While modern racing games continue to focus either on hyper-realism or huge open worlds, there’s still a market for old-school games that focus on simplicity. Horizon Chase Turbo is honestly one of my favourite racing games and I enjoyed it so much that I made sure to 100% it. When Horizon Chase 2 was announced, I was understandably hyped. But, the game had a lengthy exclusivity period with Apple Arcade before it was recently surprise launched on the PC and Switch. The good news is that the game is every bit as fun as its predecessor, albeit with a car levelling system and vastly improved visuals. Those visuals have a consequence, however, causing the game to not live up to its predecessor in an important way.
While Horizon Chase Turbo was an enormous amount of fun, the courses themselves were clearly designed to be reminiscent of 90s graphics, with lots of undetailed flat plains and simple geometry made of few polygons. This was charming, but a far cry from the visuals of similar genre entries. Horizon Chase 2 moves to the opposite end of the spectrum. The vehicles and courses are now rendered with modern high-polygon graphics. The levels are now detailed and heavily varied. Most of them don’t look similar at all, which is a testament to the game’s adherence to its world tour conceit. It really makes good on the premise in a way that the original game couldn’t have matched with its budget.
Some levels will take you through colourful cities, complete with copious architecturally relevant buildings, others might lead you through a forest dense with trees and vines. Some levels, such as deserts and snowy regions come complete with weather effects. Dust storms or snow on the final laps might obscure your vision. There’s an impressive commitment here to upping the visual ante. In addition to that, there’s a new layer to the vehicles themselves, found in the single-player World Tour mode. You start with a few cars and unlock a new one each time you complete a country in the world tour. You get 15 XP every time you complete an event. Get enough XP and your car will level up.
On the level
When a car levels up, it gains an upgrade point that’s used to enhance a certain aspect of the car. You’ll need to grab blue coins to even unlock these upgrades, which Horizon Chase 2 uses to keep players from maxing out cars too quickly. The issue with that is that you might stick to a single car due to this, but there’s a baked-in response to this since newly unlocked cars come with some upgrades already on them. This was a great choice. As for the world tour itself, it’s broken into six countries with 11 events each. Most of these are races where you’re merely meant to get to the finish line. The aforementioned blue coins (which return from the first game) are found on the courses, so making sure you grab all of them is part of the fun, as it adds a collectathon-esque focus to the proceedings.
Placing in the top three will give you between one and three medals. Getting first place while also grabbing all the blue coins will grant you a super trophy as well. The other main event in the World Tour mode is a time trial, where you vie for one of three medals based on your speed. The interesting permutation here is that time coins litter the roads and collecting them will bring your time down, which will allow you to acquire medals if your remaining time is low enough. Horizon Chase 2 is an extremely fast game and manoeuvring around other vehicles to try and reach first place is always a joy. The driving feels just as responsive and quick as it did last time, as does slapping into other cars. Feeling the burst of speed when using nitro is also still a visceral thrill.
So what’s the problem here? Horizon Chase 2‘s courses are so much more visually complicated that the game ends up having nearly half the courses of its predecessor. While this is completely understandable, it’s a bit hard to come to terms with from a gameplay perspective. It took me about 20 hours to grab everything in the last game, but this one simply takes far less time. There are other modes, at least, including three unlockable tournaments that become available as you progress in the World Tour, plus one of the game’s main features, which is the new online mode.
The big thing here is online race matchmaking, which is amazing. In theory, anyway. On PC I could never find a single other player to matchmake with. The lobbies were all filled with bots. There’s also a set of weekly challenges that you can complete for XP that will grant you rewards such as skins for cars. But that’s it. Horizon Chase 2 might be prettier than its predecessor, but it simply doesn’t have anywhere near the lasting appeal, greatly damaging it. Still, I can’t deny that it’s very fun while it lasts. I’m sure the devs will continue to flesh it out, just as they did last time, but for now it’s a bit of a hard sell for the price as far as new players are concerned. Fans will no doubt want to pick this up, though, as there’s certainly a few hours of great fun awaiting them at the very least.
Horizon Chase 2: Horizon Chase 2 might be prettier than its predecessor, but it simply doesn't have anywhere near the lasting appeal, greatly damaging it. – Andrew Farrell
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