see deal Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels - Xbox One $19.99 on Gamestop

Blizzard Mountain was going to be, and they were all wrong.

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“ A wild world engineered inside the mind of an eight-year-old child.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

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It's actually really, really hard to see out of.

What we got instead is a high-octane fever dream of life-sized toys and upside-down racing, and a surprisingly drastic departure from Forza Horizon’s established norms. Preposterous, incongruous, and completely and utterly outrageous.And I love it.Forza Horizon 3’s first paid expansion, Blizzard Mountain, brought with it a driving experience like never before seen in the series. Specifically I’m talking about the added nuance the slippery surfaces inject into Forza’s driving dynamics and the way severely reduced visibility impacts the way we attack dangerous roads at speed. But this stuff seems almost quaint in comparison to the radical new driving challenges Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels has brought with it.It’s fun racing, cut from the same cloth as Trackmania Turbo and GTA Online’s stunt races, that nonetheless retains Forza’s driving feel. Executing a loop-the-loop in a Forza game will be a very foreign experience for series veterans, but the semi-realistic handling model remains unaltered. For those of you who like to hoon around with minimal driving aids, prepare for the stress of wrestling a rear-wheel drive monster back under control while you’re bouncing off the limiter after a boost pad sent you to top speed like a Scud missile with seats and a steering wheel.The world itself is larger than Blizzard Mountain and even more stunning. During the day the sunlight picks up the scuffs on the giant plastic tracks. They’re translucent, too; just watch how stretches of track arcing into the sky glow orange and blue as the sun beats down on them from behind. At night it’s equally impressive; the well-lit tracks create amazing snakes of light against a backdrop of millions of stars, glinting over the ocean.I absolutely adore the attention to detail, too. Beneath the tracks, enormous connecting pieces hold each segment of track together – pieces of moulded plastic that, in reality, fit into the palm of your hand but here are the size of a tennis court. The boost pads are basically treadmills embedded into the tracks powered by enormous, animated engines that dwarf the game’s cars, spluttering and belching black smoke as you speed by. There are even massive, animatronic T. Rexes, chomping and roaring, which are dotted across one of the world’s six islands in homage to Hot Wheels’ occasionally prehistoric predilections.Navigation is a bit more difficult as most of the tracks are either suspended over the water and have walls on each side, so speedy, direct shortcuts are out (and off-road content is limited). You can fast travel to almost anywhere on the map though – even roads you haven’t driven on yet. The only exceptions are steep or heavily banked sections of track that can only be taken at speed.The Hot Wheels expansion apes Blizzard Mountain’s progression system, which awards stars specific to levels of success in events. Simply complete a race and you’ll receive a single star. You can net two stars by actually winning it, and three stars by winning it and fulfilling one extra condition.I actually reached the Hot Wheels finale event largely on the back of completing all the available Bucket List challenges, drift zones, speed traps, and jumps (most of which seemed quite forgiving) and few actual races, but there is no shortage of the latter. As in the main game and Blizzard Mountain they can be completed as bespoke events or as part of longer championships. Getting to the final Goliath race won’t take returning players long, but completing every race will take a lot longer.The Blueprint system that allows us to customise our own races still exists in Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels, but it’s been reimagined as ‘Stunt Swap’ and allows us to trade out pieces of predetermined track for various stunt segments, like loops, dips, crossovers, and such. The effect of swapping these sections isn’t especially drastic, though; we’re not talking about Trackmania levels of custom tracks, here.The 11 cars added in Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels are crackers. The Hot Wheels Bone Shaker and custom 2005 Mustang are returning rides (they first arrived as DLC for Forza Motorsport 6), as is the 2010 Pagani Zonda R (although it hasn’t been seen since Forza Motorsport 4/Forza Horizon on Xbox 360).What’s left is a typically eclectic bunch of vehicles that you’d be hard-pressed to find in any other racing game, from the special Hilux former Top Gear hosts Jeremy Clarkson and James May drove to the North Pole, to the record-setting and relatively unknown Valiant Charger E49.There are also two more unique Hot Wheels models – the Twin Mill and the Rip Rod. If you’re a little precious about fantasy cars cluttering up your Forza experience, don’t be; like the Bone Shaker and 2005 Mustang, these are also Hot Wheels models that have made the jump from die cast cars to real-life (the real-life, fully-functioning Twin Mill debuted at the 2001 SEMA show and is powered by a pair of 502 Big Block for an estimated 1,400 total horsepower). There’s a barn find here, too, which I won’t spoil – but hot rodders should love the customisation options.