Game:

Forza Horizon 3 (2016)

Category:

Review

Duration: 8:56

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Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels is an expansion I could never have predicted. I had a bunch of theories around what Playground Games’ follow-up to the excellent Blizzard Mountain was going to be, and they were all wrong.What we got instead is a high-octane fever dream of life-sized toys and upside-down racing, and a surprisingly drastic departure from Forza Horizon’s established norms. Preposterous, incongruous, and completely and utterly outrageous.Forza Horizon 3’s first paid expansion, Blizzard Mountain, brought with it a driving experience like never before seen in the series. Specifically I’m talking about the added nuance the slippery surfaces inject into Forza’s driving dynamics and the way severely reduced visibility impacts the way we attack dangerous roads at speed. But this stuff seems almost quaint in comparison to the radical new driving challenges Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels has brought with it.Loops and half-pipes. High speed, near-vertical bends. Boost pads. The biggest jumps in the series to date. Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels takes Forza’s very familiar physics and forces us to use them to survive a wild world engineered inside the mind of an eight-year-old child.It’s fun racing, cut from the same cloth as Trackmania Turbo and GTA Online’s stunt races, that nonetheless retains Forza’s driving feel. Executing a loop-the-loop in a Forza game will be a very foreign experience for series veterans, but the semi-realistic handling model remains unaltered. For those of you who like to hoon around with minimal driving aids, prepare for the stress of wrestling a rear-wheel drive monster back under control while you’re bouncing off the limiter after a boost pad sent you to top speed like a Scud missile with seats and a steering wheel.The world itself is larger than Blizzard Mountain and even more stunning. During the day the sunlight picks up the scuffs on the giant plastic tracks. They’re translucent, too; just watch how stretches of track arcing into the sky glow orange and blue as the sun beats down on them from behind. At night it’s equally impressive; the well-lit tracks create amazing snakes of light against a backdrop of millions of stars, glinting over the ocean.I absolutely adore the attention to detail, too. Beneath the tracks, enormous connecting pieces hold each segment of track together – pieces of moulded plastic that, in reality, fit into the palm of your hand but here are the size of a tennis court. The boost pads are basically treadmills embedded into the tracks powered by enormous, animated engines that dwarf the game’s cars, spluttering and belching black smoke as you speed by. There are even massive, animatronic T. Rexes, chomping and roaring, which are dotted across one of the world’s six islands in homage to Hot Wheels’ occasionally prehistoric predilections.Navigation is a bit more difficult as most of the tracks are either suspended over the water and have walls on each side, so speedy, direct shortcuts are out (and off-
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Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/05/12/forza-horizon-3-hot-wheels-review

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