Forza Horizon 4 Review

After a quick tutorial race, you pick your car, make your avatar, and are cut loose to do some races. It is a slower burn than Forza Horizon 3, and everything isn’t just unlocked right away. That’s okay though; you are instead put through a quick run-through of all the seasons. After that breakdown, your job is to get a gold wristband, which gives you access to all Forza events. These are the big races where you face trains, jets, or even a giant hovership. They are as over the top as they sound, often ending in a photo finish one way or another. Honestly, you can get through most of the story races in a day, but there is a ton of other stuff to find and do.

The seasons are the big new thing in Forza Horizon 4. You will race through summer, fall, winter, and spring. With the changing seasons comes changing weather and different road conditions. Winter is obvious, right? Snowy roads make it hard to handle fast cars. Coming from a guy that generally hates winter races, this game nails it. Spring and fall bring the rain though, and that can be just as bad. Summer has standard road conditions, so fast vehicles are best here. Certain events will be blocked off based on seasons. They don’t block a lot, but each season goes a few days in real time. The time frame means you might have to wait over a week to get to a particular event. I didn’t have an issue with this, but some players might.

The racing overall is some of the best in the genre, if not the best. It is an arcade racer, so sim drivers beware. Forza Horizon 4 does everything in its power to make driving easy and natural for the player. There are lines to follow that tell you when to brake and give you an optimal route. Cars don’t fishtail, unless you are driving like a madman. Even the handbrake works incredibly well and is easy to grasp. If things are too easy, you can spike the difficulty or turn off drive assist. There are also almost 1,000 cars; you will certainly find one that you like. New vehicles are easy to acquire as well, and you are encouraged to switch often.

Every vehicle in the game has its own level and skill tree to level up. You get points to level the cars up for doing nearly anything. Going fast, drifting, racing, breaking fences, ruining lawns, doing events and of course, stunt jumps. The skill trees vary for each car. Some get you more points for drifts or jumps and others improve your multiplier quicker, so you get points easier. Those points net you more levels for your car and help you gain influence to unlock more races. I cannot stress enough how accessible this game is. Literally, every annoying thing about a racing game is not present here.

Forza Horizon has been a big online game for some time, and Forza Horizon 4 takes it up another notch. First thing, other player cars are ghosts now. Ghost cars mean if you are doing a drift, you won’t bust into another player car. If you get disconnected, you are put back into single player with no loading and no loss of progress. There are group events every hour on the hour, and the whole server can take part. Grouping up with players is just a couple of buttons away. Racing together is as easy as the leader picking a race and you are both warped the event. We had a couple of server issues on day one, but that has since remedied. There is always something to do, and that is very important for an online game.

Even though it is a racing game, Forza Horizon 4 provides plenty to do outside of racing as well. There are now houses you can buy and own. Barn finds are back, and can net you some great vehicles. When you level up, you will get wheel spins which can net you cash, cars, new emotes or new clothes for your avatar. Signposts are all over the world, and crashing into them will get you more influence or reduce fast travel costs. There are also photo opportunities for influence, and the game is gorgeous making it worth the stop. I was just on the base Xbox One, so I can only imagine how good it’d look in 4K. I ran into no bugs, no crashes, and no other technical issues.

Forza Horizon 4 absolutely nails the driving experience with its tight handling and dynamic seasons, and is as close as you can get to a perfect racing game.

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State Of Decay 2 Review

State of Decay 2 is all about survival in the apocalypse. The world has gone downhill, and zombies make up most of the population. As a player, you start off with a small group of survivors and have to build up a base, a community, and the skills of different people to thrive. To do all of this, you need to go out and face the zombie hordes head on in search of weapons and other materials. While killing zombies is important, managing resources such as food and medicine is another significant part of the game. It’s a balancing act – stay out too long and your people suffer; come back to soon and you don’t get enough supplies. In the end, sacrifices will have to be made to ensure your community survives.

When it comes to fighting zombies, you have a few ways to bring them down. Melee weapons, guns, explosives, and even vehicles can get the job done. The melee combat is floaty and janky at times, but it works. Zombies will glide to you or over you, and you do the same during combat. You get used to it, but it isn’t ideal when you are fighting six or seven at a time. The other big issue comes when fighting inside. With all the floating and sliding, it becomes hard to hit enemies, and they will end up grabbing you. You can get around it by luring enemies outside, but there should have been more polish.

While facing basic zombies isn’t a massive issue during melee combat, State of Decay 2 has a few different zombies to deal with. Plague zombies are regular zombies, but each hit infects you with the Blood Plague. If the meter fills up, you get the Blood Plague, and you need to heal it or will turn into a zombie yourself. There are also Screamers (who scream and call other zombies to your location), Bloaters (which explode if you kill them), Feral Zombies (which are very fast and aggressive), and Brutes (which are tank zombies with insane strength). You will on occasion face humans as well, though this is pretty rare. Guns help with the more advanced zombies and enemy humans.

While there are issues with melee combat, shooting doesn’t suffer the same fate. There are downsides to using a gun though. Without a silencer, you draw more enemies in. However, with a silencer, your weapon will break down quicker. Still, there is no denying that a shotgun or assault rifle on automatic does way more work than any melee weapon. The ultimate zombie killing machine, however, is a vehicle. You can mow down hordes of the enemies with cars and trucks as long as they aren’t in a building. Much like guns though, vehicles break down after extended use, and you will have to repair them. Melee weapons also break down, but fixing or replacing them is way more convenient than fixing up cars and guns. All your tools for killing will break down, so having backups or repair tools is a must.

