FORZA HORIZON

Forza Horizon 4 retains almost everything that made Forza Horizon 3 the best racer in its class and bakes it into a game that doesn’t ever want you to stop playing. The stunning visual quality and sound design, the massive array of automobiles, and the extensive and completely customisable career mode that have become hallmarks of the Horizon series are all here. What’s new is just how much more effectively Forza Horizon 4 encourages us to return thanks to its shifting seasons, regularly refreshed challenges, and steady stream of rewards.

There’s a glimpse of all four seasons during the four- to five-hour introduction phase, but once the prologue’s first “year” is over seasons will rotate weekly (online or offline). It’s been Autumn throughout the bulk of this review and it might just be my favourite season. There just seems to be so much detail, from the spectrum of colours in the trees as their leaves die off at different rates, to the soggy roadside puddles that persist in an environment that’s becoming too cool for them to evaporate. Winter is excellent, too. If you’ve played Forza Horizon 3: Blizzard Mountain, you’ll have a basic idea of what to expect. It’s not just the world turned white; the landscape takes on an entirely new identity.

It’s gorgeous and I’ve enjoyed exploring it immensely. On Xbox One X I’ve opted to stick with the game’s default “Quality” mode (native 4K, HDR, 30 frames per second) because I’ve been content with playing Horizon games locked at 30 fps in the past, but there is also a “Performance” mode (which cranks up the framerate to 60 and sets the resolution at 1080p, also with HDR).

DIRT RALLY

is a first-rate return to the more serious side of Codemasters’ off-road catalogue. It may be hot on the heels of Dirt 4 – with a couple of tricks pulled from its friendlier stablemate – but make no mistake: Dirt Rally 2.0 reasserts this spin-off series’ reputation as the premier rally simulator of the modern era.

Dirt Rally 2.0 is designed primarily for hardboiled rally enthusiasts and returning fans, so new players may struggle initially. The original Dirt Rally was eventually augmented with a pile of tutorial videos in time for its jump from PC to console, and Dirt 4 features a fully-fledged Dirt Academy training mode set within the sprawling DirtFish Rally School – a real-life facility based in the US Pacific Northwest. But there’s none of that here in Dirt Rally 2.0. It’s a case of learn on the job or perish.

NFS PAYBACK

Need for Speed Payback is one step forwards and two steps back for EA’s 23-year-old racing series. While Payback does fix a host of the 2015 Need for Speed reboot’s missteps, it also brushes away a lot of the stuff developer Ghost Games got right at that time.

You see, Need for Speed 2015 brought with it a resurrection of the spirit of 2003 and 2004’s successful Underground games and saw the return of meaningful performance and visual customisation. Between all the hokey live-action, first-person fist-bumping it also revolved around encounters with real-world automotive icons. That’s an idea I still genuinely like. Of course, it was very short, the world was largely empty, there initially wasn’t any drag racing, and you couldn’t even pause the game in single-player. It was flawed, no doubt.

The cop chases feel largely neutered too; escaping police is now a totally linear exercise, where we have to follow a set path via checkpoints within a time limit instead of improvising and doing something unpredictable to throw them off. The characters aren’t functionally different from each other; they’re just each tied to one or two of the five specific car classes that are different from each other. Payback splits its cars into five categories – race, off-road, drift, drag, and runner (which are used for battling cops). Cars for specific race types need to be purchased from specific dealers and can’t be used in any other race type than the one they were purchased for. It’s a bit restrictive, particularly considering the game doesn’t always necessarily play by its own rules.

F1 2016

There are just five laps to go of the 57-lap 2016 Bahrain Grand Prix and I’ve got about enough fuel for four and change. Complicating matters even further, my tyres are on the brink of ruin – specifically my front left, which I’ve been loading up and brutalising around every one of Bahrain’s beefy right-handers.

