Review: Horse Club Adventures 2 - Hazelwood Stories convinces with Cozy Vacation Vibes and Improved Horse Animation

Horse Club Adventures 2 – Hazelwood Stories was developed and published by Wild River Games from Germany and released on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Xbox One in October 2022. It joins My Life: Riding Stables 3 in the category of “2022 horse games that I’ve been wanting to review for years but kept deprioritizing”. Look at me, finally cleaning up my backlog, I hope you’re proud of me. 

Back in 2021, my impression of this game’s predecessor was generally positive: it had its issues with user experience and wobbly leg anatomy, but it was an overall competently put together game with quite a bit of heart. When the sequel was announced in 2022, the developers claimed that some of the feedback from TMQ and its communities was taken to heart, which is always exciting to see. 
With a few years’ delay, let’s finally look into how Horse Club Adventures 2 compares and what it offers.

Welcome Back To Lakeside

Horse Club Adventures 2 – Hazelwood Stories invites the player back to Lakeside for an Autumn vacation. An intro sequence reintroduces the members of the horse club and their horses to you, but the texts and dialogues make it clear that this story is a continuation of the first game: You’re reminded of characters and events from the Summer Vacation on occasion, and you get your very special horse club friendship bracelet back right at the start. 

After brief tutorials for moving and riding, the horse club takes you on a tour of the nearby town of Hazelwood, one of the most notable new additions to the game map. The game spends some time being obviously in love with its own setting, with dialogue calling your attention to the beautiful fall colors and the wonderful vistas around town. Hey if Uncharted can constantly hype up its own environment art by having characters admire the view, then so can Horse Club Adventures 2. 

The horse and character creation pops up at the start, but can be revisited at any mirror later in the game.

I appreciate the educational tidbit, as well as the decision to have a walking only zone in a riding game.

In Hazelwood, you learn about a photography contest that’s taking place: the horse club of course decides to take part and spend the next ten days looking for interesting motifs, which constitutes the game’s main storyline. Much like its predecessor, Horse Club Adventures 2 uses a calendar structure where you have a few main quest goals to follow every day and can fit optional side quest content in there before ending your day. What’s new is that your days don’t always end back at Lakeside Stables, and that the variety of side quests has been significantly expanded, which makes for a lot more changes in scenery. 
From wild horse spotting to dressage practice to logging help, Horse Club Adventures 2 guides you through ten days of vacation activities with your horse club friends and all their acquaintances.

The newspaper’s photo contest provides the narrative framing for HCA2’s plot…

…and of course the horse club friends decide to make horses the theme of their photo series.

Controls and Animations

I knew in advance that HCA2 would once again be using the Horse Animset Pro animations and expected to once again be disappointed by its many flaws. Imagine my surprise then, when I first recognized some of the HAP idle animations but realized that the team has managed to fix some of the asset’s most common problems, i.e. the constantly bent forelegs. The idle look around animation (see below), but also the basic gait animations suddenly look infinitely better!  

HAP’s idle look animation in its original wonkiness, from the first Horse Club Adventures

The same animation tweaked and improved for vastly less foreleg weirdness in Horse Club Adventures 2

Since that’s hardly the only problem with the HAP animation, the fixes don’t suddenly result in perfectly lifelike horses, but it is for sure a gigantic improvement that removes a massive eyesore compared to the first game and the many other games that rely on the asset. I love and appreciate that the team obviously went out of their way to fix the knee-locking problem that makes so many of their direct competitors in the kids’ horse game space look subpar. Chef’s kiss, honestly, my heartfelt gratitude to whoever decided this was worth tackling, because I absolutely agree. 

What hasn’t been fixed unfortunately, is that the riding controls still don’t give the player precise control over what gait they’re going at: there’s a walk toggle and a sprint button, but your joystick movement can be used for the whole range of walk, trot, canter and gallop depending on how hard you push it. I find that choice utterly nonsensical and I infinitely prefer to just be able to tap a button to go one gait faster and one button to go one gait slower. Two buttons that are already used for the walk toggle and the sprint mind you, so this definitely isn’t a “not enough buttons on the controller” situation. 

I have a dedicated walk button, but moving my joystick very slightly also results in a walk. I don’t like this because the joystick being used for all four gaits makes it almost impossible to trot.

Good: the trot animation also looks a lot better thanks to improved knee-locking! Bad: it took me a while to even manage to trot with these controls. Also note that I still can’t properly see my horse despite doing my best to get a good camera angle.

