9/10 at eurogame too
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012- ... zon-review"Forza Horizon is one of those games that tries too hard to look hip. Its characters and setting - a festival of music and motor racing - share the same sanitised vision of youth culture you see in ads for mobile networks. Its colour scheme is black with hot pink and every menu rests at a 15 degree angle. Achievements have titles like 'OMG' and '#WINNING'.
Perhaps it's trying to correct the famous lack of charisma of its parent series Forza Motorsport, from Microsoft's in-house team Turn 10. Or perhaps it's trying to cover up a strain of rank commercialism, since it's plastered in sponsor logos and invitations to buy tokens for shortcuts. An offshoot made by another studio - new UK outfit Playground - Forza Horizon comes across like a marketing drive first and a game second, tainted as it is with buzzwords like "brand extension" and "annual cadence".
Prepare to swallow your cynicism, however, because Forza Horizon is a quite brilliant racing game - one of the best of its generation. It's also a lesson in how to make that development model work to create something greater than the sum of its parts."
"The set-up has you arrive at the Horizon festival as a no-name newbie and rise through the tiers of competition - symbolised, in a neat touch, by coloured wristbands - while taking down arrogant rival characters and being flirted at by the cutie-pie organiser. It's bland fluff with some painful one-liners,
but it's not given undue importance"
That bodes well as it seems the actual game underneath is very solid indeed, i'm interested again