

However, once the Forza Horizon festival begins proper, parity becomes a thing of the past: Playground Games goes one way on Xbox One, while Sumo Digital veers off in its own radically different direction on Xbox 360. Pulling up at the festival tent and choosing your first car via two different takes on the car selection screen, we also see that the high-end vehicle modelling utilised by each version of the game is also very close to like-for-like. But could the Xbox 360 version stand up to Digital Foundry scrutiny? Loading up the Xbox 360 code and replicating that initial road trip to the Horizon festival in the Lamborghini Huracan shows Sumo Digital's work at its best - the initial blast through the coastal town of Castelletto reveals clear compromise, but the spirit of the experience is uncannily similar to the Xbox One title.

When pre-release video eventually emerged on YouTube last week, initial impressions looked positive - against all odds, UK-based Sumo Digital appeared to have handed in a phenomenally close conversion. Could this remarkable achievement really translate across to the vintage 2005 Xbox 360 hardware? Forza Horizon 2 on Xbox One is a highlight of the new console era: a phenomenal package of state-of-the-art rendering technology, open-world gameplay and a brilliant driving simulation melded into an outstanding arcade-style racer.

Now this is the last-gen conversion - or HD demaster, if you like - that we wanted to see.
