Forza Horizon 4

Watch Britains green and pleasant land get churned up by rampant supercars

- Justin Towell

Let’s not beat about the bush; instead let’s drive through it at full speed. Forza Horizon 4 is set to become the best modern, open-world racer. There aren’t a great many surprises in its gameplay, though. Instead, as with Forza Motorsport 7 beside it, Horizon 4 is taking an already excellent game and ironing out the few shortcomings it had while polishing everything else to a fine sheen.

And boy, does it shine. Thanks to Xbox One X and screaming 4K visuals, the move from Australia to the British countryside was well worth the trip. The landscape here looks absolutely magnificent and, better still, the environments you race across change with the seasons, which are sped up so that all players in the online world experience each one for a week of real-world time before it changes to the next. It’s not just window dressing, either. Frozen lakes make for great skidpan racetracks, and the handling on dry, summer asphalt versus the wet, leaf-strewn autumn requires a very different approach.