8 hours of play over the weekend
Good stuff.
It plays really well, when you get in the zone it flows, and it looks gorgeous.
Loads to do, I get regularly sidetracked when I try and do stuff. The map is relatively small, but it is jam packed with loads of shit.
Online is pretty good fun (when it works). The forzathon live every hour is a hoot (random challenges for a group of a dozen or so players, playing in speed traps, doing the biggest jumps etc…), the “get to the end by any means necessary” races are great
. I’m a straight line, no matter what kinda guy, which more often than not ends up with me on my roof in a tree…
It really feels like the UK countryside when you are driving around.
The dude-ness of the horizon event has been toned down, less twats shouting at you all the time.
Not so good stuff.
As mentioned, the online in shonky at the moment.
The UI is a mess, there is so much to do that it can be really difficult to focus on anything, the map is layers upon layers of icons. You can filter, but that filter seems to get reset at random. And there is no easy way to just filter out completed stuff.
The choice of what you can change at any point seems arbitrary at best. I can only change my outfit when I’m at home, or at the festival, but I can change my car at any point? When can I tune my car? At any point or only at home, or at the festival? I honestly have no idea. How do I sell duplicates of cars in my garage? Can I do that? Can I only auction them? It’s all a bit overwhelming and obtuse.
Sometimes the handling falls in the bad spot between sim and arcade. Most of the time it is totally fine, but every so often you get into a tank-slapper that you had no option of avoiding and can’t recover from. It’s not sim enough for you to be able to instinctively be able to recover, nor arcade enough to stop it happening in the first place.
All in all, 2 thumbs up. I’m at work and want to be at home playing it again, even after rinsing it over the weekend.