I need to make a call: pit now and lose a few spots I won’t have time to claw back, or go for broke and risk it all. Ninety minutes of racing have reached a dramatic crescendo: a white-knuckle dash to the finish line in a car that may or may not make it. This is brilliant stuff. In just my second career race F1 2016 has swallowed me up in its Formula One fantasy. Furiously fast, satisfyingly stressful, and utterly exhausting, F1 2016 isn’t just Codemasters’ best F1 game to date – it may just be the best F1 racer ever.

 

 

PROJECT CARS

isn’t for everybody. It’s a serious, deep, and demanding racing simulation for people who like their motorsport pure. There’s no pop punk soundtrack, or explosive takedowns, or generous rewinds. Developer Slightly Mad Studios set out to capture the experience of manhandling a real racing car around a long list of some of the world’s most famous racing circuits, and has thoroughly succeeded. Tough but satisfying and cruel but fair, Project CARS is a truly fantastic racing game with the potential to become a real force in the genre.

It is, however, for anybody – and this is an important distinction. Project CARS is probably the most user-friendly racing sim I’ve ever played. Even a layman who wants to learn can delve into Project CARS and be able to find a series of settings and options that will massage it into an experience that suits them, because the list of things to tweak is frankly exhaustive. There’s a lot to admire here, from the incredibly authentic handling to its lavishly detailed cars and tracks and its potent sound, but I’m seriously impressed at just how malleable this game is.

Project CARS features all the typical crutches, from braking assistance to stability control, but the options keep coming. Don’t like where the on-screen track map sits on your HUD? Move it somewhere else. Do you play with a steering wheel peripheral and find it distracting to see an on-screen steering wheel too? You can delete the wheel from the dash. It’s exceedingly well thought out.

What I like most, however, is the way Project CARS allows us to fine-tune the overall AI difficulty and race length before every single session. The AI operates on a slider from zero to 100, which gives you the freedom to find a sweet spot that matches your ability. Find yourself out-qualifying the pack by several seconds? Maybe dial the AI up a few notches until they’re on par with you. Settled on a satisfying level of challenge but need a little more race time on a short track to realistically challenge for top spot? Increase the amount of laps for this event. Racers like the Forza Motorsports series traditionally offer similar scope to increase or decrease the overall challenge before races, but the implementation here is markedly more elegant and nuanced.

 

 

NFS MOST WANTED

Level Design
Luckily, the course and overall city design are much better in NFS Most Wanted than in NFSU2. EA learned a few things from last year’s endeavor, which is that open worlds are fine and dandy, but you’ll need to fill them if you have them, and Most Wanted is a racing game, not an adventure game.

Most Wanted is also a long game. It’s packed. Each of the 15 racers requires anywhere from seven to 10 races before you race them, and those boss competitions are usually two races. That’s easily 15-plus hours just to beat the career mode. And that doesn’t include the dozens of cop chases, additional milestones or free-roam races you can pick up at any time. It doesn’t include the challenge mode or the online play either.

Developers of racing games received a new injection of life and purpose in the last two years. The growing popularity of street racing and modding has flourished in the popular culture, while Criterion’s Burnout series has blazed a path all its own, bringing arcade racing back to its pre-Gran Turismo glory days. The Need for Speed series has never clung to a particular aspect of pop culture like Rockstar’s Midnight Club or a particular car like Sega’s Ferrari 360, but the long-time series struck gold with its light implementation of modding with Need for Speed Underground, selling more units worldwide than any game in 2003 with 7.5 million. Need for Speed Most Wanted continues the street culture thing, but EA’s Canadian development team has mined one of the better iterations of the series, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, fusing both rudiments into a newly refined, yet strangely familiar racer.

NFS Most Wanted is a well-balanced, challenging, and substantial racing game that’s worth your while on any system, including this most recent iteration on Xbox 360. It returns the series to its cop chasing days while incorporating street cars, culture, and an impressive display of stylized FMV without forgetting the fundamentals: People like to drive sweet-looking fast cars, they want more than a little freedom, and hey, if there are a hot chicks too? All the better.

