Enter the Horizon Chase series from Brazilian developer Aquiris Game Studio. The original game, Horizon Chase Turbo, dropped back in 2018 and now Aquiris and publisher Epic Games have returned for a sequel to this blazing fast racer. Horizon Chase 2 is exactly what you’d expect from an indie game studio making an arcade style racer. You start with a handful of cars to choose from and immediately jump into a series of races around the world. There are at least 3 races in every area and with six areas to unlock, you’re looking at 18 races in the World Tour alone. That’s not a bad showing for a bargain-priced digital game that will only run you $20.
A simple World Tour is not all that Horizon Chase 2 has to offer however. There’s also a Tournament mode that unlocks the first leg once you beat the first two portions of the World Tour, a Challenge mode which forces you to do things like come in first and use x number of nitro bursts, and an online Playground mode with a variety of challenges and tweaked tracks which rotate and change from week to week. Note that “online” designation. Booting up Horizon Chase 2 for the first time will bring you to a series of online prompts on the Xbox asking you to link your Epic account to your Xbox account. This is mandatory for most of the gameplay in Horizon Chase 2 and also particularly irritating for a game that purports to be primarily an arcade racer. More on that later though.
Once you start playing World Tour, you’ll quickly find that Horizon Chase 2 doesn’t feel like other games. Courses are covered in incredibly sharp turns, there are no complex maneuvers to make, and your car handles in complete defiance of the laws of physics. If you’ve played Road Rash on the 3DO, that might be the closest analogue to the handling of cars in Horizon Chase 2 (sorry for the obscure reference). Your cars are all flashy but simplistic and the focus here is on courses that feel more like an F-Zero GX track than a standard racing track. Acceleration is fast, the courses are whipping by at breakneck speed, and the other cars are slamming against you as you try to squeak by them to claim first. It’s not just first you’re hunting though, but a super trophy for each stage, acquired by gathering all the blue coins on the level and finishing in first place. For the first area and part of the second, that’s not a difficult task but things get pretty heated pretty quickly by the time you’ve finished the Brazil stages so don’t expect a walk in the park.
Completing a race nets you blue coins (if you gathered them), regular coins, and experience on the car you’re driving. These light RPG elements add an additional layer to the gameplay in Horizon Chase 2. Blue coins allow you to upgrade any car’s handling, top speed, gearbox, and other options, making challenging races a snap. Unlike the previous game, you must upgrade each car individually though, which will definitely take you additional time. Experience helps as well, and with each increase in experience level, you’ll gain additional upgrades for that car, further assisting you in succeeding. Finally coins can be used for a variety of skins available in-game. Thankfully there’s no external game currency and you won’t have to spend additional money but if there’s a look you want, it might take you some time to save up for it. The default colors of cars look genuinely simplistic and you’re definitely going to want to change up the looks when you can, but a few of the better paint jobs and rims are behind locked access walls that can only be unlocked by beating the three Tournament races as they become available.
Tracks in Horizon Chase 2 are extremely convoluted and feel like the designers purposely made them odd and unpredictable. The first few races are fairly straightforward but at the speeds you’re moving, it seems like it shouldn’t be possible to make turns as sharp as the cars do. The unrealistic physics of the game enable hairpin precision and almost instant lane shifts but they add to a sense of unreality as well. The speeds are so fast that you can barely look at anything but your car and the road on your screen, which is a shame because not only are the backgrounds fantastic but it’s also almost impossible to glance at the map and figure out what’s coming next. If you lean too hard into a turn (and you’ll have to), you lose speed as well, so gameplay is a constant balance of not turning too hard into a turn while trying to keep from hitting the sides and flipping your car. Traditional accidents aren’t a concern though and hitting the side results in your car flipping end over end and then immediately dropping back on the track and accelerating like nothing happened. It’s absolutely ridiculous and charming at the same time because who wants to restart a race over a tiny mistake?
