This is the Britain of romantic comedies, postcards and, one presumes, Brexiteers’ imaginations. It is an idealised, compressed representation of our island comprising the Cotswolds, the Lake District, acres of beautiful woodland, the Highlands, Edinburgh, the east coast and the moors. There’s no urban sprawl, no rubbish suburbs and, perhaps most attractively of all, barely any people.
In Forza Britain, instead of toiling in the gig economy to make your extortionate rent, you are gifted a house for helping out with some stunts on a movie shoot. The game even turns our weather into something beautiful. As the seasons change, so does the climate and the nature of the light, along with the driving conditions. Edinburgh’s New Town shimmers in pale spring sunshine, and in winter the snow in the Highlands sucks all the light out of the sky. The cottages in Ambleside are prettiest in the summer, when the trees are so bracingly green you can almost smell them. If you have a 4K television, this is what it was made for. Now and then, such as the first time I drove past Edinburgh Castle in the perfect twilit blue of a summer night in Scotland, its beauty made me quite emotional.
For the first five or six hours you are alone in Forza Britain, working your way through a curated selection of racing events and a whirlwind tour of the seasons. After that, you share the world with other drivers, free to challenge, team up with or ignore them as you wish.
The season changes every week in real time, bringing with it a new selection of showcase racing events and limited-edition vehicles. It offers a near-limitless number of ways to race cars around, for as long as you want to spend in its sumptuous scenery.
This is a game about the experience of driving rather than the mechanics, and Forza Horizon 4 accommodates the tourists as well as the gearheads. You can barrel through low walls and shrubbery without so much as scratching your paintwork, slide all over the road in a Ferrari in the rain, or drive an Alfa Romeo up a mountain with only a little difficulty.
Though it’s possible to go under the hood and tinker with every imaginable aspect of a favourite ride, share tuning configurations and create and download custom liveries, it is also perfectly alright to pick a car you like and head off into the countryside to see what you can do with it.
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