Wooderon Games of the Year 2016: #8

Onto day three of my coverage.The first the games on my list have been very different from one another, one being a cover based shooter, while the other is a grid based tactics game… with a lot of cover based shooting. Number eight on the list is somthing, once again, very different than the previous two entries.

#10: Gears of War 4

#9: XCOM 2

#8: Forza Horizon 3

Played on Xbox One | Released 27th September | Developed by Playground Games

Normally, I don’t like car games. They’re just not my thing. I drive enough in real life that it’s not somthing that ever speaks to me. But at E3 this year, I watched a trailer for Forza Horizon 3 during Microsoft’s Xbox One press conference and was very intrigued. Something about it just made me want to try it, it looked so pretty, so bright. I had to try it out.

I’ve never played one of the Horizon variety of Forza games before, but I heard good things. That, coupled with how incredibly pretty this game looks broke me down and made me go out and buy something outside of my usual comfort zone. I’m glad I did. While I’m not a huge fan of racing in games, Horizon isn’t necessarily that. Rather, it’s more what I’d describe as a dicking about in cars simulator.

You play the operator of a car/music festival being held in Australia. Building venues and putting on ridiculous showcases that cause levels of destruction that the Australian government couldn’t possibly abide by, no matter how much money the event was bringing in. One minute the game will have you ploughing through the rainforest in a supercharged buggy. The next you’ll be crashing through the surf in the Warthog from Halo. Then you’ll be destroying a building site in a Land Rover. You travel between these events by blazing up a freeway in a hyper car at 200 miles per hours. Jumping off ramps all the way.

The biggest stand out positive I can state here is how this game looks. The environment is beautifully rendered and while some are going to talk about the designs of the cars themselves, that doesn’t do anything for me. Cars have looks great in games for a while. Seeing the light cutting through the trees of a tropical rain forest, or the spray of the sea flying up behind on on a sunset bathed beach. That looks good. What I get the most is to see these pretty scenes and enjoy myself doing it.

The game is pure fun in cars. It gives you a beautifully rendered world to play in, consisting of all kinds of different types of environment from cities to rainforest to outback. And it lets you just run wild. There isn’t a whole lot of depth and complexity to the game to my untrained eye, but there are huge levels of customisation and community driven events and car designs that adds a lot more to what the game already had to offer. There are a ton of different custom paint jobs done by the fans of the game, many of which seem like they took a lot of time and attention. I haven’t tried the multiplayer yet but would still very much like to. I like the developers have done with Forza Horizon 3, and I’ll be sure to be keeping an eye out for the next game, more so than I would have before anyway.

I wasn’t expecting to get anything out of this game but in the end its become one I can go back to every now and then, just pick it up and spend a few hours admiring it.