The backgrounds themselves are awesome as well, showcasing Florida trailer parks, Brazilian favelas, and lots more. If you can, try not to miss out on all the detail that’s thrown in because it’s both an impressive level of detail and quite cool. It’ll be hard to focus at the speed you’re driving and dodging other racers though! The only downside of those backgrounds is that there’s so much going on visually between the brightly colored cars and the vivid and complex backgrounds that it’s occasionally difficult to spot the subtle purple nitro boost bottles on the tracks. Building up spare nitro bursts is key to success in Horizon Chase 2 and even though you start with three each race, you’ll still need every advantage you can get as you progress. Nitro boosts your speed even further, making every corner a screeching nightmare blurring by as you tense on the controller. That’s not to say they aren’t a blast to use though (no pun intended) and you’ll find yourself craving that additional speed soon enough!
Oddly, the driving mechanics don’t have much variety once you get the hang of them. Screeching around corners doesn’t really change with the amount of pressure you use and different terrain types are simplistic, leaving you easily able to predict how your car will react to different variables. Realistically, there should be subtle but noticeable changes in handling even within different types of terrain and precipitation but the game simply isn’t that detailed. As a result, driving starts to feel repetitive after you’ve managed to get partway through the game and things only get worse as you play further through the game, with no evolution in gameplay but opponents becoming more and more precise.
Unfortunately, the sound work accompanying the fun, irreverent visuals of Horizon Chase 2 also leaves something to be desired. The music tracks in the game feel generic and while they are energetic, they don’t ever really hit effectively, blurring into the background as you blaze through courses. Similarly, the sound effects are simplistic at best, with generic tire squealing and crash sounds that don’t vary significantly from one area to the next or one weather type to another. The sound in general simply isn’t as immersive as it could be and it definitely has an impact.
Now that you’ve got a basic idea about how Horizon Chase 2 is structured and what it plays like, let’s talk about the issues. First and foremost, the game crashes on the Series X. Most frequently during the course of this review, fatal crashes took place right after finishing a race (multiple different races, it’s not just one). You just get first place, the trophies come up, and then Xbox home screen. Naturally the experience never makes it to your car either, leaving you high and dry and forced to restart the game again. The first time this happened it was irritating but as it kept happening, the game became more and more frustrating. Fatal errors simply shouldn’t happen frequently on a game that’s otherwise this polished.
That’s not the only major issue with Horizon Chase 2 however. Remember that online sign in to Epic? Well, the issues with sign-ons persist into other aspects of the game, most notably local co-op play. We tried to play local co-op which allows for four player split-screen play and we were actually unable to. The game requires a Microsoft account login in order to enable split-screen play and while it states other email logins are accepted, Google accounts won’t work (yes, the password was correct). Without two accepted Microsoft logins, you simply cannot play local multiplayer and there is no way to enable guest players. This is a massive design oversight as you’d think an arcade racer would be well-suited to pick-up-and-play gameplay but that’s simply not the case with Horizon Chase 2. It’s both unfortunate and irritating for players to be pushed toward online connectivity for not only multiplayer but for even the simplest gameplay functions that an old NES can handle with no issues. To add multiple logins and syncing to what should be a quick, fun experience takes away significantly from gameplay and for the purposes of this review, limited our ability to even experience portions of the game.
The combination of fun, fast, and colorful gameplay juxtaposed with significant issues in online compatibility, crashes, and odd track design with simplistic underlying mechanics makes Horizon Chase 2 a true mixed bag. On one level it’s an incredibly fun game that is great to just pick up and blow through a few tracks. On another, it simply doesn’t manage to hold up under scrutiny in a number of key areas and suffers from problems that should theoretically have been fixed in beta testing. That being said, at the low price point, some of these issues are forgivable. Sadly, frequent crashes and needlessly complex local multiplayer are not and these issues really bring down the overall experience in Horizon Chase 2. Is it going to be worth your time to play through? Absolutely. Just don’t expect to get too much out of the experience.
This review is based on a digital copy of Horizon Chase 2 provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a 55″ 1080P Sony TV. Horizon Chase 2 is also available on Nintendo Switch, PS4/PS5, Apple Arcade, and PC on Epic.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.