After a short time on other platforms, including Nintendo Switch, the sequel to the fantastic game from 2018 Horizon Chase Turbo it’s finally coming to Xbox. Yes, Horizon Chase 2 is almost here and we’ve been looking forward to it ever since it was announced for the platform. The good news is that for the most part, this high-speed sequel delivers exactly what you’d want from a Horizon Chase sequel, even if the second round can feel a bit boring at times.
If you never played the first game and happen upon this sequel, Horizon Chase is a bit of a love letter to old-school arcade racing. Think SEGA’s classic Outrun series or Kemco’s retro SNES racer Top Gear with a modern twist and you’re there. Everything moves at breakneck speed in this arcade racing series, and you’re tasked with almost ‘driving’ the car around the circuit rather than fully controlling its every mechanical movement.
You get to grips with the old driving style fairly quickly, though, and most of Horizon Chase 2 takes place via the “World Tour” game mode – which follows the same basic format as the previous game. You’ll be heading off to a variety of postcard-worthy locations around the world – starting in the US before traversing a total of six countries and wrapping up in Japan. Despite being a stereotypical snapshot of each location, all six regions manage to feel unique in their presentation, and there was never a dull moment as we whizzed through World Tour Horizon Chase 2.
In this second game, the visual style is perhaps a bit more “modern” than the predecessor, mind you. We’re not saying that Horizon Chase 2 will compete with the presentation of Forza Horizon 5 or anything, but the graphics have a more modern, animated look than Chase Turbo, which felt much more like a clean version of the retro gameplay. This might put some purists off, but we really like how Horizon Chase 2 looks in motion, and the more modern presentation style is paired with denser backgrounds to create a “fuller” feel to the game’s virtual worlds.
Unfortunately, the actual racing is far less diverse than the game’s beautiful presentation. The vast majority of Horizon Chase 2’s action takes the form of simple circuit racing, with the odd time trial thrown in during the game’s roughly four-hour world tour. Some alternative racing modes like ‘Elimination’, or maybe even some kind of crash mode where you need to knock other players off course, would be welcome – just to shake things up a bit. That, coupled with a few other locations, would make the Horizon Chase 2 world tour a slam dunk, but it’s still a very fun time.
Outside of the main career mode, you have ‘Tournaments’ – which combine World Tour races into a simple format of four races at varying difficulty levels – and ‘Courts’; multiplayer game mode. The tournament mode is good fun and will likely be a place to return to for a quick Horizon Chase 2 post-career race, and we’d imagine multiplayer would be good fun in this game if a community develops. As usual, we didn’t spend any time online during the review phase due to the lack of players jumping into the Horizon Chase 2 pre-release.
One final note to touch on here is the game’s overall presentation and performance from the perspective of the Xbox Series X. Apart from the odd hiccup here and there, Horizon Chase 2 never let us down – even at some of the ridiculous speeds this racer can climb to. You see at least 60 FPS playback here on Microsoft’s flagship, as you’d expect from a game of this kind. We read that Horizon Chase 2’s performance suffered a bit with the Nintendo Switch release in 2023, but there’s no evidence of that on the Xbox Series X.
Conclusion
If you enjoyed Horizon Chase Turbo as much as we did, then this quick sequel is an easy recommendation. We’d like a bit more meat on Horizon Chase 2’s bones, but what’s here is undeniably fantastic fun, and we’re happy to relive the feeling of an arcade racing wonder. The graphics are gorgeous, the gameplay is slick and satisfying, and despite the relatively short runtime, you simply can’t go wrong with this one. Horizon Chase 2 is a virtual tour of the world worth going on.