you can now experience all the challenges of British driving - including tractors and errant sheep - with none of the wet and cold, as you drift and crash in the latest installment of Microsoft’s arcade, open-world racer, Forza Horizon 4.

Two years ago, we were sent to Australia to become the ultimate Festival organiser. Racing from Sydney to the Outback and back was a treat, you can take my word for it. However, the base game lacked one realism feature – weather. It was either sunny or raining, with no seasonal changes that would make driving at different times of the year on the same roads more or less challenging. We got a taste of the difference cold weather would make with the Blizzard Mountain expansion but now we have a true seasonal cycle to contend with.



The game starts you off as yet another rookie at another festival but, thank goodness, the festival organiser schtick has been dumped. Practically, this makes no difference in the day-to-day management of your career as you still have to collect "influence" to qualify for each round. You gain influence through good driving, placing well in races, or by being spectacularly bad and crashing into things; something I am intimately familiar with. You can set damage to purely cosmetic or make it affect vehicle performance. The more realistic you make the simulation - car damage, braking, and steering - the more in-game currency you will earn for completing an event. For those of us just looking for fun, the defaults are the right choice.

The game starts you off as yet another rookie at another festival but, thank goodness, the festival organiser schtick has been dumped.

The weather cycle is not as immediately apparent as you'd think as I’d say the first five to ten hours is spent in a sort of tutorial. You can take your time here as you must gain influence to qualify for each season’s series of races. Until you have completed this section, the game won’t move into autumn from summer, or progress into winter afterwards. Maybe I hit a bug but the transition to autumn occurred soon after I reached the requisite influence level, whereas the transition to winter took a good couple of hours. When I switched to playing on PC - the digital version is a PlayAnywhere title - the game immediately transitioned to spring.



This tutorial phase allows you to experience the effects weather will have on the game. In summer, a Huracan is great on the roads as the tyres will grip that much quicker as the tar is warmer, but in winter, be prepared to slip and slide along, as snow and ice make their presence felt. In spring, don’t be caught watching the pretty splashes of rain on your screen lest that tree walk in front of you. Offroad is just as treacherous; even in Halo’s venerable Warthog, I found my skills, limited as they may be, tested on the muddy tracks. While those puddles of water create great screenshots as you plough through them, you will lose precious speed and thus milliseconds, preventing that podium finish.

In summer, a Huracan is great on the roads as the tyres will grip that much quicker as the tar is warmer, but in winter, be prepared to slip and slide along, as snow and ice make their presence felt.

This seasonal variation is an amazing technical feat and addition, but also a source of frustration. If you watch the spring event video below, you will see that near the end is a huge jump into water. However, as you must hit the green gates in order not to be sent to the back of the pack, a section of roadway around the puddle and house is simply not available to me. I cannot explore while racing to find shortcuts. This is something that was encouraged in Burnout Paradise - a last-gen game! Perhaps a minor quibble, but something that should be addressed in the next installment. It's feels strange that an open-world racer would feel so constrained.



Once you complete one seasonal cycle and qualify for the "festival" itself, you'll be dropped into the main meat of the game, as it were. Here, the weather will cycle each week, regardless of your progress. This ensures that the playing field is level for all players. As this review was timed for the launch week, I have yet to experience this first reset, which should either be tonight or on Wednesday. This seasonal rotation also allows the team to develop themed events for each week, ensuring that there is a compelling reason for players to log in weekly, if not daily.

While weather and simulation options affect the handling, the game never drifts too close to the mainline series. This is not a sim, but an arcade-racer, meant for people to have fun with. You can spend hours tweaking the engine, the wheel alignment, and all sorts of other little mechanical details that get petrolheads all nervous and giggly, and yes, your race times, top speeds, and spot on the leaderboards will be affected, but that is not necessary to enjoy the game.



At its core, this is a game made for people who can recognise their Porsche's and Lamborghini's, and know their brake pedal from the accelerator, but rely on professionals to service their cars. As such, the cars are very forgiving: taking a bend at over 200 kph and tapping the brakes doesn’t result in you pinwheeling across the road and into some poor unfortunate farmer’s barn, rather it flings you into a forgiving drift that if you are quick enough to counter steer on, can turn into a skill-multiplier gaining you more influence instead of a trip to the morgue.

At its core, this is a game made for people who can recognise their Porsche's and Lamborghini's, and know their brake pedal from the accelerator, but rely on professionals to service their cars.

