The Forza Motorsport games have been released like clockwork every other year, but then there was Forza Horizon a year after Forza Motorsport 4 and a year prior to Forza Motorsport 5. At that time, it was perhaps anybody's guess as to whether Horizon was a one-shot deal or where it would go, but then after FM5 came the announcement of a sequel to the first Horizon. Forza Horizon 2 is wedged in between FM5 a year earlier and, more than likely, FM6 a year later. It now appears as though Horizon may appear as a regular series releasing every other year just like Forza Motorsport, but mid-way between the releases of the core franchise.

In 2012 Forza Horizon added a dynamic day/night cycle to the Forza franchise, but that then fell through the cracks with the 2013 release of Forza Motorsport 5. The night cycle returns again for Forza Horizon 2, and this time brings with it alternating weather, too. Changing weather is introduced to the player pretty much the moment they begin playing, as the weather changes during the introductory "race", more of high-speed run, to your first destination in the game. It's all a neat effect and pretty, but I never really felt like it affected my performance. Maybe there was some slight shift in my grip levels on wet road, but if there was I don't recall ever really noticing it. It's much the same for night, where you do tecnically have darkness and you see less but, importantly, you still see.

Besides having altering time of day and night as well as changing weather, another important difference between Horizon 2 and the previous Motorsport games is that while Motorsport has been about racing on closed circuits, generally on purpose-built race tracks, Horizon instead features an open world with races taking place along pre-determined routes in that game world. Besides offering up a different gameplay experience, the tradeoff is that these things also bring with them performance drops, as there's evidently no way Horizon 2 was going to render as much as FM5 did at 60 frames per second with the addition of dealing with an open game world, shifting time of day and night, and changing weather. Consequently, Forza Horizon 2 pushes half the frame rate of FM5, at just 30 FPS in FH2. 60 FPS would have been nicer, but probably would have meant sacrificing the dynamic cycles and maybe more. Another place the performance tradeoff appears evident is that the number of cars on track reduced from sixteen in FM5 to twelve in FH2.

The game world of Forza Horizon 2 feels more open than the map in the original Horizon, and while the first Horizon pretty much limited us to being on roads with limited opportunity to venture through the grass, Horizon 2 seems to pull the barriers back a good bit and let us venture over the hills and through the fields a lot more. In fact, a significant chunk of the racing is done off the roads, which will require different driving techniques as well as different tuning, as a setup that's great when racing on smooth tarmac may be terrible when bouncing over bumps and ramping off of hilltops. There's a great deal of smashing through fences, crashing through patio furnishings, and wrecking vinyards as you rampage about the European setting. However, all of this is dramatically different in the Xbox 360 version of the game, which looks and feels significantly different from the proper game, but one of the biggest differences for me was how much more restricted the game world was on Xbox 360. You couldn't smash through a fence and do donuts in an open field, but rather everywhere you went you were fenced in between indestructable barriers lining every street and roadway. The 360 version is a shameful shadow of the true and proper Horizon 2 and God have mercy on any Forza fan stuck settling for the 360 version of the game.

Horizon 2 builds on the car list that began in Forza Motorsport 5, there is also the loss of race cars in favor of production road cars, as was the case with the original Horizon on Xbox 360. Because of the game's heavy use of off-roading, a heap of race cars wouldn't have been particularly valuable as they tend to be low to the ground and stiffly sprung, which is bad once you venture off the asphalt. The off-roading felt a tad too chaotic to me, not because of traction in grass or dirt, but because bouncing and ramping can mean turning in really inconvenient ways while airboard and landing poorly or being bounced in inconvenient directions. During the finale I was racing in a supercar, though I forget which one but want to say the McLaren P1, and if I caught a bunch of air my car tilted backwards such that I was flying through the air looking straight up into a blue sky with no idea where I was going or what to expect until after slamming back to Earth. Supercars weren't designed with flight in mind. I had to rewind to prior to soaring through the sky and slow down to avoid disaster but the AI didn't seem to suffer the same problem. If you're playing with damage turned on, you can anticipate performance disadvantages after bouncing around and ramping as hard landings tend to result in mechanical damage, but your opponents do not suffer from mechanical damage when they bounce and ramp. Visibility can sometimes be terrible, at least in cockpit view, when smashing through vinyards with the crops obstructing view.

There's been some debate about whether or not there's rubberbanding in this game. The Forza Motorsport games haven't had rubberbanding, but I've felt like I've had to fight harder on lower difficulty settings even though in FM5 I tended to fall pretty consistently into the top 1% on Leaderboards, but that could be down to me being much more adjusted to racing on asphalt versus setting up for and racing on varying terrain and surfaces. However, the finale raised more red flags for me because, during the course of the lengthy lap of basically the entire map, I repeatedly left the AI behind only for them to always catch right back up, typically flying up on me at obviously greater speed. However, that could have been down to lost performance resulting from me playing with mechanical damage turned on while they never suffer any mechanical damage of any kind at all.

Licensed music returns, in the form of several radio stations, and we're able to switch between stations as we please. This wasn't much of a plus for me personally since I favor listening to the engine and tire sounds for audio cues, like when it's time to shift gears or if I'm breaking traction, but it's even less of a plus on account of I hate all the music in the game. In fairness, however, that comes down to pesonal taste. I know some players are happy with this noise, though personally I hate electro-new-age-cyberfunk or whatever that crap is. If you like dubstep and that sort of junk, you'll probably be happy.

The negative comments are mainly just nitpicking, and involve things that are largely subjective. The game is actually an enjoyable product and, as is always the case with Forza games, a must-play for fans of racing games. The singleplayer mode alone offers plenty of hours of satisfaction, and there's also multiplayer if you're into that. You can even choose to drop in and out of multiplayer as you're driving around the game world, so you can run around completing events in singleplayer, see that your buddy came online and you can join his game, and when he hops off an hour later you can drop back into singleplayer and resume doing your own thing.