SvennoJ said:
I 'finished' the game, or rather don't feel like playing any more of it. 17+ hours driving time was my limit with FH5, 3 hour less than FH4.
I made it to level 79 (whatever that means), completed all road, street and dirt races, half of the cross country (grew bored of that rather quickly). The long races were nice, yet nothing really stood out as bad or excellent. No favorites, nothing to dislike either.
The good points:
- Amazing graphics, crash into a tree and you'll sit there staring at the sunlight bouncing off the highly detailed tree bark.
- Great weather effects (which were sadly very much underused during my play time)
- Great map with nicely varied locations, a joy to explore.
- Great sound, as @ZyroXZ2 said, turn off the radio to fully enjoy the car audio soundscape.
- Sense of speed is fully there, when you go fast, it feels like you're going fast.
The bad points:
- Handling is a bit over easy as well as twitchy. With twitchy I mean, I could not get it to gently steer around a high speed corner. I tried different settings for sensitivity but a small movement of the analog stick already has a big reaction. Thus I ended up 'tap' 'tap' 'tapping' along high speed bends, instead of a steady steering input.
- AI or lack of I in AI. They break the laws of physics, stick to their path, don't really interact with you, it's the worst yet in the series.
- Still no rear view mirror in bumper cam (and others). You need one for racing, ridiculous it's still not there.
- No traffic on the PC. The odd thing is when I lost my internet connection, traffic suddenly appeared everywhere, including cars to race. Then as my internet came back, the map was empty again.
- Stability issues, even though it runs much better from SSD, I still get occasional 1 second long freezes. Not often, maybe related to server communication as the game also froze for a bit when I lost my connection.
As a racing game I would give it a 6, there's very little draw to keep going based on the racing.
As an open world driving game an 8 in its current state, 9 if the traffic and connectivity issues are fixed.
So for now, overall a 7 (I would score FH1 8, FH2 9, skipped FH3, FH4 8 FH5 7) FH2 is still my favorite in the series.
Playing FH5 made me long for a new PGR for street racing. A new DriveClub for racing hyper cars over rural roads. A new Burnout for arcade madness with actual damage. A new Motorstorm for off-road mayhem. A new Rallisport Challenge for arcade dirt road racing on long tracks. FH5 gives you a bit of all that, but doesn't really excel at anything. FH5 is like an all you can eat buffet. There's nothing particularly excellent, but you won't leave hungry.
Before I uninstall and move on, I'm gonna do the The Colossus one more time with some nice beats on and the engine sounds turned up! |
