Developed/Published by: Playground Games / Microsoft Studios
Released: March 27th, 2015
Completed: 29th April, 2015
Completion: Finished all the races!
Trophies / Achievements: 1000/1000
The Fast & The Furious franchise is a legitimate juggernaut, with the last film breaking a billion dollars worldwide quite easily and countless (countless!) articles about its unique appeal, from waffly thoughts on its diverse casts to hipster snark over how silly the films are despite that.
I love The Fast & The Furious franchise. I love it. I love it so much that I’ve marathoned the films twice—once for six, and then again for seven—and the second time we did it we actually went to all this effort to edit the films slightly so we could fit them into a day and include things like Justin Lin’s A Better Tomorrow and straight-to-DVD short films.
I love it so much that I paid $25 to watch Furious 7 in a juddering theme park chair (D-Box) on a Saturday night and cried buckets at the touching eulogy to Paul Walker at the end. While in a juddering theme park chair.
The most amazing thing is that until that first marathon I wouldn’t have rated the series at all, having only seen the first one as a student one night when people wanted to go to the cinema but there was nothing on. And now I have such a deep adoration for a series that, I’ll happily admit, is wildly patchy in tone, content and quality.
It’s one of those things that’s rather hard to sell to people, because the series has wiggled and morphed; lazy street-race parody, 80s action throwback, superhero movie, crime drama, heist flick… and yet as it has progressed, it’s,managed to cobble together an epic through-line of continuity, revealing a deep sincerity through a belief and love for its characters that shines through.
To me, The Fast & The Furious series is what makes cinema great—no, it’s what cinema is. None of that shite about “turning your brain off.” They’re movies that say “we’re going to take you on a ride, are you coming with us?”
I think it says a lot about the viewer how they react to that.
Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious is, and this surprises me, a wee game that is made by people who clearly also really love The Fast & The Furious. There’s not really that much to it—a few hours of driving around repurposed chunk of Forza Horizon 2’s open world—but anyone who would title the final achievement here “How Long Was That Runway?” gets it.
It’s the first realistic driving sim I’ve played in an age—since digging into Gran Turismo 3 all those years ago, a slog to be honest—and I was massively impressed with just how easy you could make it to play while still making it feel “realistic.” You can more or less get it to feel like Ridge Racer if you want, but there’s a nice middle-ground there with just enough resistance that I could feel the simulation without getting annoyed at the controller interface.
However! I was playing a The Fast & The Furious game! This is, yes, a nice racing sim, and they did do what they could to make Fast and Furious events—racing a helicopter, etc.—but with the franchise having morphed from being “mostly about cars and family” to being “mostly about everything, up to and including gun fights, kung fu, big explosions, but still cars (a bit) and definitely family” it all feels a bit pedestrian. Ludacris might be doing the voice (and his best to make it seem fast and furious) but, you know, you’re still just driving a car about town without any stakes at all.
Isn’t that weird? The series has moved on so much that the focus on car racing just feels limited, and there’s not much the Forza chaps can do about it. It’s perfectly pleasant, and at the cost of free it was a great demo for the larger game (not so much at the $10 which it costs now, though). But it is just a demo and, honestly, The Fast and The Furious franchise deserves more. Just pick up Forza Horizon 2 now it costs money.
Will I ever play it again? No, but if I’m ever a millionaire I’ll spend money on one of those insane driving set-ups with a wheel and clutch and proper stick-shift and everything and drive very slowly around Forza Horizon 8 or whatever.
Final Thought: My next trip to D-Box will probably be for Mad Max: Fury Road. Cannae wait, man.