Forza Horizon 4 is a slot machine simulator that enables a driving game.

In it, you play a wealthy, youthful car enthusiast attending a year-round racing festival during which the residents of a massive swath of British countryside generously agree to replace about 80% of their walls, fences, and trees with breakaway prop versions that explode at any collision over 20 mph, and endure thumping party music for the rest of their natural lives.

It is also an effective dopamine drip. In the early hours of the game, every accomplishment, no matter how tiny, prompts some colorful meter or progression counter to update. These achievement metrics fill regularly and unlock new content. They also rain tokens for the aforementioned slot machines on you; slot machines on which every spin is a win and most prizes are cars.

And boy will you get cars. So many cars. Your garage will be rotten with cars of every make, model, and style you can imagine in under a dozen hours. You will never drive 90% of them unless you need to make more content for YouTube or Twitch, or want to expand your collection of player-created cute anime girl paint jobs. But it's still important that they're all here because each car is someone's favorite.

Once you decide which of your cars to drive (much to the resentment of all your other cars that will forever sit collecting dust, you monster), you will look at your map and notice that there is literally too much to do. You will almost regret unlocking more races as you transform the map into a mess of badges, icons, and search radii. You will have to aggressively filter the map to find the next race in your current championship series.

But (eventually), race you will. There are many kinds of races. Track races, dirt races, street races, point-to-point, rally, and other novelties. There's even Battle Royale (Auto Royale?) racing, called The Eliminator, complete with shrinking battlefield, hunts for car upgrades, and 1v1 duels where the winner is usually whoever hits fewer unyielding trees on the way to a randomly generated finish line.

Whichever modes you favor, the racing feels very good provided you take time to find, upgrade, or tune a car out of the suck zone. Between tweaks to the AI difficulty and driving assists, both of which reward accepting challenge with multipliers to credit and influence earnings, you'll surely find a level of resistance that fits your skill. The game even pipes up every few races if you win or lose too much, encouraging you to adjust your settings back into the challenge sweet spot.

And you really should take the advice it offers. The right level of challenge, where you find victory attainable but not assured, will push you to improve your driving and tuning skills. But another reason is that FH4 understands that forcing players to place on the podium to progress just results in them lowering the difficulty, or restarting the race each time they botch a turn that will guarantee a loss. To save you those frustrations, the game largely lets you progress just by trying and finishing events, and allows you to rewind the most recent few seconds of races whenever you like to fix any failure so dramatic that you'd restart rather than finish.

The result is a game that, despite my good-natured roasting, is always, always fun. FH4 is a joyous driving party that can entertain the casual player who just wants a no-pressure racing fantasy, alongside the most driven creatives, tuners, and racers.