You Don’t Have to be a Car Person to Enjoy Forza Horizon 4

I don’t drive. It’s not that I can’t drive, mind you, it’s just that I prefer not to, and it’s from that angle that I approach a driving game like Forza Horizon 4. It’s a sleek, well-oiled machine that brings cars and players together in new ways, but the real test, for me at least, is “does it make me think about maybe wanting to drive?” It does. By my own personal metric of driving game evaluation, it is a success.

The past two driving games that I enjoyed were Dirt Rally, which I sunk a weird amount of hours into earlier this year, and Need For Speed Underground 2, which I became obsessed with in a (frankly unhealthy) way back in 2004. After getting deep into Forza Horizon 4 since its release earlier this month, I have to tell you that it is the perfect middle ground between those two games, as if someone read my exact mind to create a racing game.

Horizon 4 jams players into a Scottish open world and asks them to toot around and do races. There’s some hide and seek shenanigans, like finding hidden barns in the world, but the majority of the game is just about racing around in different weather and seasonal conditions and trying to get first place. Like the Dirt games, it is no nonsense, and if you want to race in an accessible game format, then this is a game for you.

Like Underground 2, though, Horizon 4 has a lot of cars, customization options, and skills that you can unlock. It wants you to buy the cars of your dreams and make them into the aesthetic objects that you want, although sadly the game does not have the degree of specific body modification (and under-car light additions) that the Underground games were so good for. However, you can buy a trash car from the 1960s and completely cover it in wood paneling, so there is still room for true uniqueness in the racing experience.

I say all of this as praise. I am not a racing game aficionado, and to some degree that makes me a very honest critic when it comes to these types of games. As I said at the top, I don’t even like driving real cars. I have none of that American open road fantasy about me. So a game that can bridge all of these basic realities of my life and make me care about a car game is, in my mind, at least interesting. Forza Horizon 4 does that work. It makes me think about how following the right line and accelerating and braking at certain moments impacts the long duration of a race. It makes me care about road conditions, for God’s sake, and it does so in a way where I don’t have to be bogged down in simulation-y minutiae.