My full review of Forza Horizon 4

[JMM72]

Due to Steam's review length limit, and unable to make it so short without removing many things I want to say, I decided to post this here. Note that I will not subscribe to the thread, so you can agree or disagree all you want, I'll not read it.

This is going to be long, but can't be exhaustive. First of all, I'll start with the good.

The Good

Last summer '23 I bought 'Forza Horizon Ultimate Driving Bundle' which supposedly included everything in FH4 and FH5; however it didn't include the Hot Wheels car pack. I was aware and I think I got it at a great price. Finally at the turn of the year I started playing FH4.

At the time of this review I have played every single day for a bit over 2 months, for a total of 322 hours. I think I know enough to say that the game impressed me. Good graphics, great world (both well designed and BIG), lots of cars, and this is important, loads of things to do. Single player and online multiplayer are together seamlessly (unless you disable online play) so you can do one single player event and then run to the start area of Forzathon Live to play among other people cooperatively on some challenges.

And let me insist, there are so many things to do in this game. Every week the season changes; every month the multiplayer series change. Each change comes with different championships, challenges, rewards and whatnot. Many things to do alone, many things to do with or against others. Lots of achievements and levels and rewards and exclusive stuff you must fight for with the best of your skill. The open world, even when you think you've ran around it and you know it well, offers too many things you can do in varied ways. What about racing through the fields and mountains with luxury berlinas, or try to get to 500kmh/300mph in the fastest car? Extensive stats and levels for everything can tell you what are you missing and where to go next.

Wheelspins, auctioning, photographs, backstage access to exclusive cars, lots of items and clothes for your character, winning and taunting animations, absurd horn sounds, six radio stations with more than 100 songs (most I liked - your mileage might vary), pre-made chat sentences, friending, running MP events, king/survival/banner fights, skills, stories, business, personal records...

And the customization of both the cars and the user experience is also great. The difficulty and driving helps cover pretty much everything, tuning your car both mechanically, setup, or visually, is easy. Creation of your own challenges and races is possible, as well as decals and custom paintings, and more for the creative minds. And it contains a lot of simulator elements, although in the end I think it's an arcade racer, which you can just make it feel more realistic, or less. But no, you can't take a piece of state-of-the-art engineering and design, spend 100,000 credits and make it run 150kmh faster than the original car, while also increasing the grip.

While I have a racing wheel, I decided to play this game with gamepad (because for me it's arcade racing, not sim) and it's very fun, customizable controls and responsiveness (well, depends on the car too) and the whole experience feels great.

I usually don't spend so much in games, I think this investiment really paid off. €38 for 322 hours makes each hour less than €0,12. And I think I could easily get the same hours again because I've not finished entirely the main map and haven't entered any of the two expansions. Truly worth the money for all the fun I got.

The Bad

Now when you start playing and discovering stuff and getting your first cars and driving around exploring, and racing, and trying stunts or challenges, get to your first frustrating winter week, winning an epic car and using it to obliterate opponents, it's all a great experience. Which doesn't take too much to show some shortcomings in design.

To select anything, each item is too big. At the beginning it doesn't matter when you have 20 cars, but when you have 500, trying to find if you have X or not, or change quickly to one of your favourites, is not that comfortable nor convenient. Visually it's great, but on the long run you'd prefer a list with quick search implemented. But this is usually small stuff that is in many parts of the game. Tiny annoyances you can bear with.

Then you discover you can change your gamertag (did I mention it needs a Microsoft account?) once; the second time it asks you to subscribe to Game Pass. And you can only choose from predetermined avatars if you're on PC. I've not discovered how to change to personalized ones if you're not on an Xbox. And yes I have the Xbox tools.

So I'm going with the big ones. When you try to exit to the desktop, you get the following text (something equivalent in your language) "Are you sure you want to exit? All progress will be lost." So you go around but... There's no save function. The game saves whenever it wants. You'd say it would save after ending a race. Or when you finish a Super7 High Stakes challenge streak. Or when you change car. Well, no. 3 days ago, while putting a car into auction, the game softlocked. I let it 15 minutes before having to resort to task manager, it didn't even react to Alt+F4. What I discovered when I returned to the game is that it was in the same state as 3 hours before. Not only that - the car I was auctioning disappeared, my Super7 High Stakes rewards disappeared, and I was in the same place as when I started playing. So in 3 hours full of events, the game saved nothing.

It doesn't give much confidence to not know if what you've done has been saved. Some people have found their own tricks; it saves when you change anything in the configuration, and then change it back to how you want it. In my case, I know it saves when you enter a house and choose it as your "home". But it's kind of paranoid that a game that can softlock while auctioning, showing a list of players, listing the positions in a multiplayer event, and more, might make you lose a lot of effort or luck, because there's no easy way to just save. In a game of these characteristics and budget, it's ludicrous. And to ice the cake, there's no simple way to reset your progress. There's a way, but too complicated for many people. Probably they end doing another Microsoft account and done.

Sometimes, multiplayer events consisting in five races make you wait so long between each race that you spend much, much more time waiting between races, than actually racing. You stare at the player list while nothing changes in the screen. You can't even change radio. You have no way to know if it has softlocked or if it'll eventually continue to the next race. It's very frustrating, there's absolutely no feedback like "waiting for players X and Y to load the next area" or something. Once, a five race event took me one whole hour.