 

 

NFS UNDERGROUND 2

Developers of racing games received a new injection of life and purpose in the last two years. The growing popularity of street racing and modding has flourished in the popular culture, while Criterion’s Burnout series has blazed a path all its own, bringing arcade racing back to its pre-Gran Turismo glory days. The Need for Speed series has never clung to a particular aspect of pop culture like Rockstar’s Midnight Club or a particular car like Sega’s Ferrari 360, but the long-time series struck gold with its light implementation of modding with Need for Speed Underground, selling more units worldwide than any game in 2003 with 7.5 million. Need for Speed Most Wanted continues the street culture thing, but EA’s Canadian development team has mined one of the better iterations of the series, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, fusing both rudiments into a newly refined, yet strangely familiar racer.

NFS Most Wanted is a well-balanced, challenging, and substantial racing game that’s worth your while on any system, including this most recent iteration on Xbox 360. It returns the series to its cop chasing days while incorporating street cars, culture, and an impressive display of stylized FMV without forgetting the fundamentals: People like to drive sweet-looking fast cars, they want more than a little freedom, and hey, if there are a hot chicks too? All the better.

 

 

BURNOT TAKEDOWN

Burnout 3, like the previous games in the series, is mainly a racing game that rewards you for living dangerously. The game features simple, extremely responsive controls, so you can accelerate, steer, brake (around corners), and boost for a burst of speed. The courses in the game are open-road tracks on winding freeways and city streets, and, naturally, the streets are populated with a good amount of traffic.

Best Takedown :Driving dangerously comes in the form of driving in the wrong lane, getting close to (but not hitting) other cars, catching air, drifting around turns, and so on. When you pull such risky maneuvers, you’re rewarded with boost. But the quickest way to fill your boost meter in a regular race is to make your opponents crash. Takedowns, as you might imagine from the game’s subtitle, are a major part of Burnout 3. When you knock another car out, not only is your boost meter filled, but also it’s extended up to a maximum of four times its original size. The downside is that you’ll expose yourself to some pretty dangerous situations to earn all this boost, and crashing will eliminate much of your boost, chop off one of your bonus meter segments if you have any, and, more than likely, cause you to fall back one or two spots in a race. For an easy-to-play racing game, Burnout 3 actually gives you a lot to consider.

 

 

 

MIDNIGHT CLUB : STREET RACING

With the street racing market becoming increasingly flooded with overly commercialized, hokey, and downright stereotypical games, Rockstar’s Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition is a welcome offering. You won’t find any bikini-clad babes gyrating over the hoods of cars, cellular phone company logos intruding on the scenery, or lame story modes featuring The Fast and the Furious rip-offs. Instead, you’ll find a thoroughly entertaining arcade racer with lots of licensed cars, a slew of ways to customize them, and a high volume of various play modes. Sure, it isn’t without a few notable gaffes, but all in all, Midnight Club 3 is a deep and enjoyable game that will definitely satisfy fans of the genre.

Most of the races in Midnight Club 3 are checkpoint races. These checkpoints are scattered all over the place, and oftentimes there are multiple paths that will take you to each one. Half the challenge of the game is trying to find the best path to each checkpoint.

There is no storyline in this game just challenge player to make a race in game an get the number one in race.  So after the race player will get money to rebuild his  car. With in get a reputation when we finish game.

CRASH TEAM RACING

The Crash Bandicoot series has always had pretty smooth graphics, updating with the times quite nicely, and CTR is really no exception. The environments are reasonably large, and they convey the cartoon-like attitude of the game very nicely. The music and sound effects also push the game’s cartoon theme, but it’s not too over the top, so the cutesy themes never really get shoved down your throat.

Gameplay to get a box with questions mark. The player can hit the question mark to get a special abilities from that and the abilities can hit another player to make a slow or make another player freeze and anything we get. Its to challenging player to get best podium