But for people who still don’t quite get it, there’s the rewind feature. You will lose some influence and some credits, but if you get that corner very, very wrong, or don’t realise that you must hit that ramp at just the right angle in order not to careen into a tree or boulder, just tap Y and rewind to a earlier position, giving you enough time to correct your course. This is cheating, sure, and you can turn it off, but why would you? It’s in the game and and why not use all the tools the developers have given you to have fun?



The game features a couple of mechanical improvements worth noting. I’ve already mentioned that you are no longer the organiser, and now you can centre your game around houses that you buy. Acting much like the Festival hubs from the last game, these are places where you can change your avatar’s look. However, unlike the last game, you don’t have to go to a hub to change cars. Now, just bring up the menu and choose to change cars, and the new car is delivered to wherever you are; simple and no fuss.

What hasn’t changed much is the map and the open-world structure. This is a game with a ton of events and secrets to find - like cars hidden in barns and various notice boards to smash. Making its debut is the movie stunt-driving challenges. These have some story tacked on but, basically, you get to drive very fast in amazing cars, while trying to beat a clock or a fighter jet. The number of things to do can get overwhelming but my advice is to just do them as and when you like. Don’t be a completionist, just have fun.



Not unexpectedly, the game is gorgeous; absolutely stunning and on par with anything the very highest end PCs can produce. Playing it on the Xbox One X ensures that it looks its best, but to play it at a native 4K you have to sacrifice some frames and the game locks to 30FPS. If you're willing to sacrifice some visual flair with the "Performance" mode, you'll instead get a buttery smooth 60FPS. I am sure that there are some dropped frames here and there, but nothing I noticed. One small criticism of the graphical engine is that damage to the world is not persistent; if you smash through some stone boundary walls, the stones will go flying all over the place, but after a few minutes the little repair elves emerge to fix everything. It would be nice to be able to memorialise your crashes. Driving past that spot again and seeing the persistent damage would be a good reminder that you are more Eddie the Eagle than Michael Schumacher.

Not unexpectedly, the game is gorgeous; absolutely stunning and on par with anything the very highest end PCs can produce.

Making a welcome return is photo mode, for those people who want to be photographers without actually leaving the couch. The system is intuitive and, with a bit of practice, even a complete newbie to the hobby will be taking amazing pictures. Unfortunately, the mode doesn’t offer you a save to HDD or share on Twitter feature. For that, you must use the console’s built in game capture functions - just remember to hide the UI.

The game features amazing audio, from the low idle rumble of the Warthog, to the high-pitched whine of the Huracan as you put your foot flat. I cannot fault the sound design at all and it's clear that the hard work put into the last couple of installments continues to pay dividends. The radio stations make a return, but again the song selection is limited. Eventually I switched to Spotify to add some variety to my playlist.



As a first party game, any digital purchase is accessible via the Windows Store on a Windows 10 PC. This is a great initiative as, if you travel for work and have a decent enough laptop, you can play the game away from your Xbox. The transition is seamless as progress across platforms is synced, so no worrying about different save points and repeating races.

There is a caveat, two in fact, specific to PC gamers (ed - all hail the master race?). Firstly, the game did not show up as owned on the Windows Store after I redeemed my code on the Xbox. I clicked on purchase and instead of checking my account and recognising that, in fact, I owned the game it created a second purchase and charged my card. I had to log a ticket and get Microsoft Support to call me to get the cost refunded. Even after that, the only way to actually download the game to my PC was to go to the store via a browser, navigate to recent purchases, and from there click on install. That then opens the Windows Store app and started the install.

As a first party game, any digital purchase is accessible via the Windows Store on a Windows 10 PC. This is a great initiative as, if you travel for work and have a decent enough laptop, you can play the game away from your Xbox.

The second caveat has to do with streaming software. For some reason, Windows 10 games do not work with any capturing software other than Xbox DVR and GeForce Experience, which I used and didn’t realise that my mic was set to automatically record (hence the echo and some sweary bits - PG13). Action!, OBS, SLOBS and XSplit all result in the game failing to launch. It’s a known issue and various Reddit threads are full of angry PC gamers.

PC-specific gripes aside, Forza Horizon 4 shows what the Xbox is capable of when Microsoft gets out of their own way. While it is a sequel and not a new IP, it is still one of the best racing games released this generation, competing only against its predecessors. If you just like arcade driving games like Need For Speed, or even hardcore sims (if you're willing to tweak some settings), this is the game for you. Hell, even if you don’t enjoy racing games, this might be the game for you.