As it is, we’re once again left with a horse game, supposedly intended to reflect the horse riding fantasy for kids, where moving at a trot or canter is practically impossible without super precise joystick movement. I strongly dislike that not just for realism and educational reasons but also because it would actually be very cool if a game world to ride in would have areas where it makes sense to slow down to a walk or trot for easier navigation. The whole topic makes my fingers itch with the desire to write a detailed breakdown of do’s and don’ts for horse riding controls. 

The cherry on top is that there are sequences where one of your horse club friends ride beside you at a perfectly reasonably paced trot while you can only go at a gallop for some reason, making the discrepancy between movement speed and gait animation even more obvious. Games making walk, trot and canter feel infinitely sluggish to make a gallop your only viable movement speed is a something I’ve noticed more and more recently and I strongly dislike it.

This is me trying to record a canter, which is horribly fidgety and marred by odd blend states between gait animations.

Note how Lisa (on the black horse) is moving at a normal looking trot, while my horse (bay) somehow maintains the exact same speed while using a gallop animation.

Horse Care and its Benefits

Back to the good stuff: We now have to take off our horse’s saddle when we put it away for the night! 🎉 I don’t know if I’m alone in this but I love that this was added, and I find it adds a lot of domestic comfort to the concept of settling down to end the day, along with (optionally) going to fetch hay and water for your horse. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t add a ton of complexity or game time, but it does make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. 

HCA2 also brings back optional horse care minigames: at grooming posts in the game world, you can brush your horse’s coat or scrape its hooves. I generally like this implementation, but found myself using it a lot less than what I recall from the first game. On the one hand, the brushing interaction is made a bit awkward in user experience feedback because you need to repeatedly move your brush over the same spots to get any effect, which gives it an inherent bit of tedium. What actually kept me from making use of the care mechanics more often though, was that their benefit felt completely intangible. 

I’m a simple woman: let me take off my horse’s saddle when I put it away for the night and I’m happy.

I had to go back and check my early game footage to realize that I didn’t in fact start with three sprint capacity horseshoes, so I assume I got one of those through feeding my horse.

The game claims that grooming your horse means it “can gallop somewhat longer”. That’s fine in theory, but I never actually noticed any difference between gallop capacity whether my horse was freshly groomed or not. 

The sprint mechanic takes inspiration from The Legend of Zelda this time: instead of a stamina bar, you have individual horseshoes representing your gallop capacity, and activating a gallop always means using up one entire horseshoe’s worth of galloping. This isn’t bad, and it does add a tiny bit of strategic consideration for when to activate a gallop – you don’t want to do it right in front of an obstacle for example, because that will make timing the jump harder. Like in the first HCA though, galloping fails to really feel satisfying in its speed or frequency. And while some actions (feeding your horse some apples for the first time and bringing my horse hay and water) rewarded me with my second and third horseshoe, any later upgrades and additional chores I did where either entirely pointless or brought small enough improvements that I didn’t notice them. 

The horse also gets visibly dirty again so quickly (and seemingly regardless of what I do) that I don’t even really get to enjoy the satisfaction of having a shiny clean horse after grooming. I ended up always giving my horse hay and water but never bothering to brush it or scrape its hooves. All in all we’ve definitely seen much worse takes on horse care, but it’s not exactly a highlight of the game either.

I’ll never understand why we need both a dirt texture and a progress bar, only for both of them then to not immediately give me feedback for doing the right thing with my brush.

Having to use my limited sprint capacity to keep up with my friends casually cantering doesn’t feel great.

Dressage and Other Disciplines

In addition to the checkpoint races and occasional obstacles to jump, Horse Club Adventures 2 also boasts of offering Dressage, Barrel Racing and Pole Bending mechanics. The Western riding mechanics are straightforward and simple, but roughly representative of their real world disciplines: you follow a series of arrow checkpoints around traffic cones for practice and optimize your speed by sticking close to the cones and using your limited gallop capacity when you have a straight line ahead. It’s a fine change of pace from the other activities and fun to play. 

Dressage in the meantime consists of playing crappy Guitar Hero to keep doing a piaffe. Horse games struggling to gamify what dressage is actually about calls for its own article some time, and HCA2 is absolutely not the first game to simply turn dressage into a rhythm game for lack of better ideas. I don’t find that inherently a bad choice, but the resulting minigame is missing any actual rhythm, fitting music and good user feedback. It’s not only far removed from any real life dressage exercise but deeply unsatisfying as a rhythm game to boot. 

Ah yes, dressage is when you gallop around the arena from piaffe to piaffe. Especially as a beginner.

