Forza Motorsport – Review

We’ve had a pretty busy year so far, but Microsoft’s final major release of 2023 is finally here, with the reboot of Forza Motorsport.

Forza has been around over 18 years, with the popular free roam arcade spin-off Forza Horizon dominating recently, but now it’s time to return to the simulation roots of the franchise.

Forza Motorsport, (2023) is technically the 8th game in the mainline franchise with its predecessor, Forza Motorsport 7 released back in 2017, as well as plenty of returning cars and tracks, we’ve got plenty more to get through.

From the top, you’re given a quick introduction to two of the new cars introduced a blue Corvette and a Cadillac V-Series R. This feels a little like Horizon where you’re thrown into the action in-motion, and while it’s a nice introduction, it’s a little too straightforward but no doubt welcoming to newcomers even if it doesn’t have the fanfare of the Horizon intros.

Next up, you’ll need to choose your driver, there’s a simple choice between a male or female build, followed by a bland offering of various overalls, I would have loved to see a little more customisation, maybe changing gloves, or helmet, but the entire outfit is locked to this one choice.

Heading into the main menu and you’re treated with a simple and very effective layout, with the bulk of content under Race. The career mode, known as the Builders Cup, Featured Multiplayer, Free play, Rivals and private multiplayer.
In Builders cup, you’ll face a series of races on each class, which covers everything from a Honda Civic to the fastest cars in the game like the Koenigsegg Jesko. There are over 100 races in total, but there’s also weekly rotating events that will ensure you’ve always got a new challenge just around the corner.

Thanks to a wide range of very impressive accessibility, difficulty and assist settings you can make that challenge as easy or difficult as you wish, with a simple 1-10 slider for Drivatar difficulty, you can go from feeling like Max Verstappen, leading every race by 10-20 seconds, or crank the dial up and you’ll find every race an ultimate challenge with your opponent’s rarely making a poor decision.

As with previous Forza titles, the Drivatars are built from AI which develops dependent on how other people are playing the game, so while you’ll likely see a few of your friends gamertags beside you on the starting grid, even offline these racers have a much more human feel and don’t just religiously stick to the driving line, there is one tiny issue where AI drivers would be a little too aggressive when returning to the track, but I’ve only encountered it twice and developers Turn 10 have already highlighted the issue ahead of release, and plan to have it resolved before you get your hands on the steering wheel.

The assists are also simplified allowing you to pick one of these presets, or customising them to your exact preference, I kept things fairly simple to maintain the racing line, but this was mostly because I kept getting time-penalties on higher settings because of my own aggressive driving.

The Builders cup certainly offers plenty of events to work though as you “build” the best car from over 800 upgrade options, and I love the way upgrades are tied to Car points, so it doesn’t matter how many races you win (or how much money you earn), these car points are awarded per vehicle, for careful, fast and professional driving.

These per-car upgrades are a great way of pushing the user to concentrate on specific vehicles for each series, but with over 500 cars on offer, you’ll want to try a few out.

thankfully in free race, you can choose any car, even if you have to rent it, to give it a proper run out, there’s a wide array of options for these races, meaning you can choose any track, time and conditions you can dream of.

Racing options only continue to get wider as you progress to the multiplayer menu, with “featured multiplayer” and “rivals” the main two areas.

Featured multiplayer gives an ever-rotating selection of events, that you can join in, the race is at a pre-defined time, but you’re free to practice beforehand and run up to 3 qualifying laps to get the best starting position.

I usually avoid PvP online with racing games, but even playing against Turn 10 Devs who were considerably better than me, I had a great time, and even managed to win a few races too.

The next new addition is Rivals, which took me by surprise. It plays like a time-trial, where you race around the course aiming for the best lap, you’re initially given a ghost time to beat from another racer, and upon defeating them, the ghost is automatically updated to a faster opponent.

I really enjoyed battling for the fastest times, and spent far too long doing some simple corners time and time again trying to perfect them, until I eventually ended up #1 on a few tracks, but with all tracks, and all different circuit variations, as well as different vehicles classes for each one, you’ll again find well over 100 races, but unlike career mode, it’s ever evolving, you’ll always have new players, so while I might have got World number 1 on a few courses, I’m sure I’ll be down in the bottom few percent when people who spend even more time than I did fine-tuning every corner.

