Forza Horizon 4

PC, Xbox One

Developer Playground Games Publisher Microsoft Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now

The big question on the whiteboards at Playground Games is always, you suspect, “Where next?” The answer, this time around, is home – a loving, lavish rendition of Albion that compresses the twinkling streets of Edinburgh, quaint cobbles of Cheshire and the dense forestry of the Lake District into a single, seamless space. Not to mention wideopen moorlands, dusty British beaches, the peaks of Perthshire and the looming walls of Bamburgh Castle.

The quandary wasn’t just a geographical one, though. After all, where do you progress after Forza Horizon 3, which was not only the best game in the Forza series – mainline and spin-offs both included – but one of the best racing games since the halcyon days of the genre? And so arrives the fourth, best and least overtly outrageous Horizon yet. One that’s more beautiful but less topographically dramatic; one that’s even more fun, but which isn’t as reliant on throwaway spectacle.

Forza Horizon 4 excels in its subtlety, spreading its best moments more evenly and backgrounding some of its most inventive ideas until you’re some ten hours into the game. It’s a change that isn’t immediately successful, lingering for too long in a halfway-house tutorial wedged between a thrilling introduction and the game proper. What’s eventually clear is that the answer to Playground’s whiteboard conundrum lay not just in finding a new place to mould into Horizon’s image – it was about creating a racing game that never stops, taking ideas from games such as Destiny and adapting them for the road.

The headline addition, changing seasons, are vital, not only affording Playground further visual flair to layer on top of Britain like changeable Instagram filters, but also offering a drastic impact to the driveability of the roads, fields, lakes and other surfaces. Of course, the bombastic setpieces have their moment in the headlights, from the marquee Showcase events – in which you’ll face off against the Flying Scotsman, a hovercraft, and Halo’s Covenant fleet, as you do – to all-new discipline-topping gauntlets that send you on 11-minute pilgrimages across this toy-towned Britain.

The game leans less on the expansion of your own festival this time, stripping away the multi-hub components of its forebear and instead pivoting its focus to the more noble, and successful, goal of keeping you playing for longer, with friends and rivals, all in a persistent universe that’s consistently offering you something to do, not to mention rewarding you for the effort. A fantastic prologue plonks you into all 800bhp of a McLaren Senna in the auburn of autumn before seamlessly transitioning into a rollicking rally race in the wet of spring. A cascade of trucks then punch through the billowing dunes of winter, before you’re back in the Senna once again – this time in the height of summer. The game then segues strangely into an extended, perfunctory learning curve, once again cycling through the dappling April showers to the Christmas flurries, four or five races apiece, oh-so-slowly introducing you to the multitude of disciplines on offer. Then suddenly, the game throws itself wide open. If Forza Horizon 3 was your once-in-a-lifetime summer getaway then Horizon 4 is the bona-fide lifestyle you can lead all-year round, albeit in a supercar. Aptly named Horizon Life, it heralds the game’s sudden transformation into a steady flow of activities, events, challenges and PvP races, all of which become part of a compulsion when you log in. The seasons themselves – initially just glorified skins designed to shift the world from snow, to sun, to rain and back again – instantly become a fundamental reason to sign in: to see new race events, challenges and barn finds depending on the season that particular week.

The game takes the Cortana-like sat nav, Anna, and increases her utilities to make entering everything, including the rotational seasonal events, as seamless as possible. Of course, all of those races and discoveries clock up more cash, influence and cars in what becomes a steady uptick of rewards. By the game’s peak, what began as a map littered with a few dozen markers is now plastered in them – fir road races, rallies, drag races, head-to-heads, barn finds, timed challenges, online championships and more. You’ve seen much of it in previous games, certainly, but Horizon has always defied the suggestion of less is more. Playground knows that as long as you’re driving, you’ll be happy.

If there’s one area in which it falters, it’s the consistency of the AI in races. Horizon has always tended towards choreography, leading to rubberbanding that can detract from the authenticity of a race. It’s still pretty noticeable here, and requires some fairly constant tweaking of difficulty settings to ensure the balance is right. Troubling too is the influx of tat that’s been fed into the reward wheelspins, awarded when you level up, to better fit an always-online world. There’s nothing quite as anticlimactic as completing the aforementioned 11-minute marathon, only to win a pair of gold chrome shorts, a woollen flat cap, and a novelty car horn. We expect we’ll find a use for them eventually.

There’s nothing else to poke at, really. There are whole essays that could be written about the depth of the tuning mechanics; or how, gimmicky as it is, the Drivatar system still provides a little thrill when you end up creating emergent rivalries with your dad’s gamertag. Britain never offers up the jet-setter lifestyle of its Aussie counterpart, then, but what it lacks in exotica it more than makes up for in sheer personality and the promise of an interconnected petrol-headed paradise that, presumably, will only grow and expand from here. Welcome home. Mind the sheep.

There are whole essays that could be written about the depth of the tuning mechanics