Forza Horizon 2 review: road not taken

It's developer Playground Games' (on the Xbox One version) second shot at making a big, social racing game out of the laser focus of the main series. There are no licensed tracks, no real-world altars to racing, no shrines to storied brands. Instead, there are speed traps, and hidden barns, and billboards to smash. Forza Horizon 2 is about the journey, not the destinations — like any good open-world game should be.

But, like Forza Horizon, Forza Horizon 2 finds mixed success in that regard. Horizon 2 has all the basics down, borrowing from almost a decade of Turn 10's racing fundamentals. But when it comes to building places to use all that hardware, the game comes up a little short.

Forza Horizon 2's story, such as it is, provides an excellent setup for the fictionalized southern European setting and the concept of the Horizon festival. I rarely asked why I was going on road trips or doing point-to-point races because the game contextualizes it so well. Just don't expect much more than that.

It helps that driving in Forza Horizon 2 is so enjoyable. The mechanical fundamentals of the Forza series are in place, though the move from 60 frames per second to 30 has made the car controls just a bit less responsive than they were in Forza Motorsport 5. Otherwise, Forza Horizon 2's car physics and handling are impeccable — each car feels unique, particular, like something to get to know. It's easy to develop favorites, and then, when prompted by a new championship class, to find a new favorite.

That shift from 60 frames per second to 30 is prompted by the broader scope of Horizon 2 in comparison to last year's Forza Motorsport 5. Horizon 2's world is big, significantly bigger than the last Horizon game, and for the first time in a Forza game, weather has been added to the mix to join the dynamic time of day — it makes for some spectacular sunsets and stormy racing.

In open-world fashion, there are collectibles. For example, there are more than a hundred billboards around the world to smash for bonuses. There are plenty of championships to enter, plenty of cars to buy, hundreds of roads to find and special cars inside hidden barns. All the pieces seem to be present to make for a consistently engaging hybrid of open-world systems and a deep racing game.

Yes, Forza Horizon 2 uses the same artificial intelligence system as last year's Forza Motorsport 5. The awkwardly named Drivatar system is constantly analyzing you and everyone else playing Forza Horizon 2 for your driving behavior, and putting a virtual approximation of those driver profiles into everyone's races. This system results in drivers that react much like you'd expect people to — they're often reckless and aggressive in a turn, causing spinouts and wrecks on a regular basis.

But they never got any better in my time with the game, a problem Drivatars also suffered in Forza Motorsport 5. Races later in the game weren't much more challenging than when I started, shy of some very poorly explained staged events.

Other racing games struggle with interesting AI, battling against this idea of sameness. But games like Forza Motorsport 5 and Gran Turismo 6 present a more compelling challenge than other cars — they license the most famous, infamous and storied racing venues on earth, each themselves an example of meticulous, well-tested design. They focus their time on fantastically refined mechanics and systems, and lean on decades of real-world track design from the real world. Racing games are as much about beating the track as the other people on it.

Forza Horizon 2 instead relies on courses built on top of its open world, and they can't compete. There's no equivalent to, say, Laguna Seca, a punishing, rewarding, fickle track that demands so much and provides such a deep sense of satisfaction for mastering its intricacies. Instead, there are two kinds of races, and two kinds of tracks — circuits, which are lapped races, and point-to-point sprints, which in turn are on streets, off-road, or a combination of both.

These start out fun, because winning against the forces of chaos feels like, well, triumph. Against evil, even. But after the 15th race, that chaos doesn't seem so chaotic. There's not much nuance to Horizon 2's track design. Circuit and point-to-point races on asphalt begin as melees at the first few turns before winnowing out. Any early leads you secure are unlikely to be challenged barring a catastrophe you can rewind and fix anyway. Offroad races are brawls from start to finish without any particular instruction or direction, other than to hit checkpoints.

This last part would be a redeeming feature, actually, save that there's little proper direction in offroad races. There are checkpoints that construct some kind of route, and the rest is up to God. God in this scenario is fickle. Strategies that seem expedient can be sabotaged by terrain that slows you down inadvertently or sends you flying, and the only way to figure it out is to fail — though at least it's a temporary failure with Forza's rewind feature, activated with a press of the Y button. Still, it feels like surviving, not succeeding.