Forza Horizon Rally Review: A Welcomed Expansion for The Horizon Festival

Forza Horizon Rally Review: A Welcomed Expansion for The Horizon Festival

Forza Horizon Rally
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Racing

Forza Horizon is easily one of the best racing games I’ve played in a long while and so I can easily say that I would have been excited no matter what updates they brought our way. Forza Horizon Rally is an expansion pack focused on Rally racing, thus bringing something new to the Horizon festival. Most Horizon fans already know how great Forza Horizon is and I am sure you can imagine how awesome this expansion pack could be for the game. Well, let me tell you, it’s a great addition to this game. It gives us yet another reason to fall in love with this game all over again and to really appreciate its wonderful style. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, the Horizon Festival did. The Rally event can be easily enjoyed.

The Forza Horizon Rally expansion isn’t perfect, but it does fit in quite well. It features 7 events with 4 stages each and your overall time is what matters most. It’s also quite difficult and often finishes with less than a second separating many of the top cars. I raced in one event where I finished 1st in three of the four stages, but the one stage I didn’t finish first, I lost by only 2 seconds. Because of that, I finished third overall… that’s how insanely close these races can be and that’s on medium difficulty. That basically tells you that all three of my first place finishes were won by less than a second. However, it’s still a ton of fun to race on each track and of course the cars handle well with the Forza style racing. After you complete all 7 Rally events, you can continue customizing your cars to perfection to see if you can get a better time on your next attempt. Either that or you can just have fun and take some enjoyable vehicles out on the rally course; as you can see in the video below, I wanted to race a big truck on one of the courses.

Obviously, the racing is outstanding and the visuals of each track are beautiful, but overall, there aren’t too many great moments that I can remember on each course. Those few moments of enjoyment however, are some of the really tight spots that create a great sense of speed, plus there are a lot of places where, if you are not careful, you could easily end up rolling your car. So, there are some good spots and moments on each track. However, once you have played through each stage/track a few times and other than bettering your times, there isn’t much to bring you back to rally racing. Secondly, when is it ever going to rain again in Colorado? Or snow? I always loved getting dirty in rally games I have played. I would like to see some weather effects in Colorado. It may be better to have perfect weather for the Horizon festival attendee’s, but come on, I want to drive in some extreme conditions!

The expansion pack comes with only five Rally ready vehicles for you to toy around with, but obviously you can put the rally parts on any vehicle in the game and take it out on the course or the main roads if you choose. Those parts include rally tires, transmission, springs and dampers. It’s a lot of fun to experiment with different vehicles and see what may work the best, but I still went after those vehicles that gave me the best launch and acceleration. It helps with having to deal with a lot of tight turns which cause you to slow down and speed up on each rally course.

You can also take the rally racing online in a new multiplayer mode. The online handles quite well as you can see each participant as a ghost. It’s nice knowing where they are compared to paying attention to a time. Plus, it’s entertaining when everyone misses one of those sharp turns and you see every ghost go flying into the wall. This is another great way to get some competition and enjoyment out of the expansion pack.

I must say, the Forza Horizon Rally expansion isn’t too exciting and doesn’t offer that much content to make it feel worth the 1,600 Microsoft points. However, it’s still Forza, it’s still fun and I believe most people will still have a good time with it. But, what I don’t know is how long you’ll want to keep playing Rally until you go back to the main game. It won’t take you long to win the competition even though it is insanely challenging, especially if you are to attempt it on the hard setting. Still, if you end up getting it, you’ll have a good time going through it and probably love it a lot, all the way up until you win the Rally championship. At that point you’ll wish it had a little bit more to offer, but at least you can go online and enjoy a few rounds that way as well. It’s a welcomed expansion and worthy of the Horizon Festival – it fits in perfectly. I loved every moment it had to offer, but now I wish it had just a little bit more.

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