Forza Horizon 2 also rewards committed participation with fancy showcase events, sending you racing after hot air balloons and blustering cargo planes. Just as my Bentley and I would get tired of glistening through tight city circuits with an ocean view, the game would catapult our pack of racers through a spacious aerodrome with ease. The calm drives and smashing races take you through a great variety of towns, valleys and slippery dirt roads, through day and night, sun and rain. You can even speak to your GPS (via Kinect) and have her direct you to the nearest starting point, or the next hub and set of championship races. Once you reach the hub, the game automatically carves out car-relevant circuits, cross-country jaunts and point-to-point races from the vast network of local roads.

For the most part, you're in a pleasant loop of buying a car and driving to a hub town, getting a feel for its handling and for the other competitors driving with you in the Horizon Festival. Though Forza Horizon 2 can't give you an XP bonus for successfully evoking nostalgia on a rain-soaked and forgotten road, there's lots to do deliberately within its enticing structure. I enjoyed the unhurried drives between races so much that I never ever bothered using fast travel (which is just as well, because it requires some in-game currency). There's enough room to cut corners, coast downhill and imprint your own love of driving as you go.

The gorgeous open world lets you engage with Horizon 2's championships and other challenges with as much intensity as you like. It also shows the game to have a beautiful balance of direction and aimlessness, a valuable quality even in games that aren't about cars. Going off the road just about anywhere and bouncing over the hills in a skull-shaking first-person view reveals Forza Horizon 2's dirty, combusting heart. That guy who spent much of his time in a nu-disco haze, bopping his head to the radio on a road trip through Europe and its lush vineyards – perhaps better labeled as drive-through wineries. But I did turn into that guy: that intolerable guy who drove through Forza's massive chunk of Italy and France in a roaring Bentley made of pure gold.

Oh, and what it's like being a rich generi-dude who identifies every techno song on the radio as an 'anthem.' The finest quality in Forza Horizon 2 is that it inspires a sort of role-playing, none of which is – or needs to be – explicitly acknowledged. Inhaling for your Ford Raptor as it squeezes through a green gauntlet of fir trees. The cringe of your beastly Nissan GT-R scraping through a tight turn in the castle town of San Giovanni.

What it feels like to zoom along the breezy coast in a lovely LaFerrari. Forza Horizon 2 is the kind of racing game that expands the idea of 'simulation' to include less material, more ambiguous parts of driving.

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