Watch the archive of our Forza Horizon 2 Twitch preview right now

The latest in Microsoft and Turn 10's Forza racing series, Forza Horizon 2, will arrive on Xbox One and 360 next Tuesday, September 30. We plan to have a comprehensive review ready to go at that time.

In the meantime, Windows Phone Central is celebrating Forza Horizon 2's upcoming release with a Twitch streaming session! Tune in to my channel at Twitch.tv/EastXTwitch tonight at 7pm CST (-0600 GMT) to see me play the full Xbox One version of Forza Horizon 2 for one hour. Let's chat and have some fun as we preview one of this year's hottest Xbox titles.

Read on for a quick rundown of Forza Horizon 2 and why we're so excited to play the game on Xbox One.

Watch live video from EastXTwitch on Twitch

Prepare for Forza Horizon 2

The Forza Horizon games present an open world setting in which players can freely explore beautiful terrain and cityscapes, participating in scores of races and events as they encounter them along the way. These games still offer all of the main Forza game's best features, such as realistic handling that can be adjusted based on your skill, loads of cars to collect, and more.

Forza Horizon 2 on Xbox One uses the Forza 5 graphics engine, which runs at 1080p and looks absolutely stunning. Horizon 2 one looks even prettier than Forza 5 though, as it adds new touches like a day and night cycle and rain!

Some racing games aren't much fun to play by yourself thanks to the unrealistic AI drivers you have to race against. Luckily, Forza Horizon 2 (like Forza 5) uses the power of the cloud to create Drivatars – AI driver profiles – based on the racing styles of actual players. As you cruise the roads and terrain of Horizon 2, you'll encounter AI versions of your actual Xbox Live friends and other players. It's an exciting feature that we look forward to showing off on our stream.

Naturally, Forza Horizon 2 offers strong online multiplayer features. Players can take online road trips together or simply enter online events. You can also create your own car club and recruit other players, much like the clan features in other games. Again, we'll dive into some of those features tonight.

Join us at Twitch.tv/EastXTwitch tonight at 7pm Central (5pm Pacific and 8pm Eastern) and be sure to say you're from WPCentral in the channel chat! Subscribe to my Twitch channel and follow me on Twitter @PaulRAcevedo to keep up with future streaming events.

Update

The streaming event was a blast! Thanks to everyone who showed up. We had some microphone issues for the first 22 minutes or so, but fixed them up eventually. The archived version of the video is now available to watch, and has been embedded in this story. Twitch has unfortunately muted the last portion of the song due to one of the game's songs hitting the site's copyright protection detector, but we'll try to get that fixed soon.

Paul Acevedo

Paul Acevedo is the Games Editor at Windows Central. A lifelong gamer, he has written about videogames for over 15 years and reviewed over 350 games for our site. Follow him on Twitter @PaulRAcevedo. Don’t hate. Appreciate!