The way it has to load your car, season and area before going to the next challenge in a Super7 which then loads another car, season and area is stupid. Many times it has to go (automatically) through all the menus and stages of loading something again and again. Very frustrating. Specially if you're doing a challenge that takes less than 20 seconds to do, is really frustrating. And I have a decent computer, I can't imagine how it goes for people closer to minimum specs.

And the final straw is the bugs. Not talking about the softlocking, which can be disastrous in certain circumstances. There are several bugs, reported zillion of times, but the game is old. And the money is old. So over these years, some things have changed, new things have been implemented, and with those changes and implementations, new bugs come. And one of the worse is the Backstage Pass. They're tokens which allow you to enter an exclusive market of around 60 cars that are rarely to almost impossible to obtain anywhere else, including auctions. Note that this was implemented after launch, so people could have more chances to get those cars because they removed the other way to get them.

Backstage passes are hard to obtain, it's a matter of luck waiting for them to be a seasonal, series or Super7 High Stakes reward. You can also get them advancing levels in certain stuff. But overall getting passes is slow. And I was slowly getting them, getting some cars, happy to see that this season (one week) has a pass as reward for the Super7 High Stakes. I was getting 1-2 passes daily until the event I told you above 3 days ago. Then the Backstage pass bug appeared. You simply stop getting them. You do what you need to do to earn them, but you go to Backstage and you have 0 passes. In fact I've won today a Super7 High Stakes, didn't touch any button so the game shows you (as if you were in a TV program) all you've won. And the Backstage pass doesn't even appear. I've done 7 challenges but only 6 rewards appear. I know, from now on, that I'll never have any more passes (once it appears, it's forever, reading forums and wikis), and it might take literally years if I'm lucky to get those cars. Unacceptable for those of us doomed with the collector's gen (despite what their FAQ says).

We are not customers. We're old money. All the money was already globbed by the economical machinery of the company. There's no budget to fix bugs, no matter how often they're reported. There have been three updates in the whole year 2023; lots of known issues are still unsolved, including four related to Backstage passes, but curiously the "never ever receiving passes anymore" is not mentioned. The money and effort go to Forza Motorsport, until the next Forza iteration comes. For a company that seeks to have prestige and be a referent of quality, this is shoddy. Fishy. Simply not acceptable. I don't know how much would cost to fix a bug as severe as the Backstage pass. But I think we know the company has that money. It simply doesn't care, because the efforts are put on the new money from the newest published games. And as sheeps, the majority move forward to the newest published games, leaving behind the other sheeps who want to stay in the same grass. "Oh, you can stay in that grass, we're so sorry it's slightly toxic."

If you think I'm exaggerating, read this excerpt from an official communicate:

Originally posted by Forza Forums Community Manager:

Backstage Pass Note: Following our March 2023 FH4 update to set future Festival Playlist rewards, players may continue to not receive the Backstage Pass from 50% series completion. While the team focuses on FH5 content, there are no plans to work on fixing the FH4 Backstage Pass reward issue at this time.

Original link: https://forums.forza.net/t/festival-playlist-events-and-rewards-through-june-1-spring-s61/602262

My Conclusion

No company is perfect, but you see developers devoted to their creations, taking the commitment and delivering the promises, and then the big companies do nothing like that, just have big budgets, and that's all. Their promises? They don't care, because they know people will end buying their products. After so many fiascos like Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana, No Man's Sky (see how many people bought that one); and after endless launches that are full of bugs and should be in beta, still testing and fixing, but instead using users as free betatesters until they're tired of fixing things; after all those skeleton games that milk us with DLCs that are needed to fully enjoy the game (EU4 is a great example); after all that, we gamers still buy their products. It's our fault. We don't have an united front, and we'll never have. Companies have found that this business model works for earning lotsa money, and that's what matters. It's our fault.

I've had my lot of bad deals with Microsoft (or Microsoft Studio, or Xbox Game Studio, or however they want to name them) including the disappearance of my favourite golf sim franchise ever, Links. But here I draw the line. I tell you, this has happened already, another user with another company, and will happen again to so many people. "I'm done with X, never ever going to buy and support them again". Today is the day that I'm done with Microsoft. Not a cent will ever go again to them from my pocket. I will play what already paid, knowing what to expect. I've also kept away from other big companies with dubious ethical behaviour with their customers, like Ubisoft, EA, Paradox (well, I was also fully done with Paradox long ago) and the likes. But with Microsoft it's a total bye to their games forever.

I'll do like others, focus on smaller companies, indie developers, and true and tried behaviour. Whenever I read a review saying that the dev is responsive, helpful and delivers what's needed, I try to check if that's true - then that game goes to my wishlist. When there are complaints against the dev for not hearing customers, abandoning games, etc. it doesn't matter how good the game looks, I just don't buy it.

Thus, my conclusion is that this game is not recommended, because I'm sure you can find other racing experiences. None will be like this one, each game has its appeal, its personality, but surely not playing FH4 will not be the end of the world.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

Opinions are like buttholes.