Recently, in celebration of Fast and Furious 7’s release into the cinematic world, Forza Horizon 2 Presents: Fast and Furious was released for free for a few days on both the 360 and the One. As I adore the Forza games, and I’m a pretty solid fan of the Fast and Furious movies, of course I was going to download this. But I saw an opportunity for something else. I realized that I could pit one game against the other and see what the differences were.
In all honesty, when I did it, I didn’t think there would be many differences at all. Maybe graphics would be better on the One, but that’s all I imagined. I figured I would essentially be playing the same game twice. But what the hell, right? I’m a Forza adorer, I can handle doing that just fine.
Of course, the truth was announced by a friend of mine and I discovered it on my own. Fast and Furious on 360 is a much different game than Fast and Furious on One. So much so that they might as well be two different games, under two different names. I am told that the one for 360 is the way that it is because it’s running off of the Forza Motorsport 4 engine, but my personal experiences with FM4 weren’t enough to make me think that’s all that’s wrong here. There also has to be some kind of … I don’t know. Inattention to detail? I feel bad writing that, because of my Forza love, but there’s so much that makes me feel like it’s the case.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed playing F&F360 quite a bit. Right up until I started to play F&FOne.
So, for those that cannot – or have not – or will not – play both, I’ll lay out some of the most glaring differences.
1. Fast Travel. In F&F360 you can fast travel to the garage after a race. Pretty cool, because you don’t actually get the cars until you get them to the garage. They don’t count on your roster. In F&FOne you can fast travel whenever you damn well please. Yeah. Color me surprised. It means that if you don’t feel like tooling around in your current car, you can pop over to the garage to swap it out and be on your way. In F&F360, I mostly just dorked around in whatever car I had to use, since it was such a huge pain in the ass.
2. Environment. F&F360 has a pretty open environment. It’s nice to look at. But it really did feel like a throwaway game. There’s a lot of places that you can’t go in your car, because they’re just… not there to go to. This is obviously hidden by clever uses of railings and fences. In F&FOne, however, you can plow right through all of it and go wherever you damn well please. Whenever you please to do so. Trees, I must warn, are still rather sturdy unmovable objects. As are buildings. And walls. Those’ll stop you right in your tracks.
3. Skill Points. As a result of the more open environment, skill points are much easier to hang onto. You can get higher multipliers much easier than in F&F360. This is made obvious by the achievement “Chain Reaction”. On 360 you just have to get 15,000 or higher. On One, it’s 50,000. It seemed absolutely absurd to me at first, it was nearly impossible to get that high on 360. Not really so much on One.
4. Cars and Car Mechanics. Perhaps the most important difference, and a really huge one. Astronomical. In F&F360, the cars all felt stunted. Laggy. As if somebody had gone in and put governors on all of them. Or cut their balls off. Pick one. The only car that I felt any sensation of speed with was the McLaren. I spent a lot of time in this car when I was farting around, because it could reach the speeds I wanted to be at with ease. Which fucking sucks, really, because I would have liked to spend more time driving around the Bugatti. I LOVE Bugatti. The Bugatti felt like a VW Bug, the Charger felt like a Prius. It didn’t seem to matter if a car had more or less on any stat, they just had no get up and go. In a racing game, that’s a rather dire requirement. While playing F&FOne, I discovered what these cars should really feel like. The increase in speed and handling ability. The Nissan GT-R, a car made to drift, could actually *GASP* drift properly (this is very easy to test, take the Nissan out to the airport in both games, fuck around with drifting. Note that drifting in F&FOne is easy and tons of fun, while drifting in F&F360 feels like skidding across gravel on your face).
Races that I had to do multiple times on 360 got finished the right way on my first try on One. Brakes worked better, gas didn’t stutter weirdly. I could drive the way I wanted to where I wanted to without the game trying to drag me back onto the road or outright preventing me from going somewhere by stopping my car or turning me into a wall (I had the steering assist on normal for both games to have a comparison marker).
5. Various. There are other little differences that you don’t think about much while playing. The fact that on One you can choose the car you’re going to drive in some of the races. I thought that maybe they weren’t going to do that since it’s just a little stand alone Forza game. But no. Nope. On One you can pick. Or weather. There’s weather in the One version. Like rain. That was pretty cool and lent a much different atmosphere to the race, not to mention challenge. And rain is a lot of fun with the drift cars, let me tell you.
Of course the graphics are better, and of course other console related differences are better (haptic feedback, car paint colors, textures, etc). But I think it’s most important to note that while I enjoyed F&F360, it felt like a tedious slog at times, where F&FOne is frustrating in a fun way. There’s challenge there, actual challenge. The kind of challenge that you can get better and overcome, whereas the challenge in the 360 version is if you can hit the drive line the exact way to get the challenge to work the way it’s supposed to. Not really the same thing, especially if you’re familiar with the Forza games. One part of the Forza games that I love is that they make me feel like I can learn and do better instead of turning down the difficulty to make it easier on myself.
I feel like there’s better dialog, as well. Better conversation between … well, not between anybody, Luda does all the talking all the time, but he seems to enjoy his role more in F&FOne.
Some of the races in the two games are actually completely different as well, which was a little disappointing because I was really sure I would be able to easily execute the rather terribly difficult maneuvers required in F&F360 that made me want to do physical harm to myself or somebody else. There are differences in F&FOne that made races harder to do, but again, it was the kind of hard that one learns from and becomes better due to.
OKAY, NOW FOR A RATING.
Fast and Furious Xbox 360:
Man, do I wish that I would have written a review and rated this game before playing the other. But I didn’t. And for that, it suffers. I’m going to have to give this game a 4 out of 10. For all the reasons I stated above and because of how disappointing it is in retrospect.
If you don’t have the other version to compare it to – and even better yet, if you’ve never played a Forza game – it’s not a bad little sim. Play it, enjoy. However, if you do have the choice, don’t choose this one.
Fast and Furious Xbox One:
I can give this title a solid 8 out of 10. It loses points for being so short (I know it couldn’t be a super long game, but COME ON, IT’S SO AWESOME), it loses points for not dividing the achievements up a little better (could have had one for completing the bucket list, and one for driving all the roads, probably others), and it loses half a point for NOT BEING ABLE TO FUCKING CHANGE THE RADIO STATION. Yes, you can turn the music off, but part of the Forza fun is that soundtrack while you’re driving. Holy crap, some of that music is obnoxious.
