Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious - Maxi-Geek Review

Over the years, the Fast and Furious franchise has had some pretty bad games, with nothing looking like it could end that reign, until Forza got their hands on it. Sadly this is not quite the game that it could have been, but it’s a solid movie based adaption none the less.

The story here is a really basic, Tej, voiced by Ludacris himself, needs your help to secure the cars that are used in the upcoming movie. The list of cars caps out at 10 and you will need to win them in a series of events spread over a small portion of the map from Forza Horizon 2. It is a pretty basic story, with Tej being the only character from the film series that makes an appearance in the game.

From a gameplay point of view, it is the same core mechanics from the main game and they work just as well here. If you loved racing, exploring roads, smashing billboards and driving with style, then you will be at home, though if you wanted something more, you won’t find it here. The core gameplay is identical, except most of it is not needed. In the full game, driving with style let you earn new skills, here it does nothing. You can still drive with style, the game keeps track of it, but it won’t actually result in any rewards.

The other problem with the gameplay is that there is not a whole lot of it, in fact to 100% the content, took me just over 90 mins, and that is not complete the story, it is do all the bucket list challenges, drive on all the roads and find all the billboards and smash them. For something that is free, it is hard to argue with it, but at its size and the fact that it won’t always be free, that is a shortcoming that is hard to overlook.

The presentation of the game also takes a massive step back from the main game itself in which that it was polished to a fine sheen, with rarely a blemish to be found. However with this release, the game suffered from constant pop in, buildings would get details on them just as I would drive past them, shadows and lighting effects were only rendering where the camera was pointing and hard turns or spinning the camera would have the game rush to render things right. Sound wise it’s hard to listen to as you now only have one radio station and at best I think only 8 songs, they repeated often enough that I turned the radio off entirely and apart from Ludacris’ performance there is no other dialogue to be found.

The worst part of this experience is that this is branded Fast and Furious, yet outside of a nice montage at the opening of the movies, Ludacris’ vocal contribution and a title card, there is nothing at all that scream Fast and Furious. In all honesty, if you were playing and were part way through and a friend walked in and saw you playing it, they would assume it was just Forza Horizon 2, there is nothing at all throughout the campaign or the world that says this related, which is a shame.

So for fans of the Forza Horizon series, it is easy to recommend as its more of the same, even though its 15gb of space for the same world and cars in it. For anyone who wants a good afternoons fun, its worth a shot, but I would not pay for it.