What’s Good?: Seasonal Events in Forza Horizon 4 for Series 11 Winter (July 18–24, 2019)
To answer the question in the title, it turns out that a lot of the seasonal races are good. So. … yeah.
This season’s completion rewards are both Koenigsegg cars, but only the CCX is a Hard To Find vehicle. (The Regera’s normally just expensive, or an unusual Legendary drop from a Wheelspin.)
Incidentally, this season is also the earliest point where you can hit 80% festival completion and receive the “I Beat The Stig” shirt.
Winter #Forzathon Shop
I’ve messed with the ALL4 Mini in this week’s shop a little more than the Trophy Truck, but I didn’t really get a whole lot out of it that I can’t get with the other Minis or other vehicles in the ALL4’s class. But, the Completionist in me still has to tell you to pick these cars up if you don’t have them.
Weekly Challenge: A Power and a Force
Even this week’s challenge is really straightforward in a good way! There’s a new Ford Ranger Raptor in the Autoshow, and mostly you just get to throw it around a lot in freeroam which just happens to be one of my favorite things to do. Ten “Crash Landing” skills, one “Barrel Roll” skill, and five races of any type! I’m probably just going to set it up for Cross Country, but the devs certainly seem to want you to experiment. And since you don’t have to spend time, say, driving twenty-two miles, you’ve got a little time to mess around and see if you can tune this up for a more unusual race type. Have fun.
The Trial: Natural Habitat
This week’s co-op Trial series is a Dirt series with a single vehicle: the Volvo V60 Polestar, B-class. As with some of the previous single-car Trials, you’ll probably see nothing but default blue cars at the starting line, because it’s certainly not a car I’ve had a reason to mess with before.
The car is already mid-B-class stock, so you don’t need to do much if anything (though it never hurts to balance it or shorten the gears a little). So barring all the other factors that make multiplayer races what they are, this series is relatively painless, fun enough, and offers a (Hard To Find) Chevy Colorado ZR2 offroad vehicle as its reward for winning a series against the Highly Skilled AI. Not a bad deal.
Road Race: Ford Cup
I was torn between a couple of options for this Road series — any Ford, A-class? — but ended up picking the ’00 SVT Cobra R and made it run pretty clean. The top reward for this championship is another Hard To Find that we’ve seen in at least one season previously, the ’18 Ford Mustang RTR. I think the RTRs are kind of like weird Hoonigan type things. I’m not really sure. They’re very loud. I know that much.
The Festival Sprint in particular can be a little tricky if you like to do what I do: shorten up the gears, like I mentioned earlier, in order to get a little more acceleration in exchange for less top speed. It still works, but when you get out to the south side of the map, you’re hitting your top speed and you’re on wet or icy roads, and the blue line starts to lie to you about how much you’re going to slide around. The Ambleside Sprint has its own issues, but it’s much easier to deal with the switchbacks in an AWD car than it was in the FR Spotlight last week, even with the icy conditions.
Road Race: AWD Spotlight
I guess they felt like they had to do an all-wheel-drive series after the last couple of weeks, but this seems ridiculous. Then again, it would have felt more ridiculous to put anything but AWD in the Winter, with potentially the worst road conditions in the festival.
But this is also a chance for drivers to get creative with their picks, with so many more good and useful options. And the Cotswolds Super Sprint roads are mostly plowed clear, letting you actually get some traction to work with.
Winning this series nets the 2018 Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe, another Hard To Find vehicle in the Super Saloons category.
Cross Country: Snowball Fighter
The “Unimpressed Round Glasses” are a pretty good reward for this championship if you’re like me and never felt like messing with the Local Motors Rally Fighter required for it. (It’s actually not that bad.) Add to this the Cross Country circuit race that goes through … the city of Edinburgh, a track that rewards you for staying on the racing line by… covering it with obstacles that make you lose speed for crashing into them. The best thing I can say about that is that it’s a unique challenge.
But hey, overall, the game took several individual cars that I’d never cared about before and put them front and center, and for a game that really does want you to drive everything, that’s what good weekly updates should do.
