Parp parp! Forza Horizon 4 is out now
Honk honk
You are cordially invited today to tear around a cut-down chunk of northern Britain with a serious disrespect for road safety and the craft of dry stone walling, as Forza Horizon 4 launched this morning. And the latest arcade-y open-world racer from Playground Games is a good'un, Stirling Matheson said in our Forza Horizon 4 review.
"It was fun and relaxing and not too difficult to just enjoy tearing through the game world's highways at 170 mph," said the man with the most racing name in the world. "That's the real beauty of this game and its format: you can do whatever feels good in the moment, even if that's just indulging in the fantasy of having a badass car in a world with no laws and no consequences."
No consequences that you suffer, you monster, but who do you think rebuilds those dry stone walls and rounds up those sheep after you roar through a field? You can see our Matthew up to some of those monkeyshines in his recent video:
Forza Horizon 4 is out now for Windows 10 only. It costs £50/$60 on Microsoft's Store, which also gets you the game on Xbox One too. It's also covered by the Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft's £8/month 'play all our new exclusives plus some other stuff' subscription - but that's not really worth it if you're only playing on PC. A 'Deluxe Edition' including the season pass to get new DLC cars costs £65/$80.
I have been excited to race around Edinburgh, where I live, but what I've seen has kinda missed part of the city's character. It's absolutely recognisable, and recreates enough in enough detail that I can follow several specific walks I do every week, but lacks the weird (often almost unbelievable) scale of some architecture and geography. Much of Edinburgh is tall and narrow and, while I understand roads being widened to accomodate racing, I do feel the loss of the height. But hey, I'm sure I can get past that in the name of racing.
A demo is available, and the Xbox Game Pass has a free 14-day trial you could use to give the full thing a go. Our Katharine has also examined its performance with different graphics cards.