Category: Racing

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Game Ramblings #151 – Forza Horizon 5

More Info from Microsoft

  • Genre: Open World Racing
  • Platform: PC / Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

Look, this is Forza Horizon. From a meta game perspective, there’s nothing new. You drive around in an open world, find races, find over the top stupid events, crush signs, get a ton of cars. That hasn’t changed. The location has changed. The specifics of the story have changed. None of that is really important though. If you’ve played these games, you know if you like this series by now. If you don’t know if you like it, give it a try. That stuff’s not really what I care to talk about.

What’s nice about 5 is that it’s a lot of the things that they felt like they learned from 4, but amped up and there from the start. Seasons and seasonal play lists are no longer the big new feature, but just part of the game. As a result they feel oddly more integrated to me. There’s more variety in the seasonal play lists. There’s a better push to get you to jump into multiplayer games just to try them out, without the stress of needing to win. There’s just more of a reason to do these things for the hell of it. Being rewarded with cool new cars is just a part of the fun.

The other big thing just there is the Eliminator. For 4, this was the battle royale that was added as a random patch a year after the game’s release. What nobody expected is that it was going to be a hell of a lot of fun. For 5, it’s there from the start and continues to be chaotic. Now that it’s just a part of the game, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of dumb shouldn’t work but ends up being hilariously find ideas they come up with.

However, the big thing for me is related to screenshots in this one being in different aspect ratios. I was actually able to take advantage of cross platform play this time around, and boy does it work well. For FH3 and 4, my choices were PC or a base Xbox One, and let’s be realistic – that isn’t a choice. I was PC all the way. However, now I have my development PC or a Series X. They’re comparable hardware for me with comparable experiences – I can do 60 FPS in 21:9 1440p or I can do 60fps in performance mode dynamic res 4k. They’re both great experiences and I used them both.

The big thing for me is that the cross platform play just works. A lot of cloud save stuff in the game industry has tended to be sporadic. Nintendo’s cloud saves work well, but require a lot of manual handling that can be kind of a pain in the ass. Sony’s storage needs are so slim relative to the size of modern save files that I stopped taking advantage of it when I left the PS3 generation. On mobile, both Android and iOS have made me want to stab myself in the face when developing on those platform. Steam’s cloud saves work well though because they check when you launch a game for any newer data in the cloud. Microsoft takes this approach, and it works flawlessly. If I was already at my PC, I’d just play there. If I wanted to lay in my beanbag or didn’t want to turn my PC on, I just turned on the Xbox. In both cases I didn’t think about save data or whether I needed to sync things. I just went, it just worked, I just raced.

It should also be noted just how well it runs on any hardware you throw at it, but frankly Digital Foundry covered it better than I will ever be able to.

That was really the important thing for about playing through 5. I already knew I was going to come in and enjoy the game because I’ve literally been doing that now for this subseries for the past decade. What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to just play where I wanted to play. This series has always been spectacularly fun, and it continues to be so. Now I just know that I can do so where I want, when I want, and I don’t have to worry about the platforms getting in my way.

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Game Ramblings #148 – Hot Wheels Unleashed

More Info from Milestone

  • Genre: Arcade Racing
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

This is just a stupid fun game. It’s not deep. It’s not going to hold your attention for long. What it is is stupid fun. You’re going to hop into an event, drift around like an idiot, probably fall off the track a few times, probably want to kick the rubberband AI in the dick, and keep going back for more. It’s just that kind of game.

This is as good a gif to describe the game as any. I spent a lot of time drifting and boosting in this game, and it’s kind of core to the experience. You boost to keep your speed up and you drift to get your boost up, so there’s a lot of time spent trying to alternate between the two and not really spend time simply driving. In a lot of ways it’s reminiscent of Ridge Racer, albeit with a weird visual scale. Like Ridge Racer, it’s helped by the fact that the drifting is distinctly fun. It’s got the right amount of looseness that makes it feel slightly out of control. However, it also gives you the ability to modify your drift mid-turn giving you some precision capability. That bit of flexibility really allows for long duration drifts through varied courses in a way that feels far more natural than I expected.

If it was just fun though, I don’t think I would have ever really picked up the game. There’s enough arcade racers that I really don’t need to jump into them that much. Through all of this I was generally just constantly baffled by the fact that the game exists in such a high quality form. There’s just so many things that mask the fact that this is ultimately hot a huge AAA production that are all extremely smart but also impressive to see in use.

Let’s start with the tracks themselves. There’s 5 main themes which may not sound like a lot but is more than enough. The themes themselves have a ton of useable space within them. As an example, there’s a construction theme with a ton of vertical space. Some of the tracks in theme have you at ground level, zipping around equipment and debris. Others have you up in the rafters going along beams and supports or using magnet tracks to zip around on the ceiling. In that regard, they get a ton of mileage out of a small amount of themes. The tracks have some background level of familiarity, but have a much different feel just based on how the track is sent through the environment. This is combined with a high potential to really find shortcuts via boosts and launches to make the racing feel extremely dynamic and different with each race.

