Ah, Winter in the Horizon Festival! The season of cold, freezing cold, and only enough snow plow for a fraction of the roads in the UK. I’ll bet we could clear all the rest of the roads if we just hired all of the Horizon drivers to plow instead of race. Or, um. You know. Race the snow plows.
In the big promotional panel of the Forzathon Shop this week is a Forza Edition Land Rover Series III, and coincidentally, the Weekly Challenge also involves a Series III. But, for purposes of Forza and the Weekly, they’re two different cars, and buying the FE won’t give you anything for the challenge.
I haven’t driven either of the weekly reward cars yet — I still need to get about 11% to pick up both of them — but the Aston Martin, at least, is a new hard-to-find car, so collectors should make sure to get their completion in.
Seasonal Championships
Reaching Your Peaks
Ah, Offroad Buggies in Cross Country point-to-point races! The last time Horizon gave us a Buggy series I remember struggling with it a bit, and I assumed I was going to have a bad time when I saw that it had come back around. But either I’ve learned a few things since the last rodeo, or I liked the races better this time around. To be fair, it’s probably both. Arthur’s Seat takes you to the top and back down again, and includes an oft-missed path through a train tunnel to sneak by everyone who went straight up the hill. Glen Rannoch has more broad, sweeping turns near the base of the mountain, rather than actually going up it.
I ran this series in a Baja Bug on the suggestion of a friend, and tuned for top speed and handling rather than off-the-line superiority. It was a slight gamble putting more of the power in 5th and 6th gear, but it worked well for the combination of the Bug and the races, as long as I remembered to downshift after the huge corners.
Racing Through The Years: The 1970's
The years start comin’, and you know the rest. Two weeks ago, Racing Through The Years started with 1950’s cars, and has advanced one decade — and one vehicle class — every season. This week you get to pick your favorite 1970’s B-class (700) cars and race them on Road, Dirt, and Cross Country.
I’m gonna sound like a broken record, but I’ll say it again: if you race Co-Op or PVP, you can only pick one vehicle to go through all three races in this series. Solo racers get dumped back into freeroam after each race, and have the option to switch between vehicles they’ve tuned for each surface. My strategy for running these series in Co-Op (or to test my skills with a single car in Solo) has been to find a balance that slightly favors offroad tuning, to give it the edge in at least two out of three races. We’re still in a low enough class that your tire compound doesn’t matter as much, so you can focus your modding on everything else, and try to find a balance with which you can work.
Side note: if you don’t yet have the 1970 AMC Rebel muscle car from this week’s Forzathon Shop, it qualifies for this series, so you can take it out for a spin and see if it feels like a winner to you. I went with my Datsun 510, because that’s what I always do.
Street Scene Stamina
There are five Street Scene races in this event.
I just wanted you to know that before you jump into it, so that you can block out a little more of your schedule ahead of time.
You’re racing Super Hot Hatch at class A (800), so you have some leeway for mods and tuning, and not all of the races are in the middle of the night. Not all of the races are on the icy roads, either. You’ll need to take all of these things into account, in the moment, while avoiding traffic.
For five races.
Aside from the “stamina” required, this also presents solo players with something they don’t normally get in solo championships, and that’s an opportunity to whiff at least one race a little bit more than you could in a three-race championship. Each race has a maximum of 20 points for first place, for a total of 100 instead of just 60. As long as the Drivatar in 2nd place is not consistently getting 2nd place, the gap between 1st and 2nd will continue to widen enough that your weakest race can give you 3rd or 4th place points, and possibly worse, without jeopardizing your lead in the entire series.
Forzathon Weekly Challenge: Tough as Old Boots
Every season that does not require any races in its weekly challenge automatically gets a thumbs-up from me, but this isn’t one of those seasons. After you smash the easy Wreckage skill chapter, you’re directed to the Whitewater Falls Cross Country race, which is locked to Extreme Offroad by default. You’ll have to use a community blueprint, or make your own, to run the race and complete the chapter. It’s worth it, imo, and not just because it’s Festival completion but because it’s actually a fun race.
The final chapter of the challenge is 15 miles of driving. If you’ve done this type of challenge before in Forza, you may have had the same problem that I occasionally have, and the game might not log all of your mileage correctly, making you drive further than 15 miles in order to complete the challenge. It’s an odd bug and I don’t know how many players are affected by it. If you’re one of them, the “fix” that I found was to change my video settings in-game to 30FPS for the duration of the drive. This challenge also failed to log any mileage that wasn’t on designated roads (despite this being a vehicle designed to tackle the countryside), so if you’re concerned about getting it done as quickly as possible, stick to the road as much as possible.
Showcase Remix: Assault on the Control Room
One of the items on the Festival Playlist this week is a Showcase Remix. Remember the Showcases? If you’re like me, you don’t. You played through each one, once, for the campaign progression, and then never really had a reason to look at them again. Showcase Remixes are those same events, but with an additional twist: I don’t actually know what the twist is, because I don’t remember anything about the first time I did any of them. But the drives themselves were okay.
In a few cases, the Showcase Remixes are in different cars than the original events, but there’s only one Warthog in Forza, and I’m pretty sure that running the Halo Showcase in a vehicle that isn’t the Warthog would be a breach of a Microsoft contract.
