Forza Horizon 4 Review: 6 Ups & 3 Downs

2. The Story Mode & Human Interactions Aren't Great

Like the previous Forza Horizon games, there's a distinctly human grounding to all the vehicular mayhem, despite it being completely unnecessary.

Though your voice-over assistant is charming enough, the voice acting during the game's cinematic sequences range from mediocre to laughably bad, and the human character models look embarrassingly low-res compared to the jaw-dropping fidelity of the cars themselves.

It probably would've been smart to just do away with people altogether, honestly, but Horizon 4 ultimately goes the other way. Its tangential Story Mode, for instance, flings players into a series of chapter-based scenarios where human interaction is all-too-frequent.

Though the opening stuntman events are fun to a point, the hackneyed dialogue gets old fast, and the missions themselves end up feeling quite repetitive. It's this aspect of the game that feels the most workmanlike and unnecessary: the world doesn't need to be populated with any robotic, stiffly animated-and-voiced people for it to feel alive.