All of this plays into a more significant part of the game – inventory management. You only have so many slots for items and equipment, and the car can only fit so much crap. On top of killing materials, you need to worry about stamina and HP as well, so that ends up taking up some room. Even early on, you are always facing these problems. Do I need that? What should I bring back? That is one of the best things the game has going for it – no matter what is going on, you will always have something to do. Some factions will need a hand, some infestations will pop up, or you will need to grab some more supplies for your base. It’s a lot of busy work, which some players will enjoy and others hate. If you don’t keep on top of these problems, you get annoying radio messages and your community members might even threaten to leave.

Base management can be one of the more disappointing aspects of the game. You start off with a small home base, with a couple of slots for crafting new buildings. You can also claim a few outposts outside of your main base. As you progress, you will ultimately look for a new home base with more space and better built-in buildings. The problem with all this is that you can only have one main base and only a few outposts. The idea of the game is not to just survive, but to thrive. On top of this, you cannot take over an entire map, or even a quarter of it. In total, you can have one primary home base and up to six outposts with additional building mods. If you have the materials and people to expand further, you should be allowed to do so.

Only having one base leads to another problem as well. You cannot have all the facilities at one home base, which means you have to pick and choose. There is no logic behind this; that is just the way the game was designed. Expanding your home base should be an option so you can have everything you want to have without having to sacrifice certain buildings in your home. I thought this might be rectified by switching maps and getting a second home base, but that is not the case. If you change maps, you lose the base and outposts you have on the map you leave, giving you the same problem you have on the first map. All of this also means you cannot take over more than one map on a single playthrough, which again makes no sense.

You can have multiple communities, meaning that you can have one on each map. There is three maps total, and most of the buildings in each map are the same. The game has a number of reused assets, which again will upset certain players. Something that helps all of this is the fact that State of Decay 2 has co-op. Slogging through the same buildings multiple times is much better with a buddy. Having a real player lets you loot more and lets you take on harder fights. Sadly the co-op player doesn’t progress in their story, but the characters get their own loot and level up.

State of Decay 2 is not without its faults, and these faults are increased during co-op. I was playing on the original Xbox One, and frame drops are consistent. Floating zombies, glitching cars, and buggy AI are all prominent. While playing co-op, my game would stop for 5-10 seconds at a time while driving with my partner. Zombies spawn in after you finish driving, and you are all of sudden surrounded. The worst is when a Bloater spawns on the road, and you crash into it causing massive damage to you without you even being able to react. Textures don’t always load in, and then you have to wait for those to load in as well. I’d say this could be fixed with a day one patch, but a six gig patch came out on May 15, which is when the Ultimate Edition came out.

State of Decay 2 is going to be very hit and miss for a number of people. If you can ignore the flaws, there is a fun game to be had when played with a friend. That said, even if you ignore its flaws, you can’t deny that this game was not ready for release.

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Inside Review

Sneaking through the forest, a child running for his life serves as the main protagonist of Inside. Running further into the forest, it becomes apparent that the boy is running from an ominous threat. Having to sneak past trucks filled to the brim with mindless people that are being shipped off to an unforeseen destination, you are given a sense that everything is not ok. Further enriching the experience is the threat of dogs chasing you, masked bad guys gunning you down and worm infested pigs being, well worm infested pigs.

This was all in the first 10 minutes by the way. Part of what developer Playdead does so well is putting the player in an immediately immersive world with an action button and a jump button. Puzzles are the main antagonist of the game ranging from simple to almost really difficult. Never did I feel that a puzzle was going to end my game or make me have to go look it up or ask for advice. One of the things I really did like about some of the puzzles were the audio cues you would get from solving them, really giving satisfaction for progress.

The game adds in a mind controlling aspect where the player puts on a little helmet and you can control little mindless humans in the background for the purpose of solving a puzzle. It was a fun novel way to approach puzzle platforming and I rather liked it. Unfortunately, like the rest of the game, there just wasn’t enough of it. At certain points of the game you get achievements by finding out of the way hard to reach nodes to destroy. If you find them all you can achieve an Alternate ending which for the purpose of this review I did not do but it was nice to see a little added content for a short game.

About 50 minutes into the game I fell in love with the submarine you are given to play with. Obviously I’m biased since I served in the Navy on a Submarine but it was a fun little thing. It had a boost on it and a light and was simple. You could boost through barriers, over obstacles and into broken walls revealing access. Also there were these little underwater creatures you had to get away from but keep your spotlight on. I liked the way their hair flowed underwater with the current, it gave a sense of serenity. But let me tell you, the second you took your attention away from them they sneak up on you and completely eviscerate you. Which brings the brutal nature of this game. At any point when you die, you are completely ripped apart and or torn to shreds with blood going in all directions. It served as a reminder that this world the player is in is full of threats and the only way to get through it is to keep running.

All told if you do everything possible in this game you still fall well short of 10 hours, but at $20 it’s a novel puzzle platformer that definitely scratches the indie itch. Following up Limbo should have been an arduous task but it seems that developer Playdead has the ability of blurring the lines between art and video games inside its DNA. I for one feel like games like this need to exist in an industry bursting with more and more mundane AAA titles. Now if only it can take less than 6 years between games. Inside was definitely a very good game, even at times great but it was by no means a perfect platformer and was at best a pretty good puzzle game. What makes Inside good is the overall experience i.e. the tone, setting, pace and soundtrack. Definitely a must play.

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