The Fast and the Furious franchise is one of many movie franchises I just haven’t really watched. Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the various Star Wars and Star Trek spinoffs among many, many other series, I just can’t really see myself sitting down and watching these by myself. I know this is partially a fault of me treating watching things as a social experience, but some day I will watch those popcorn action flicks with Cool Cars and equally Cooler Stunts.
Naturally with a franchise that’s been around as long as it has – over two decades! – there’s been video games. Official licensed ones such as the unremarkable Fast & Furious Showdown, Cruis’n for Wii, which was a port of the Fast & Furious arcade game but without the licensing, even the TV show spinoff Fast & Furious: Spy Racers got a tie-in game: Rise of SH1FT3R. But I wanna focus on one that was a tie-in to an existing popular franchise that also involved cars and wild stunts.
Forza Horizon 2 presents: Fast & Furious was a tie-in game released on Xbox One and Xbox 360 as a tie-in to Furious 7, which is when the franchise started using weird names to refer to its sequels. Developed by regular Forza devs Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios, alongside Sumo Digital for the 360 port, this was a free* tie-in that was a standalone expansion to Forza Horizon 2. I put an asterisk there because it was free for the first month or so of release, eventually requiring one to pay for it for the last few months it was available. More on that later.
You play as a nameless protagonist who gets a call from Tej Parker, a recurring character in the previous films, with Chris “Ludacris” Bridges reprising his role. Through a semi-fictionalized version of Nice, France, the player must drive through the streets and complete races to gain enough street cred.
If you think you need to understand the Fast & Furious films to play this, you don’t. The game starts with a clip montage of some of the wildest moments from past films, and you can get a handful of cars from the film, like Dom Toretto’s 1970 Dodge Charger. Otherwise, this is easily understandable even to a person like me who only has a bit of knowledge of the Fast & Furious franchise.
For this article, I played the Xbox 360 version, as that’s the most recent console I own at the time of this writing. Yes, even in 2024, I still haven’t jumped to the 8th generation of game consoles. Which, y’know, when you got a powerful PC, it seems kinda pointless to grab a modern console unless you wanna play a game exclusive to that platform. Surely there’s no major differences between the two games besides graphical fidelity, right?
Anyone who’s played the previous Forza Horizon games will be right at home here: Racing with driving lines, a rewind feature for mistakes, and a big amount of difficulty customization from racing game newbies to veteran Forza players. When not racing, you can accrue points for stylish driving, go through speedtraps to break your friends’ records if any, and even get “barn finds” for hidden cars that can help build the old collection.
One of the other big appeals of the Forza Horizon games is the exciting showtime events, where you race against a non-car opponent. In the Fast & Furious expansion, the chases involve places like chasing a plane to the runway, likely a nod to the ridiculous plane stunt that appears in Furious 7.
Now here’s something funny. When this was announced as free, I immediately grabbed it. Got a good chunk of the achievements, all the cars available, all that jazz. But then there was one tough roadblock: That final plane race. It’s incredibly tight to finish, as not only did I have to make a bunch of twists and turns and get past the pack of seven other racers, I had to make sure I gained just enough speed to beat the plane to the finish line. There were several times where I got close, with Tej telling me “You gotta beat that plane, man!”
This is mainly because the Xbox 360 version lacks one of the major features that the Xbox One version does have: Nitro boosting. A signature feature of the Fast and the Furious franchise, this only appears in drag races in the 360 version. Compared to Xbox One players who probably had no problems with the race, 360 players had to drive practically perfectly to beat it. It’s the main reason I put the game down back in 2015.
So why did I come back to it? Well, this year I’ve been replaying a bunch of 7th generation games I’ve bought over the past few years – the original Dead Space, Split/Second, Call of Duty: Ghosts, even the godawful Need for Speed: The Run. This got me looking back at past 360 games that I never beat, and I decided to give this one another try. Even though it had been nearly a decade since I last seriously played it, it took me a few tries thanks to adjusting the difficulty settings to practically easy mode and some well-timed drifting and rewinding.
That final race, alongside the achievement for getting 15,000 points in a single combo, were the last two achievements I needed to 100% the game. According to my TrueAchievements page, that holds a record for the longest time it took me to get all the achievements: Roughly 3100 days. And they say you can’t always come back to a game to finish it if it’s been so long.
Even though it had been a long time, I still enjoyed my time with it. Forza Horizon rightfully understands to strike a perfect balance between the sim-racer stuff that the regular Forza Motorsport prides itself on, yet also embrace some of the more arcadey stuff like Need for Speed does. The simulation of some racing games put me off sometimes, because I just wanna race cars and not have to micromanage my car collection.
Now, normally this is where I’d point to where you can get this so you can play it yourself. Except there’s one big problem: You cannot get this game anymore. In early 2018, the game was taken off digital storefronts, presumably due to expiring licenses. The parent game, Forza Horizon 2, also got delisted later in the year. As a result, this is now locked away to those who had the fortune to grab it while it was still around. And that sucks.
I’ve complained about stuff like this in the past, about how Sega released a handful of games themed off their iconic franchises to celebrate their 60th anniversary, and how they were only available for a period of time. I constantly bemoan about Our Digital Future™, where you don’t own anything and things will be removed because companies say so. We’re seeing this a lot over the years with constant articles about films and TV shows being pulled off Netflix and other streaming services due to licenses or other similarly dumb reasons, and gaming is one of the biggest offenders of this same problem. This is common with a lot of the Forza games, where Microsoft removes them from sale after about 3-4 years, with only the most recent titles – Forza Horizon 5 and the 2023 Forza Motorsport – being the only ones readily available for purchase unless you resort to used physical copies. Is there any wonder why piracy is still big to this day?
The problem with Our Digital Future™ is that companies want us to accept these as “oh well, it was fun while it lasted,” and I hate that. There’s gonna be folks who love racing games and/or Fast and the Furious and wanna check this out, but can’t. Everyone should get to play this, even though Forza Horizon 2 presents Fast & Furious is merely just a vertical slice of the main Forza Horizon 2 game.
It’s also ironic from Microsoft’s point of view: They have practically fuck-you amounts of money, enough to buy not one but two major publishers for billions of dollars, yet they’ll let these games expire and be removed without any consideration of long term preservation beyond a simple thought. That message that they want to preserve the past of games feels kinda hollow.
Anyway, Forza Horizon 2 presents Fast & Furious was an alright game. A shame you can’t really play it anymore. Unless you decide to watch a longplay, which isn’t as good of an experience. Maybe sailing the seven seas might help.
Guess it’s time to play those other Forza Horizon games I own, like Horizon 3 and 4. The latter of which got announced that it too will be delisted by the end of the year.
…god, I hate Our Digital Future™.
Screenshots taken from Mobygames and Giant Bomb, as I do not have a capture device for Xbox 360 games as of this writing.
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