I'm about half way through the Winter section. I'm not sure if I'm going to play more.
Pros:
- Good open world graphics and performance
- 60fps option (I'm on X)
- Good selection of cars
- Season are a good addition
- Houses are nice
Cons:
- Same game as FH2 and FH3, almost nothing new of significance.
- The world can be boring to drive in, towns are empty, field after field can sem lifeless.
- Driving model still sluggish, 60fps did not help.
- Driving festival is still annoying as is the music.
- The races are all just point to point, no real variety outside of the occasional stuntman stuff.
- Cars don't matter, pick a car and you can win just about every race with it. They auto fill the competitors with the same cars. What is the point of unlocking cars or tuning?
- No use of vertical space. There are rarely jumps or ramps or anything to get airborne with. I want to drive off roof top!
- Same cars as the last two games, why do I want to keep unlocking the same cars over and over?
- The avatars, emotes and clothes are really dumb.
- Towns feel lifeless. Edenborough had six people and no cars.
- Some stuff like houses are really expensive and seem to pushing microtransactions - why not have a boss race to win houses?
Fundamentally I want FH series to be a better racing game. Either for more realistic or go more bombastic. Either let me pick a road car and force me to drive well on the road, punish me if I take a Lambo onto a field or if I pick a 4x4 let me take short cuts to keep up with the sports cars on roads. This would take a lot more thought on the part of the people designing the races, but right now they are completely lazy. They just went into an editor and put flags down making all the same cars drive to the same points and call it a race. Green flag to green flag. No variation or imagination.
Otherwise go full crazy town and give me nitro and big ramps and let me wreck the cars. Right now I can drive 200mph into a house and bounce off and keep driving. I understand they can't upset their licence deal with manufactures, but it sucks.
What I really want is a car-RPG. Make it so races have fixed competitors and make me unlock or tune a car to get better stats or drive better, but don't auto level everything, it makes the first race feel the sale as the race in hour 40. I want to start in a Civic and work my way up. Have different classes of races, but don't let the driver pick any car for any race, it all feels the same. Make me work my way up street races, offroad races, etc. with different classes of vehicles. I want that new Lambo that I earned to be meaningful. Right now you unlock cars randomly and they are meaningless. Fast cars do nothing other than make fast competitors. The sense of progression is nothing more than a collectathon. More levels, more spins, more cars, clothes, emotes, perks, etc. But problem is they don't matter. The races never change, they never get harder, there is no sense of getting "more powerful" either via skill or cars.
In the end it's not a bad game, it's just not the game I want it to be. We have three almost identical games in the Horizen series in one gen and they should evolve more. But maybe they don't need to, reviewers and players don't seem to care.
