Most importantly, the roads are wonderful. And it's just as beautiful and atmospheric, especially when sun goes down or the rain rolls in. The new setting - the southeastern corner of France and northwestern corner of Italy - isn't quite as grandiose or as varied as the first game's Colorado, but it's slightly more plausible for that. That formula unleashes a judiciously pruned and embellished selection of the Forza car catalogue on the open road, using a gorgeous map based loosely on a real-world region for a setting, and the Horizon festival of music and racing for a context and a soundtrack. (It's telling that our YouTube editor Ian, who normally doesn't get on with racing games at all, is smitten with Horizon 2.) Drivatars are better behaved than they were in Forza Motorsport 5 - to what extent they're more than regular AI with Gamertags attached is uncertain, but it's still a fun feature.įor the most part, Playground restricts itself to tuning and tinkering with its sound formula.

Newcomers, meanwhile, will be blown away by a supposedly serious racing game that dares to be this romantic and thrilling. Forza Horizon fans might find it all pretty familiar, but then Forza Horizon fans are hardly likely to mind that. It's no revolution: this is an iterative, by-the-book sequel to a game that was already very good. That's big talk, but Forza Horizon 2 is the work of a studio humming with enthusiasm and professional confidence. This is a game that lays claim to the spirits of such past greats as Project Gotham Racing and Test Drive and seizes them with aplomb. 2012's Forza Horizon, an open-word spin-off for the Xbox-exclusive sseries, was a supremely good start, and its sequel does not deviate from its course by one turn of the wheel. The young UK studio is on a mission to break this sad entropy by building a bridge between hardcore and populist, between the car games you get and the car games you dream about, between rubber and soul. That's all very well for enthusiasts like me, but the genre as a whole is in danger of entrenchment and exclusion - of losing sight of something as simple and important as sheer entertainment value.Įnter Playground Games. This year, even EA's mass-market stalwart Need for Speed will be missing its first Christmas since 2001. It's a counterintuitive truth about the current, strange state of racing games that drier simulation racers have endured - games like Gran Turismo, its opposite number Forza Motorsport, and the thriving PC sim scene - while the appetite for more flashy, exciting and accessible games seems to have dried up. Great multiplayer racing enhanced by a glorious celebratory tone.

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