Horizon Chase Turbo Review

Back in 2015, a small team of game developers named Aquiris Game Studio made an arcade styled racing game known as Horizon Chase – World Tour for iOS and Android devices. After it achieved reasonable critical and commercial success, the decision was to port the game to PC and home consoles under the name of Horizon Chase Turbo with additional features and enhanced graphics to compliment higher resolution devices.

At its heart, Horizon Chase Turbo is a love letter to the arcade racing games of the past thirty years, including SEGA’s Outrun and Gremlin’s Top Gear series, with added game mechanics from various modern racers thrown into the mix. The gameplay is viewed from a third person perspective, with a static animated background in the distance as your only viewpoint. You are not able to see the entire track at once, but the handy retro styled track map on the left-hand side will tell you exactly when you should expect to turn or encounter another driver. For anyone who is used to the simulators and realistic driving games currently available on the Xbox One, the looser control scheme may be a slight culture shock, as you will need to adjust to sharp turns jumping out of nowhere, which can be difficult as you are not given the necessity of seeing an obstacle coming your way.

When you first load the game, the only available game mode is the World Tour. Each location contains several sub cities, each with several races based on real world locations. As you unlock new locations on the world map, new game modes also become available, such as the Tournament mode, and the Playground mode which is exclusive to the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch versions is the game. The Playground is an entertaining addition to Horizon Chase Turbo, adding new randomly chosen challenges on a daily basis for players to complete. Although you don’t gain any specific rewards for doing this task, placing your best times to be ranked on an online leaderboard will be incentive enough for most competitive racing game fans.

The ultimate goal of each race in the World Tour Mode is to earn trophies and credits, which unlock bonus stages and more powerful cars to drive. This career style progression gets steadily harder, with each track having a varying number of blue tokens waiting to be snagged, and fuel tokens to ensure you don’t get disqualified in the middle of a race. These flag shaped collectables increase the amount of credits obtained at the end of a race, increase the replay value to each available course, and allow you to obtain one of the highly desirable Super Trophies as proof of your racing prowess. If you are lagging behind a significant number of racers, you can use a limited number of nitro boosts, which not only gives players the thrill of the chase, but adds to the challenge of keeping your car on the road when it comes to those pesky corners.

One of the exclusive additions to the console port of Horizon Chase Turbo are the local and online multiplayer options. One of the best parts of this feature is that you can play every game mode along with other gamers, and the progress made towards unlocking new content will be added directly to your current user profile. The transition between single player and multiplayer is near instantaneous, with almost no significant delay whilst using the online functionality.

As you may expect, the graphics of Horizon Chase Turbo have been given a high definition makeover for its console release. The game has the potential to run at full 4K resolution thanks to its Xbox One X enhancements, but anyone who does not own the premium version of Microsoft’s current home console will not any major frame rate or loading times. In other words, it is the same experience for all end users, albeit at the slightly lower resolution of 1080p. The soundtrack of the game is a perfect mixture of synthesised high energy tunes, with the majority of them being composed by Barry Leitch, the original composer behind the soundtrack for the Top Gear series.

Overall, Horizon Chase Turbo is a well-designed port of a mobile arcade game that incorporates a retro themed sub-genre and modern game mechanics into a highly enjoyable racing title. While the arcade style controls may take a bit of getting used to for modern players, the thrill of racing around at high speed with a intense synthesized soundtrack blaring out of your speakers is an experience that should definitely not be missed.

Rated: 7/10

If you are looking for a racing game of another nature, Horizon Chase Turbo is the perfect arcade themed addition to your gaming library.