Forza Horizon 2 Reviews
This feels less like a review and more like a love letter to Forza Horizon 2. This game was an absolute joy to review, and I'll play it long after this article goes live. Like opening the hood on a Ferrari, Forza Horizon 2 is filled from fender to fender with absolute awesome.
'Forza Horizon 2' has delivered an over the top, open world hit for the Xbox One.
There's no great revolution here and it occasionally lacks for visual variety and challenge, but Horizon 2 earns its stripes with a breezy determination to simply show you a ruddy good time.
The game's only issues are minor – a reliance on a race discipline it doesn't quite master, and the fact that it really only builds on what we knew from the first game without ever striking out too far on its own. The Horizon offshoot has unshackled the Forza franchise, letting it run free into the wild, and this new adventure ensures that we don't take that freedom for granted.
If you are an Xbox One owner and looking for a racing game that is an open world, fun, and has a lot of replayability while being both accessible to beginners and a challenge racing veterans given the number of gameplay options, then you really shouldn't look any further then Forza Horizon 2.
Forza Horizon 2 is a great looking game. The southern European setting is gorgeous and provides a variety of roads and settings to race on. The presentation is slick all the way through, and the six radio stations ensure you'll always have something to listen to (even if they aren't quite as stellar as those in the first Horizon, which I still listen to regularly).
Forza Horizon 2 is a fantastic racing game, probably the best released so far in this short-lived generation of consoles. Xbox One owners should definitely check it out. The amount of content is impressive, but even more impressive is that most of it is really fun to play. Horizon 2 starts off a laundry list of exclusive titles for MS, we can only hope the rest are as excellent as Playground's latest racer.
Forza Horizon 2 easily records a podium finish ahead of what is going to be a busy winter for the racing genre.
Forza Horizon 2 is just about everything you would expect from an already superb game upgraded and moved to a stronger platform. While it's disappointing that higher end driving rigs still can't be used, the quality of the game and the Xbox One's controller ease the pain just a bit. This one is well worth the 100+ hours it will take to work your way through.
Forza Horizon 2 picks up where the first game finished, and improves on just about every area. The FM5 engine produces some absolutely stunning graphics, which is matched in equal parts by the audio and sounds of the cars. The world is as open as it can be and leaves the players to drive and race wherever they want. Add to this all of the single-player events, multiplayer races, co-op events, road trips, and car clubs, and this is a mammoth package of pure petrolhead pleasure. The festival atmosphere is felt throughout the game. It is fun from start to finish. Due to its diversity and replayability, it's hard to say what more you could want from such a title. In short, following in the tire treads of its predecessor, this could well be the racing game of 2014.
This is about as good as open-world driving gets.
A near-perfect arcade racer, with gorgeous graphics, beautiful scenery and some of the best on-road and off-road driving around. With Forza 5's guts still inside it, you can make Horizon 2 as arcade-easy or demanding as you choose, and throughout the game shows a level of flair and invention that leaves its would-be rivals choking dust. It might not be the best racing game we'll see this year, but it sets a fearsomely high benchmark for others to beat.
[W]hile one can appreciate a good binge session from time to time, Forza Horizon 2's immensely accessible design makes 20-minute sessions just as attractive.
If you're a Top Gear fanatic, you probably have Forza Horizon 2 pre-ordered and pre-loaded. Newbies may falter, but they should stick with the game because it's the premier racing title on the market.
A colourful, energetic driving game which suffers from an uneven tone and an abundance of ideas
Forza Horizon 2 is light on challenge, heavy on fun, delivering one of the most exciting and enjoyable racing games in years.
Horizon 2 is a wheel that has not so much been reinvented as polished to perfection. Whilst comparable to other open-world racers such as Burnout Paradise and Test Drive Unlimited, it takes the genre to a new level.
If you love racing games, Forza Horizon 2 is a must. In fact, it's so good that it's worth buying a new console for.
Bigger doesn't always equate to better. Forza Horizon 2 definitely delivers a gameplay experience a step above its predecessor, but gutting story mode leaves the single-player soulless and more akin to a grind.
[Y]ou're always doing something, and there's always something to do in this game. Let's just hope that there's ever-faster cars and ever-more stuff to destroy on the horizon with this series.