The vehicles themselves also just have a ton of detail in them, both in gameplay and non-gameplay bits. The level of detail in the vehicles is astounding. The way they modeled the various surface materials is fantastic. Visually speaking, there’s a ton of difference between the plastics, metals, different paint types and more to where these just look incredibly realistically like their in-hand counterparts. However, at the eye level of a race, these look like they are driveable cars.

The detail extends to the gameplay level though, and the balance act here is impressive. The cars all run from the same general stat pool, so you would think that a high speed, high acceleration car is generally going to be the way to go. However, the slower cars are also generally the ones that have more boost availability, so they have a lot of potential to really keep up with the pack in the hands of a player comfortable with drifting. To some extent, the shape of the car is also a factor. I really fell in love with a wedge-shaped little roadster, and if I hit my boost right, I could go underneath cars in front of me and launch them off the track. It was a nice bonus to my selection that was inherent to the car, and not necessarily something obvious that came out of stats.

This is a game that punches far above its weight. It’s an inherently AA-priced licensed racing game, but it’s so much better than that. It has such an ability to just be picked up and played, then played for far longer than was intended without growing old. It’s got a great drift model combined with fun vehicles and even more fun track design. It’s got a light heartedness in its theming that really just comes out of it being based on a kid-focused license, but has such a quality that any fans of arcade racing – particularly drift focused racing – will be able to have a lot of fun. It’s just the surprise of the year for me.

Also…..that map design 😍

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Game Ramblings #140 – Wreckfest

More Info from Bugbear Entertainment

  • Genre: Racing / Demolition
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X

You know, sometimes you don’t need something serious. Sometimes you just want to run a car straight into everything. Sometimes you just want to send your opponents falling to their doom while you go through the apex of a vertical loop. Sometimes you want to race lawn mowers around a figure 8 track. Sometimes you want to use a school bus to take out a packed field of Reliant Supervans.

Sometimes, you just want to play Wreckfest.

There’s no dressing up Wreckfest as something deep. It’s ultimately a demolition derby game with some loose variety in terms of modes and objectives. Each even is about crashing shit and winning, but when it’s done well that’s all that really need to be there. Wreckfest does is very well.

The big thing about this game is that driving is fun. It plays a pretty surprisingly good balance between being arcadey and realistic. Cars feel weighty, which certainly leans into realism. Crashing into opponents or being crashed into feels meaningful. You can’t outmuscle something larger than you, so you have to pick your battles. On the other hand, you can spin the hell out of smaller cars and take full advantage of that. That said, the game doesn’t take a realistic approach to handling at all. Braking is extremely powerful and you can drift the hell all over the place, which is a lot of fun in a situation where you’re really just pinballing off your opponents while trying to gain spots and take them out.

The destruction follows a similar pattern. On the one hand, you obviously destroy your car where you’re hitting things. Getting t-boned will leave a huge dent on the side that got hit. Repeatedly hitting people from behind will wreck their trunks and your nose. Smacking the same side repeatedly will cause tire damage. All of this starts to effect your steering, acceleration, and braking capabilities. It may take a while, but you can eventually get to a point where you damage your car too much to continue. On the other hand, you can literally destroy the car enough to where you often don’t have an engine visually, but can still drive. In being realisticish, the game lets you do stupid things with penalties that are fun and impactful to gameplay, but isn’t realistic to the point of annoyance.

On this end of things, the PS5 has some special points to consider with the inclusion of interesting trigger mechanics. Damage to your brakes and engine have a noticeable impact on how hard it is to press the trigger tied to that part of your car. It’s a subtle but nice integration of the controller’s feature set. What it ends up doing is allowing you as a player to feel how damaged your car is, rather than needing to take your attention away and look for the specific colored icons down on the screen. It’s one of those kinds of subtle features that I don’t know I want until I feel it in action, but now I want every damage-based racing game to use it. The other place I noticed the trigger manipulation is in braking. High speed and low traction areas both felt like they were noticeably changing the tension on the trigger which is a neat way to really push the out of control feel of blasting through the levels at breakneck speeds.

I admittedly started playing this one because I’m filling time trying to get to Ratchet & Clank without starting something long. That said, it scratched just the right itch. I’ve played this one on and off for years going all the way back to it being Next Car Game on Steam, but this is probably the first time I’ve really played the “complete” version of the game since it came out of early access. While it may have steered a bit away from realistic destruction physics in favor of playability since then, I think that ultimately led to a better product. Parts of the game that needed to be realistic are realistic because they are fun. Parts of the game that realism would make worse are instead arcadey to be fun. This game really just feels like it was made to be fun.

It’s generally stupid. It’s generally over the top. It’s generally destructive. It generally is complete nonsense. But it’s fun.