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As platform comparisons go, Forza Horizon 2 vs DriveClub promises to be one of the most exciting console clashes of this year's holiday season. There's certainly much in common between the two titles, with each boasting similarly advanced rendering features, tight online integration, and native 1080p visuals operating at a locked 30fps. But where Playground Games' Xbox sequel hopes to differentiate itself is in its focus on delivering a rich and unrestrained open world where players are free to explore and tackle challenges as they see fit. How well that would actually work wasn't clear until the release of the Forza Horizon 2 demo earlier this week - our first chance to get uninterrupted hands-on time with the game.First impressions are positive. Set across South of France and parts of Northern Italy, our first glimpses of the world in Forza Horizon 2 are filled with large, intricate landscapes spanning rolling hillsides, rocky cliff faces, and stretches of countryside filled with winding roads and fields rich with foliage and farming crops. This is nicely demonstrated in the demo as we first make our way around cliff-side coastal roads in a yellow Lamborghini before heading inland across the countryside to our eventual destination, the Horizon festival.
Draw distances are impressive with buildings, trees, and plants visible far into the horizon. While there are restrictions on how far you can drive in the demo, generally speaking if you can see an area, you can reach it, cutting across fields and driving up hillsides to get there. LOD (level of detail) transitions are for the most part kept in check too, although we find that higher quality assets for foliage pop in quite late, which is quite noticeable when tearing through the scenery at over 100mph, while shadows frequently flicker as you approach them. Textures mostly appear pretty crisp and clear, although the low level of anisotropic filtering is disappointing - details on the ground start to blur from just a few metres away.
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