I appreciate that an attempt was made, and that the HCA2 team went and made their own piaffe animation for this, but oof boy do I have issues with both it: For one, the horse’s posture is hollow-backed, lacks any semblance of collection and has a broken-looking neck. Sadly, finding good references of correct piaffe is an odyssey in itself due to what some might call the Twisted Truths of Modern Dressage. I also take issue with the implication that galloping around a ring and performing piaffes in between is a suitable beginner exercise. Riding school-figures? Serpentines? Diagonal change of hands? Never heard of them, Piaffe Hero it is. Sadly, I couldn’t even point devs to a really good implementation of dressage mechanics in the horse games of the past to take inspiration from, because I’m not sure it’s ever really been done well. Now that’s a prototype I’d like to make. 

That’s not to say Dressage in HCA2 is horrible or unwelcome though. Like many of the other riding activities, it’s a neat change of pace and it’s optional beyond the mandatory intro quest. It could just have been tackled in infinitely more interesting ways both in terms of accuracy as well as gameplay fun. 
What sadly didn’t make much of a comeback in HCA2 – at least as far as I’ve found – is a show jumping style race like we saw in the final mission of the first game, which is a shame because I think the jumping mechanic itself works quite well and I would have been here for the challenge of steering and timing in a tighter space.

Vacation Vibes

Much like the first Horse Club Adventures, HCA2 is wonderfully chill and feels like a holiday all around. Which I ended up finding quite boring, unfortunately. I don’t want to complain about that too much because I think it’s a perfectly valid alternative to many heavily competition-driven horse games, but at the same time I was kind of underwhelmed by it and didn’t play it for particularly long sessions at a time. This is probably perfect for kids (and let’s be real, anyone just looking to escape The Horrors™ of real life), but not all that interesting for anyone who appreciates a challenge or a thrilling plot. 

Meeting new people and going somewhere new almost every day feels nice and fresh and wholesome, and I appreciate that the game both reuses some familiar faces as well as introducing new NPCs. Horse Club outcast Tori continues to do nothing wrong, and this time the game even acknowledges that we Horse Club girlies might become friends with her, or at least work together towards some common goals, which I appreciate. 

The game adds a few missions where your horse has to be led rather than ridden, which is not groundbreaking but cute and a neat change of pace. Leading is unlocked through a horse relationship threshold that happens to be reached exactly when the plot demands it, which is fine but left me in the dark about how bonding with the horse really worked in the rest of the game. Here too, any additional sprint capacity increase supposedly gained through bonding after the first in-game day felt completely unnoticeable.

This initial bonding upgrade gave me an extra horseshoe, later ones were far less noticeable.

Not exactly a proper groundwork leading position there, but I’ll take it

Polish and Functionality

I’ve had an entirely bug-free experience with Horse Club Adventures 2, which I don’t take for granted in a game of this scope. The user experience is solid apart from my already mentioned gripes with horse gait controls. There have been various small improvements in both UI and general polish that I appreciate, like that race tracks show a preview on the map. The photo mode is a very welcome addition, though I found the controls a bit unintuitive and would have preferred if activating photo mode paused the game world so I could take pictures of my horse in motion rather than only standing still.  

The world feels more alive this time around thanks to moving cars and various wild animals crossing your paths. From the new disciplines outlined above to wildlife photography and investigation to balloon popping, the side activities on offer are numerous and varied. As of writing my review, I have played through the story in about 8 hours, but haven’t spent significant amounts of time with races, challenges and other such activities outside the introductory missions for them. I’m sure Racing, Dressage, Western training, sheep herding, photo mode and customization – new customization options are unlocked by gaining medals in races – could easily keep a completionist player busy for hours more. 

Like in the first game, I appreciated that I could save and quit at any time, and that the game lets me completely edit the appearance of my horse and character at any point in the game, making customization a lot more fun than if I had to stick to something. The English translation once again shows signs of German grammar sometimes, but that too has improved a bit compared to the first game. 

The side content has been significantly expanded in comparison to the first HCA.

The game reuses the first game’s map but adds several new areas.

Conclusion

Horse Club Adventures 2 improves upon its predecessor in almost every aspect. The story remained too uneventful for my taste this time around, but it would feel a bit odd to drag the fluffy kids’ holiday game for not having enough tension and drama. 

I greatly appreciate the improvements made in the areas of animation and quality of life, as well as the much increased variety of things to do outside of missions. If you liked the first game, HCA2 offers “more of the same but better”, and if the wonky animation put you off the first one, you can absolutely just jump into this one right away. It’s far from perfect – note my frustrations about gait controls, dressage and sprint mechanics – but a lot better than many alternatives. 
Horse Club Adventures 2 might not be the most exciting project to adult horse game players, but it gets a lot of things right and is great at what it sets out to be. And when I compare this game to what was available a few years ago – think My Riding Stables: Life with horses, Bibi & Tina at the horse farm and the first Windstorm – we’ve sure come a long way in a good direction when it comes to PC & Console horse games for a young audience.