What’s Good?: Seasonal Events in Forza Horizon 4 for Series 13 Summer (August 29–September 4, 2019)
Ah, Summer in Forza Horizon 4! It’s a new season and a new series, and several hard-to-find vehicles are hiding in the various seasonal rewards. It looks like most of the gimmicks from the previous series are over, and I can’t imagine a whole new set of gimmicks isn’t ready to be unleashed. Let’s get right into it and find out.
Weekly Challenge: Hand-Built Supercar
The Horizon Festival hands you a relative freebie this week by putting this week’s Challenge car, the M600, into the weekly shop for relatively cheap. That’s nice of ’em. (There are also no races in the Challenge, which is always the first thing I check.) And the top speed part of the Challenge is relatively straightforward modding and finding the right road to mash on.
If you have the same problem that I have, however, when you’re required to do a distance challenge like this week’s “drive 10 miles”, the hack that worked for me was lowering my framerate to 30 FPS for the duration of the drive, as demonstrated in the video below.
The Championships
Saloony Tunes
Here’s the worst conditions this week: Street Scene, in the rain, in Super Saloons, on the Ambleside Ascent. My Kia Stinger is still my go-to for this class of vehicle, but in general, be ready for a lot of rewinding, a lot of luck, and a lot of switchbacks (again). The rest of this championship isn’t quite as punishing, so it might be best to get Ascent out of the way early so you can get back to having fun.
Summer Developer Championship
These four Dirt races for Retro Rally are a pretty good assortment of challenge without being too frustrating. Treetop Towers might be a bigger challenge if you don’t manage to get out in front very early on; I experienced a pretty big pile-up at the narrow bridge and checkpoints. But the other courses don’t have any major gotchas. Lake Side Rally is a good eight-mile(!) hike with an amusing U-turn along the edge of the quarry, and “A Tunnel & Some Jumps” flusters the AI drivers enough that a well-tuned machine (and its careful driver) can leave them in the dust.
Hype Tour
Lego Valley lovers know Hype Tour as the name of a Horizon Story, but here it’s referring to S2-class Hypercars. Lakehurst Copse Circuit, Lake District Sprint, and Waterhead Sprint have a lot of sweeping turns to manage. But it’s Summer, and these races have avoided the bad weather, so it’s otherwise pretty straightforward — just you, the hypercar, and a split-second decision-making process that would kill a lesser person.
Is It Good?
So far, for me, it’s been good. The gimmicks I was anticipating never arrived, and once I got my bearings on each individual championship, it was a good ride. I’m still working on the Trial (Porsche Cup) with the 918 Spyder that I also used for Hype Tour (and I’ll need to qualify for Team Adventure again if I want to work on that 100% completion that I screwed up last month, but that’s beside the point). But, generally speaking, any season with good custom races is going to get a content smile out of me.
