This post will be mostly my first impressions with Forza Horizon 4, no not a "review" as you will find out when I realte my tale of woe. Also shots of FO4 Cris in the spoiler below.

But first the aforementioned tale of woe, so I bought and downloaded Forza Horizon 4 last Monday, played it for a bit before going to bed then on the following Tuesday woke up played it some more before going out for food. So I was gone for around an hour and can you imagine my surprise when I get back and attempt to start up Forza Horizon 4 that it tells me the game has been refunded and that I can't play it, nevermind the fact that if I was going to refund it I'd uninstall it, when I never requested a refund (we'll get onto why I didn't later) so commence a trip onto the Microsoft support forums where they tell me to contact support directly so I do and in the process of trying to fix the problem (which is effectively me buying the game again) we remove my card's details from my account since the windows store wasn't recognising it and now I can't re-add it so I'll be rebuying the game with MS points that way if this happens again I just get my points back and can just rebuy it again.

But anyway my first impressions (I'll give a full "review" at a later date) in a nutshell I was really enjoying FH4, while it's still missing some of the stuff I loved in FH1, namely the "boss" races where you can get their car it's a really fun game. I absolutely loved hooning around a smaller version of Edinburgh in an NSX. The story is usual Horizon fair, you're a rookie driver trying to gain influence at the Horizon festival (a festival that could never exist in real life I don't think) and driving a variety of cars from modest hatchbacks to American muscle cars to expensive hyper cars and everything in between as you compete in various racing events. Street racing makes a welcome return (at least for me, I never actually played 3 and it wasn't in 2) and I actually prefer those races to the regular events as they're a bit more challenging due to the traffic on the roads (nothing like crashing a £1,000,000 hypercar into a ford focus and needing to do some insane driving to regain the lead) but that's not to say that the regular events aren't good and the addition of the different seasons (which in the tutorial you get to play through all 4) add a bit of variety to each race.

As for the "character customisation" it's not true customisation, you choose from a selection of premade avatars and you can change between them at any house you own. you can however customise their clothing and obviously the car customisation is still there and really in a driving game it's the cars that are the main focus right? Not to say the game is perfect, I did encounter a few issues (other than the aforementioned refund) mainly Frame rate drops (though they were infrequent) and LOD fuckups when I was going to fast (again fairly infrequently) but nothing to really dampen my enjoyment of the game and from what I played of it I really did enjoy my time with it and after Xmas I'll be getting those microsoft points to rebuy it again so I've got something different to play while I'm playing Dragon Quest.

Also in other news Warframe managed to piss me off (not to the point where I'm not going to piss away £60 on Mesa Prime) with one of its missions but I'll probably be back onto it at some point in the future.