Forza Horizon 2 (for Xbox One)

An Open World of OptionsForza Horizon 2 takes its time doling out its more than 200 beautifully rendered cars. You start with a choice between a BMW Z4 SDrive35IS, Toyota Supra RZ, or Chevrolet Camaro SS Coupe. After the opening races, the choices gradually expand to Ferraris, Audis, Aston Martins, and to vans and trucks, too. You unlock them in a couple of ways. You can win them as prizes in Wheelspin, a roulette wheel you spin after gaining a level. You can also buy cars or stumble upon them as Barn Finds (junkers or gems scattered about the game's open world). You can collect the heaps and bring them back to your garage to tune up, paint, and decal to your heart's content.

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The customization options are many and far deeper than those in Need For Speed: Rivals$33.66 at Amazon. You can change the colors of individual car parts (the hood, rims, window tint, etc.) and create your own designs. Taking a page from PhotoShop, Forza Horizon 2's creation tools offer layers to edit, and you can skew and resize your designs to your satisfaction. Customization also extends to your cars' performances. You can tune and upgrade tire pressure, gears, alignment, brakes, springs, and more until the ride handles just how you want. Additionally, you can select how hard or easy races will be by selecting the AI opponents's difficulty levels, whether you want assisted braking or steering, and a host of other variables. You can truly create your own car and experience.
You can drive wherever you want, too. Forza Horizon 2's open-world design lets you cruise through the rainy streets of Nice or go off-road and plow through somebody's field. If you have Kinect you can ask A.N.N.A., an Automated Natural Navigation Assistant, for suggestions on where to go. The fancy GPS informs you of the Career Mode races in your vicinity, as well as where Showdowns and Bucket Lists (more on these below) are located. At times, A.N.N.A. takes a while to respond. She's a great feature, a companion who guides you where you want to go without making you bother with a menu, but either the Kinect's microphone or the game itself had trouble recognizing my voice commands.
Showdowns are Hollywood-style races against other vehicles, such as Italian stunt jets or trains, while Bucket Lists are challenges like time trials or air-jump contests. The Bucket Lists are pretty basic, but they're not without charm. A favorite challenge had me speed a Ferrarri to its destination as quickly as possible as sunlight gleamed off the red paint and a synth-heavy soundtrack played in the background. It was as if SEGA's OutRun returned from the 1980s.

Go, Speed, GoThe racing is great fun, if difficult. You can shift the difficulty to your heart's content before each race, but it may take a few retries before you find the right combination of easy or hard, manual or automatic, clutch or no clutch. You can choose how you race, too. You can "race clean" or smash into your opponents, barrel through street signs and lampposts, and perform stylish moves during races like drifts and jumps. You chain these moves together to the gain experience points (XP) necessary to unlock Skill Points to buy Perks. Perks can increase the amount of XP you gain while performing drifts and clean races.
Rewind is a great feature that fixes any mistake you make while racing. Just press Y and the game rewinds to a few seconds before the crash, swerve, or burnout. Rewind is incredibly useful, and you can turn it off if you deem it cheating.
Drivatars return from past Forza games. These are AI opponents based on the driving patterns of actual human players. If you have friends on Xbox Live with Forza Horizon 2, they can invade your game as Drivatars when they're not online. Your own Drivatar takes over for you when you're not playing and gains XP while you're away.
Other social aspects include the usual online competitive multiplayer, a Free Roam mode that lets you enjoy relaxing road trips, and Car Clubs, where you compare car specs with other players. You can even buy another driver's car if you like the way it's tuned.
Trading PaintForza Horizon 2's huge open-world is beautiful. Dynamic weather and night and day cycles mean you get a variety of visuals to enjoy. The rainslicked roads, reflecting neon light as headlights cut through the night, are absolutely breathtaking. The human characters, however, are stuck deep in the uncanny valley. Plasticy arms and inarticulate faces distract from the true stars—the gorgeous cars.
There's another caveat to this otherwise excellent game. Seasoned Forza drivers should have no problem with Horizon 2, but newcomers may find it difficult to get around the sensitive controls. If you're used to SEGA All-Stars Racing or Mario Kart you may be in for a humbling ride. There are no tutorials, and getting the hang of drifting around corners can be the ultimate test of patience. It will be some time before you're driving like Ryan Gosling or Vin Diesel.
The biggest problems, however, are the installation and load times. They can be interminable. Installing the game, even after it was downloaded, took an exorbitant amount of time—north of an hour. I recognize that the game is over 30GB in size, but the load times between races are too long. Perhaps it's a tradeoff for the more tolerable, consistent loading while playing in the game's vast, open world. Still, I wish that even simple actions like opening a menu or closing a race didn't take so long.
Let's Go AwayForza Horizon 2's almost the complete package, but lengthy load times and a steep learning curve hold it ever so slightly back from racing perfection. The races are challenging and intense, full of hairpin turns and Terminator-like Drivatars. The game's also a grogeous European road trip where you can calmly drive around the highly detailed French countryside listening to radio stations full of excellent synthwave, rock, and classical music. All this adds up to a Top Gear fanatic's dream game and an Xbox One owner's next likely purchase. Forza Horizon 2 is PCMag's Editors' Choice for next-generation console racing games on the Xbox One.