It was quite a long time that I had not played a driving game, as lately I was more focused on Beat ’em up, Shoot ’em up or “Metroidvainia” kind of games, but oh boy! Horizon Chase Turbo has got me hooked for hours to my ps4 in the last weeks!
Developed by the Brasilian studio Aquiris, the game has a very lovely retro art style that will remind you inmediately of some famous mega classic games like the Outrun saga.
The mechanics of playing offer also some reminiscence to Outrun in the way the car drifts through the curves, the dialog boxes, etc. Being more on the side of arcade games than of a real simulation, which is fine by me, as I am a kind of player that, when playing driving games, I do not want to touch the brake button so much and just decide when to accelerate or skip the acceleration for a few seconds in a difficult curve.
The game is super addictive from start, and offers several game modes like Campaigns, Adventures, Tournaments and Endurance, but I miss some online mode to compete with other players around the world (even though I am not a great online multiplayer myself).
The soundtrack is a delight and fits perfectly with the circuits, I have some songs stuck in my head now for days, and the visual art, though is not super flashy, embeds itself perfectly in the different tracks and circuits, being beautiful but not intrusive.
Is Horizon Chase Turbo a perfect game? Far from it. The AI and balance of the rival cars sometimes plays funny, with cars accelerating too much without sense or flipping over magically or creating too much of a bottleneck on your path in certain areas. Some stages in the World Tour are almost impossible to win with a normal advancing level and you will need to return with a better unlocked car to win them over, and probably the rookie Campaign should have appear unlocked from start, cause once you play the normal campaign, it loses the appeal.
But all in all, although not being a technically flawless game and having a few bugs and design improvements that could benefit from, it is still one of the funniest and most addictive games that I have played in the last years. Sometimes I lost count of the hours I played inmersed in repeating a race again and again until winning, or thinking “ok just one more race” but playing 2 more hours instead. It is a simple but beautiful and catchy games, and I fully recommend it to you if you like driving games with a retro arcade touch.