➤ Forza Horizon 4 for PC, the review 🎮

Forza Horizon 4 it is pure visual enjoyment. Such a spectacular racer has not been seen for some time, and if the memory invariably comes back to Project Gotham Racing 4 it's because in the ranks of Playground Games there are people who have worked in Bizarre Creations, so they know perfectly well how to make fans jaw drop. After a few hours from the start of the campaign, we did a little experiment: we started to roam freely around the huge British setting of the game, reached the city of Edinburgh and parked in an avenue of the park in front of the castle. At that point we virtually got out of the car and activated the drone, moving very quickly through the streets of the Scottish capital, admiring the architecture of its most famous buildings and the streets of the center.

Well, the shop windows were not simple, rough textures stuck to a few polygons that no one would have bothered to observe closely in the middle of a race, but rather defined and diversified interiors: on the one hand a clothing store, on the other a bakery, and then again a place where live music is played in the evening. A short distance away, a square and a pedestrian street with people walking and discussing, creating a sharp contrast to the areas, deliberately desolate, where you run. The point is: such a level of care and detail was not necessary or taken for granted for a product like Forza Horizon 4, yet the developers have taken on it equally, with the intention of not really leaving anything to chance. Well, if in the minutiae there is such a great passion, let alone in the main contents of this new chapter of the Microsoft series.

Gameplay and structure

Available for free to Xbox Game Pass subscribers, on both PC and Xbox One, Forza Horizon 4 boasts a really cool take on the traditional open world structure seen in other racers. In addition to focusing on the great variety of situations, on a disproportionate number of events and on an equally gargantuan fleet of cars, which has something like 460 different cars, the game's developers have tried to keep the interest in the progression high by dividing this aspect in several parts and linking specific achievements to the completion of the races, to the customizations, to the artistic and creative implications of the experience, as well as to the possessions.

As the narrator says during the introduction, this is not simply a matter of trying your hand at a festival of out-of-the-ordinary competitions, but with a real way of life; and life requires times and spaces that in Forza Horizon 4 are declined in the form of dynamic seasons and the houses that we will be given the opportunity to buy. Tinsels of purely aesthetic value, mind you, but which offer the convenience of an easily accessible hub, where you can manage your garage and make any changes and upgrades to vehicles, to be financed through the use of credits earned with each victory. The seasons have been talked about in abundance, but between saying and making the difference is notoriously large.

In the very first part of the campaign we will be able to appreciate them all in relatively rapid succession and experience the way in which they influence the conditions of the asphalt, with situations also very distant from one extreme to the other. Because "arcade" does not mean "trivial", and when you aim at importing as an absolute reference for the genre, you have to know the difference between the two concepts. We are not in the range of Forza Motorsport 7 simcade dynamics, of course: in Horizon, fun, immediacy and visual opulence come first, but every car responds to certain rules and seasons play a destabilizing role compared to these elements, successfully mixing the cards of an experience that in this way never bores and finds further comfort in the folds of an online sector which is also dynamic. However, for this test on PC we have only scratched the surface of what the Playground Games title has to offer: for more details take a look at our review of the version of Forza Horizon 4 for Xbox One.

The PC version

Forza Horizon 4 runs on Xbox One S at 1080p and 30 frames per second, while on Xbox One X it offers the possibility to choose between two different modes: 2160p at 30 frames per second or 1080p at 60 frames per second. The quality in these last two cases is variable: at 4K the effects correspond almost entirely to the "ultra" preset on the PC, with the only exception of the ambient occlusion, while at 1080p many parameters switch to the "high" preset and are deactivated. some extras, such as night shadows. Excellent results for a hardware that is sold for 499 euros, there is no doubt, but we were interested in understanding how the game behaved in the presence of more advanced components, specifically an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti video card.

After the Forza Horizon 4 benchmarks with an RTX 2080 Ti, capable of obtaining at 2160p and with all effects at the maximum "only" 65 frames per second on average, we were afraid of not being able to push ourselves too hard with the settings to be able to enjoy consistent, "rocky" frame rates. Fortunately we were wrong, and there is no doubt that the work done by the development team appears commendable from this point of view as well. The options are numerous and actually allow you to scale the experience according to the system in your possession: in addition to the resolution and vertical synchrony it is possible to modify the general preset, the anisotropic filter, activate the night shadows, set the quality of the shadows, of the motion blur, environmental textures, static and dynamic geometry, choose which type of anti-aliasing to use and with which values, adjust the quality of the ambient occlusion, reflections on the windshield and mirror, the level of detail of the cars and the deformable terrain , to finally arrive at screen space reflection, lens flare, shaders and particles.

A huge amount of settings, in short, but what were the results on our configuration? By setting the resolution to 2160p and bringing all the effects to the maximum (therefore several items on "extreme"), without completely renouncing anti-aliasing but activating a simple FXAA, the same tests that on the RTX 2080 Ti returned an average of 65 frames they rewarded with round 60 fps. The simulation used for the benchmarks is quite varied and lively, but we wanted to verify this value even in real situations, perhaps within races with different participants and journeys full of dynamic elements. We weren't disappointed even in that situation: there are times when the engine drops two or three frames below the target, but it really comes down to trifles compared to the extraordinary visual quality of this title.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Processor: Intel Core i5 6600K @ 4 GHz
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
Memory: 16 GB of RAM
Operating system: Windows 10

Minimum requirements

Processor: Intel Core i3 4170
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti, AMD Radeon R7 250x
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Operating system: Windows 10

Recommended Requirements

Processor: Intel Core i7 3820
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, AMD R9 290X
Memory: 12 GB of RAM
Operating system: Windows 10

Comment

Digital Delivery Windows Store Price 64,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

9.5

Readers (154)

9.2

Your vote

Forza Horizon 4 is a feast for the eyes, an arcade racer capable of delivering sequences of great impact without neglecting the attention to detail, even the most marginal ones. The successful formula of dynamic seasons, which revolutionize the suggestive British scenario not only from an aesthetic point of view but also from a practical point of view, together with a really rich structure and an immediate gameplay but not devoid of personality, draw the picture of an exciting production, which on PC it is even more spectacular.