An adrenaline rush amongst a beautiful backdrop, “Forza Horizon 3” builds upon the original’s foundation and improves it tenfold to create a sprawling and incredible experience.
“Forza Horizon 3” is an open world racing game set in Australia based on the fictional “Horizon” festival, a celebration of exotic cars and exciting music. The player takes on the role of the main organizer of the festival, and it’s your job to participate in festival events to garner fans. Gathering fans leads to unlocking new cars, upgrades and other forms of progression in the game. There’s always something to do in “Forza Horizon 3.”
The festival improvements act as a skill tree, giving several buffs that lead to new car unlocks, more money and more fans. Each time you level up or complete a special event, you are given skill points used to apply in the skill shop. From there, you can unlock different buffs for experience, credits (money) and even new cars.
It’s par for the course of the “Forza” series to have a large catalogue of both modern and classic cars of all types, and per usual the newest entry in the “Horizon” series expands the selection to over 350 vehicles of all types. In one race you’ll be driving a super car and finding yourself constantly driving over 100 mph and another race you’ll be barreling through a thick forest in an off-road trophy truck.
You can also upgrade cars to certain classes of speed in order to adapt your favorite vehicle for any event. The customization in “Forza Horizon 3” is extensive; from new body kits, paint jobs, engine components, rims, tires and more. The customization also expands beyond car parts, allowing you to create artwork to display on your favorite vehicle, choose what radio stations you sign to the festival based on your music choice and make choices on the several expansions you can make to the festival as your fans grow.
Regardless of what choices you make to any vehicles, you can be sure that the cars and the festival are going to look beautiful. The graphics in “Forza Horizon 3” are stunning, and the fictional locations are relatively accurate to the real locations in Australia they’re based on. You can race from notable locations like Byron Bay to Surfer’s Paradise within a few minutes or less, but the world still feels realistically gigantic. The lighting and reflections are life-like, and the cars are accurately recreated from their real-life counterparts.
The hyperrealism also applies to the driving mechanics themselves. You can tweak the difficulty of your driving setup so that you can manually shift with or without the clutch, keep Anti-lock braking system (ABS) on or off, as well as tweak your car’s traction control. The rewind feature from previous “Forza” games returns, allowing an in-game retry. The skill of other drivers can be shifted to accommodate any player’s skill.
The only issue with the graphics is if you are playing “Forza Horizon 3” on PC, you’re going to need a rather powerful setup in order to run the game smoothly without any hiccups.
All in all, “Forza Horizon 3” takes the successful concepts and formula that powered the previous two and creates an all-embracing experience devoid of dull moments and encourages high replayability.