I've recently returned to this game to play it with some friends who bought the xbox game pass and I just have to vent a bit.
Mostly pointless rant warning. You have been warned.
The menus are confusing. Just yesterday I spent way too long trying to figure out how to leave a multiplayer session, flipping through the different tabs scanning the super cool modern looking tiles which are totally better than a more classic menu. Found it in the end, but I considered just shutting the game off instead. That's just one example. Finding things you might not use all the time is a horrible experience in this game.
Why can't I have rear view mirrors on anything but the interior view? Surely for a driving game this should be an obvious option. Or maybe there's a way to turn them on, but I haven't found it in the menu labyrinth. In any case, I'm left with looking backwards all the time which isn't ideal.
Then this is less important, but why am I getting ads for the expansions in the game I paid money for? The little icon on the map is fine, doesn't bother me, including pictures in the loading screen is fine and I could live with getting the little cinematic in-game whenever a new one is released, but all three of those start to get on my nerves. Sure, the option to buy the packs or cars in-game should be there, but constantly reminding you that it exists seems shady to me as I really don't like a company advertising so heavily in something I paid for.
Why can't I just locally save the photomode pictures? Why do they need to be publicly uploaded so I can snatch them off of forza hub? It just seems so unnecessary and frustrating if forza hub refuses to load for some reason, like it did yesterday.
These are just off the top of my head, but it feels like I run into minor issues like this all the time when playing this game.
Then my main gripes are related to playing it on PC. Why is it so frustrating? This is a game made by Microsoft Studios - a division of the company that made the OS you can play the game on and it sucks. It just lacks basic features that you'd expect to be there.
I would like to listen to my own music while playing, but while I can turn off the radio while driving there appears to be no way of turning off the menu music. Something I've not had a problem with in any other PC game so far. Especially annoying because the menu tracks get repetitive fast.
Why does the game insist on "optimising the game for my PC" every once in a while? If something changed on my system I'm the one that changed it and I can probably figure out if I'd like to change the in-game settings. The option to have it done automatically is nice, but it's been forced on me several times, which means the game takes longer to boot and it messes with my settings.
Playing multiplayer with a friend on PC is an absolute nightmare. I didn't think a service could get worse than games for windows live, but they've somehow managed it. The whole process goes like this: Befriend someone on the external xbox program, similar to other services like Steam. That's fine. Then in game, invite a friend to your convoy. This opens up a window separate from the game, again similar to steam, where you can flip through your friends and invite them. Except interacting with this window with the controller also effects the game in the background, so while I'm scrolling through my friends and inviting them I'm also doing random menu-flipping in the game. This is a minor annoyance, but it's been like this since Horizon 3 and they still haven't fixed it.
More importantly after you've sent the invite there's a decent chance it just won't go through. When this happens there's usually no way of joining a friend through the in-game menu either. The game just somehow ignores that your friend is online and there's not much you can do about it.
And then finally if you manage to get a convoy going there's a decent chance someone's game will crash in the next hour, making you repeat the whole process all over again. I should stress that Horizon 4 is much much better than Horizon 3 in this regard, but to me it's still one of the most frustrating multiplayer experiences on PC.
I had to let this out somewhere, because I really like the Horizon games. They've done a lot of improvements since Horizon 3. Better performance, less infuriating multiplayer, simple features like being able to turn off your microphone in-game (no really, you could only do this system-wide in windows settings for the third game), but for a full-price AAA game from Microsoft it's so disappointing.
tl;dr
I really like this game, but there are plenty of minor issues that can all add up to a very frustrating experience.
