The first 3 or so hours of Horizon Chase Turbo is a pretty awesome experience. A back to basics arcade racer in the vein of games like Outrun or SNES Top Gear with tight, fun handling, a decent soundtrack and beautiful stylised 3D graphics that evoke the style of the aforementioned retro racers with a modern sheen.

The problem is that Horizon Chase Turbo is just too basic for its own good, and it starts to lose its appeal towards the end of the roughly 10 hour long campaign. You can tell that the devs tried to mitigate this with a "quantity over quality" approach as there are hundreds of race tracks in the campaign, lots of cars to unlock throughout and other modes like tournaments and a roguelike-ish endurance race mode for Tens Of Hours Of Content™. The problem is that none of this icing really makes up for the lack of meaningful content in Horizon Chase Turbo.

The other issue is the difficulty balancing. Again, this game is mechanically simple to the point where driving by itself is a pretty brainless activity, so difficulty is injected into this gameplay style with some questionable decisions, such as a plethora of gimmicky, extremely narrow tracks and stupidly aggressive rubberbanding AI for your opponents. The even more questionable thing is just how much this difficulty is eradicated towards the end when you unlock the most OP cars like the AE86 and have all of the vehicle upgrades. Seriously, India (which is just past the halfway point of the campaign) is by FAR the hardest region but everything after that goes back to being pretty easy despite the attempts to be dramatic at the end.

I'd still recommend this game to anyone else who is a fan of arcade racers, but with a more tentative recommendation than what I started out with. I would say I have high hopes for the development team Aquiris in the future but they recently got acquired by Epic Games, so we'll just have to see what that future holds in store for us.

It's playable, but length of the game is incredibly long for content in it and it's gameplay loop. If you completed world tour - than you completed 80-90% of the game, because all other DLC's and game modes is just reuse of those tracks, except SENNA dlc, which is the last 10-20% of content in the game. Adventures is terrible, you can't even see reward for this 5 pretty difficult races (ecxept car on the first place which is your reward and most of the time just recolour of your car, like darker orange on NSX, while car already have orange colour), which will waste your nerves because of the AI and level design. Races by themselves is easy, but your AI opponents and their fat asses is very annoying on the tight corners. Like... it will be okay if reward will be good, but reward (most of the time, there is a few good styles for cars too, but just a few) is RECOLOUR! Take your green audi, or dark orange NSX, yeah, definitly worth it. Also last cars unlocks for completing all tournaments, 1 car for each difficulty, and all endurance challenges, because you will get only 1 car for highest difficulty challenge and to unlock it you need to complete previous challenges))))
Game can be not that bad if you will play it on the phone or in the toilet on your steamdeck for 20-40 minutes, but it's not any capable for complete PC or console game. Poor soundtrack which starts to being annoying pretty fast, only 1 type of the race - circle for all game, and wasted potential of good tracks, there is only very grounded and ordinary tracks, not anything special or interesting. But cars are good, they feels different, have personalitys and etc. Maps and tracks (for their ordinaryty) is kinda not THAT bad (shit background and sometimes it's hard to distinguish texture borders on the track, but weather and some parts of the tracks are feels good)

Idk what to say. Want to say it's shit, but i spended on it 15 hours which feels like 100.

Most definitely more sizzle than steak but I still finished the "World Tour" with 100% gold so it was doing something right.

The art direction and overall style of Horizon Chase Turbo is far and away what it does best. It's a beautiful game full of color and design. It strikes a perfect balance of being its own modern style while still being a nostalgic throwback. All while avoiding going full 80s, 90s, synth, or whatever. It's really nice and really unique. The gameplay tries to do this too but it doesn't quite come together as well. It feels like an old arcade cabinet racer with all the drifting and frustrating collisions into the backs of cars or sign posts but then it's also insanely easy with scripted player favoring rubberbanding ever stage.

The only real challenge on the campaign mode("World Tour") is trying to collect all the blue coins every track. But even that you can kind of cheese by going slow lap one to make sure you get them. You can do this because you'll be pulled to the leader in the following laps. There's a wide variety of cars with only one real difference. If you focus on cars and upgrades with the highest steering the rest of the cars' stats are irrelevant. The track layouts also get progressively lazier as you get to each new location. The art and design stays good mind you. But the layouts, whether through player familiarity or design laziness, just get boring. It opens with tracks clearly inspired by real world racing and video game fandom and devolves into repeated gimmicks and lazy left/rights. The music is decent but I turned it off quickly as it got too repetitive even in the small doses.

But where it works is the drop in and play aspect. Races are rarely longer than two or three minutes. The game runs full blast on the Steam Deck. It's just one of those games you can get in and out of. Load it up, cruise to victory, feel a false sense of accomplishment as the gold "Super Trophy" flashes on screen, rinse and repeat a couple times, shut down, and go on with your day. That said, once I completed the campaign, I had no desire to check out any of the other fluff. The racing product simply isn't good enough for me to want to do "Adventures" or "Endurance". I got what fun I could out of it. I will note that the menus got randomly unresponsive for me at times. Hangs or something. Especially after unlocking a vehicle. Might've been a Steam Deck thing. But otherwise runs flawlessly.

It looks great and is just passable enough fun to drive. Great on the Steam Deck.

[copied from my Steam review]

Top 50 Favorites: #12

The vibes are immaculate, best racing video game of all time. One of the few retro-inspired games that actually feels like it's trying to carve out its own unique legacy, as opposed to simply nostalgia-baiting and recycling genre tropes. Perfectly encapsulates that feeling of sticking your head out the window on a summer drive, feeling the breeze caress your face as you take in all the beautiful sights in front of you - nothing else existing outside of that moment. The gameplay loop is essentially just doing one thing, but you never want to stop doing that thing - not with such stupendous colors popping right off the screen (in many scenic interpretations of real-life locations). And boy is that soundtrack killer, or what? Controls are tight but not so tight that it's a cakewalk, this still relies on your skill and drive to succeed. Great with buddies, too. Saying this is truly something special would be an understatement - one of the most underrated games of the 20th century.