Game Reviews

 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.

Rather than a chop-shop banger, this is a custom thoroughbred: a game that shares many of the strengths of its parent and adds a few that are all its own. Playground is a talented supergroup of racing game veterans working with raw materials of the finest quality: Turn 10's graphics and physics engines, handling model, upgrade system and car catalogue. On these rock-solid foundations it's built a hugely entertaining blacktop odyssey that finally realises the potential of open-road simulation racing.

Those open roads are found in a miniaturised impression of the US state of Colorado, rendered as a sort of theme park for autophiles. Colorado is known for its majestic scenery, and Horizon does it justice, creating a pocket universe where towering mountain ranges flow smoothly into rolling plains and red-rock canyons in the space of a few miles.

It's as neatly and credibly condensed as the short 24-hour cycle that bathes the landscape in the rich tonal changes of late summer dawns and dusks. It's a simply gorgeous map - and anyone who's been lucky enough to take to the local roads for real will attest to how faithful it is in detail and atmosphere, if not actual geography.

All this craft comes at the cost of true scale. It's a deceptively compact game-world and you will see most of its variations within a few hours, while the many dozens of race events have to make economical use of its road network. Over time you'll become intimately familiar with the snaking passes, roaring freeways, secret dirt tracks and tangled smalltown layouts, learning the corners as if it were a single, giant circuit. That's not a bad thing; while it's not built on the breathtaking real-world scale of Eden's Test Drive Unlimited games, the roads are a good deal more interesting to drive.