Home Page / xbox / F / Forza Motorsport / Review Listing / Review

Ever since the inception of the Xbox, Microsoft has been making counter maneuvers to everything Sony does. The latest in such moves comes in the form of Forza Motorsport, Microsoft’s own brand of driving simulator. I can tell you right off the bat that Forza is indeed a great racing title, but the real question lies much deeper: Can Forza possibly topple the driving simulator king known world wide as Gran Turismo?

Forza features a sweet set of no less than 230 cars from over 50 different companies. There is a healthy mix of race tracks that feature both real-world and fictional settings. While Forza may not be a heavy weight when you play the numbers game alongside other heavy racing hitters, the level of depth presented in Forza is what makes it memorable.

Right out of the box, Forza offers plenty of assists for the newcomer, including (but not limited to) traction control, stability management and antilock breaks. The cars featured in the game feel solid and react believably. Acceleration feels realistic, as does breaking.

As many racing gamers are more than aware, timing and executing a turn are the key to victory. Break too hard, and you end up choking on your opponents exhaust, but if you just try to speed around any given turn, you won’t end up much better. While most of the hardcore racing audience may have this type of skill mastered by now, the more casual race fan, or the newbies even, may not. This can lead to some serious frustration on the end of the newcomers as they struggle to get the ‘hang’ of learning how to execute a turn to its fullest efficiency. Thankfully, Forza has a flashy, innovative new way to help bring the newcomers up to speed.

The “suggested line” feature, when activated, acts as a tutor that will help you learn how to properly apply gas or brake pressure when you’re making a turn. It’s a fairly complicated system that is extremely easy for the user to learn. The feature creates a line on the road that will show you where to drive through the corner, and uses color codes to help you determine if you should speed up (green), let go of the gas (yellow) or press the brake (red). As you go through your turn, the line will change color depending on the situation, until it goes back to green when you’re ready to floor it back onto the straightaway.

The system isn’t perfect, but it is great. Novice racers will appreciate the way it helps speed up the learning process, while the more experienced gamer will love the way it shaves a tenth or so off your lap.

Being such an efficient tool, it may be easy to become dependant on it. If you spend too much time relying on it, you’ll find that your performance suffers rather significantly once you turn it off. It’s an unavoidable issue that hinders many, if not all, tutorial features.

The handy tutorial features aside, the actual driving in Forza, as I said before, is solid. Controlling your vehicle is sensitive and smooth, allowing you full control over your car of choice. Controls are not fully customizable, but there are enough pre-sets to choose from that you can surely find something fitting to your personal taste. While racing, you have information like tire temperature and damage sustained on hand at all times, while simultaneously ensuring the screen isn’t cluttered with too much information.

The games AI is one of it’s best features, offering up some very realistic racing conditions that keep the challenge running throughout your time with it. The AI is rather clever in that it seeks most the same aids and strategies you can expect to find from real opponents. For example, opponent AI will look for any drafting opportunities they can grab, as well as block your attempts to pass them on the track.

The AI is also adaptive in its style, in that it tries to play in the same style you play. If you’re the type of gamer that likes to smash and bash your way to the finish line, taking out any opposition as it comes along, the AI will play by the same rules. If you’re a passive driver that likes to keep a clean race and avoid collisions when possible, the AI plays relatively clean.

The drivatar system is designed to emulate your particular approach to the different types of corners found in the game. You start off by training your drivatar on a number of tracks and in cars of various drivetrains. As you make your way around the courses, you'll be graded on how successfully you navigate the types of turns that compose the track. Once you've completed all the training tracks, and the system has a relatively complete picture of your style, you can enter your drivatar into races in your stead, though it will cost you credits to do so. You can even set up races against a number of drivatar copies of yourself, observe your drivatar on any track in any car in your garage, or even trade drivatar profiles with your friends by saving them to a memory card. And you can always go back to the training mode to try to improve your cornering skills, thus improving your drivatar skills while you're at it.

Of course, no driving sim would be complete without the ability to buy and collect cars. Forza offers this option, as would be expected. What’s not expected though, is the fresh spin Forza gives such a simplistic feature. Forza implements a regional system that controls the availability and cost of certain cars and parts. When you first create your profile for the game, you’re asked to specify a home region (N. America, Asia or Europe being your choices). If you choose Europe as your home region, European model cars and parts will become more widely available and less costly than if you chose North America. You can also gain relationships with certain manufacturers as you make your way through the career mode, which will also affect the cost of certain items.

Winning races earns you credits that you can use to buy such items. May it be cars or parts to put in them, you’re going to need some serious green in order to obtain them. Handicapping yourself makes it easier to gain credits, since you gain more as your winnings. For example, someone that plays with all the default aids will not make as much cash per win as someone that turns off all the aids and boosts the opponent AI difficulty.

Credits don’t just serve as a way for you to upgrade your car, though. In Forza, your credits earned also helps determine your cars level. That’s not to say you should save up your money to level your car up, that’s not quite how it works. The game takes into consideration the number of credits you accumulate over the course of your career, and levels your car up accordingly. Some championship and endurance races are unlocked only once you reach a certain number of credits.

Car damage comes in two distinct flavors in Forza: cosmetic and simulation. When simulation is selected, you have to be very careful how you handle yourself in a race. Smashing and crashing too often will end up costing you a fortune in repair costs, if not costing you the entire car. It’s a really great option for purists, or anyone looking to up the challenge of the game a bit.

Online play in Forza is often very smooth an lag free. You can play with up to 8 players in a race in any of the tracks available in the career mode. You can play circuit races, point to point races, and even an online career mode. Forza allows the creating of ‘car clubs’, which is essentially the Forza word for clan, which is a nice feature rarely seen in racing games.  Playing online, you have the ability to toggle certain options on and off, such as collision, damage, tire wear, etc. The one glaring issue with online play is the inability to forbid the use of the suggested line feature, which can be used as a crutch by some of the less adapt players, and make for a somewhat uneven playing field.

Aside from racing online, you also have the option to buy and sell cars. Unfortunately, you cannot set the price for the vehicle you’re putting up, instead the game sets a price for you determined by the rarity and value of each part and upgrade on your car, as well as the car itself. This can be taken as a good idea though, since it prevents players from jacking up prices and ripping off unsuspecting buyers.

Graphically speaking, Forza is amazing. Car models border on photo realistic, and the tracks all look vibrant and distinctive. Neon covered Tokyo is a sight to see at 120 mph, let me tell ya… The games audio is just as nice, offering up some excellently realistic sound effects. Shifting gears, skidding around corners and screeching to a halt all yield very believable sounds. The musical end of the spectrum, however, isn’t so grand. The games soundtrack is filled with generic guitar-heavy rock tunes that do their best to inspire head banging during play, but only succeed in annoying you. Thankfully, such annoyances can be avoided all together thanks to custom soundtrack support.

Forza is a great racing sim, very well the best Xbox has to offer. Microsoft has done a great job with their first attempt at the sim lane of the racing game, and with a sequel surely already in the works for Xbox 360, Sony may just have some heavy hitting competition by the time Gran Turismo 5 and Forza 2 show up.