You can also define specific rivals to track them across various races, which just further adds to the mode and makes multiplayer racing a little less aggressive, because I don’t know about you, but with online PvP I have a tendency to hit other cars.

There’s certainly a lot of content on offer and while you may find yourself through The Builders Cup after 40-50 hours, it’s things like Rivals and featured events that will make sure there’s always plenty of options.

I can’t help feel like we could have done with something more though, maybe a co-op career, or at least Season (F1 2023 style) would have been an amazing addition.

The most important part of any racing game is obviously how it feels, and there’s no doubt Forza Motorsport is the most realistic and fun driving game I’ve ever played.

cars feel stocky and powerful, yet quick and nimble, having tried dozens and dozens of cars, I didn’t find any that felt the same, with even slight adjustments in the wide plethora of tuning options allowing me to vastly alter the feel and performance of each car.

What really caught my attention was cornering, for so many years, gaming tells us it’s okay to brake when you’re going round a corner, and we’d either brake far later or enter a nice controlled drift, but on Forza, just like real-life you’re rewarded with doing it properly, braking early and then feathering the accelerator as you round the corner, before putting your foot down to drive out of the bend.

I know it sounds simple, but when you’ve felt it, and compared that to pretty much any other racing game over the last 5 years, it’s a refreshing chance to have the car behave how you know it should, and not how gaming (and movies) make you think it would.

I’ll be honest, I’ve probably played every major (and not so major) racing game in the last 30 years and I’ve never felt cars feel as grounded and realistic as this.

As with any Forza titles, one area that’s always been rock-solid is the appearance, every image in this review is a screenshot direct from my Xbox, but to give things a proper test-run, I did my usual test, setting up a race at night, while it’s pouring down with rain.

Initially there where a few shortcomings, in-car rain doesn’t streak across the windows like I’d anticipated and even in heavy rain, it all feels a little too visible. Games like DIRT Rally got it spot-on, where you’d be waiting for every flick of the wiper blades to give you a clear view for just a second, but rain on the window just doesn’t feel as impactful.

Outside of the car it’s a different story, with water streaming across the camera, it delivers that inconvenience you expect and it looks great in doing so. During a rainstorm, there’s just the right amount of rain, spray and distractions to make it inconvenient, but not enough to stop it being an absolute blast.

Beside the scenery, the real star of the show is, of course, the cars, and from the handful I’ve actually seen close-up in real-life, the car models are incredibly accurate.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’ll be someone freeze-framing dozens of races, to find a few bad examples, but when you’re blistering around at 60fps, the cars all look fantastic. If you want to grab a few screenshots, there’s a pretty in-depth photo mode and while the focus and depth of field takes a little getting used to, the potential results are staggering.

The real highlight is the overall lighting, after dozens and dozens of hours, I can’t remember a single time when a car looked out of place, gone are the superimposed feel that we see on so many other racing games, instead each car looks and feels perfectly in-place, no matter what circuit, time or weather you have to deal with. The only downfall would be pit crew on the starting line seemed to be missing shadows, which left them feeling superimposed, but during the race, it’s floorless.

The quick rundown of Graphics options are Performance, Performance RT and Quality.

Quality drops everything to 30fps, so most will avoid that, and the graphical drop to achieve 60fps doesn’t seem too significant to the naked eye with Performance RT, offering a 60fps that never visually stuttered and enough WOW factor, that I never had to consider the normal performance mode, or feel like I was missing out on the visual mode.

Over on Series S, it’s a slightly different story, playing on a smaller 1080p screen it’s not as noticeable, but put it on the same large 4k TV I usually play the Series X on and there’s quite a noticeable drop with everything just looking a few steps lower, it’s not an issue and doesn’t affect gameplay in the slightest, but at least graphically it does feel like the Series X and S are just a little further apart with Forza than we are used to seeing.

One area that’s consistent regardless of your console, is audio and as you’ll expect from a Forza title, that’s consistently good, car engines never feel overwhelmingly loud, but they all sound punchy and powerful, and as much as I tried over my time with Forza, I couldn’t pick fault with the audio at all.

one area I did find fault was back with the graphics, with a few mixed textures and screen tears, this was only noticeable on one race, at Spa, and never happened again, even after hours more play, without resetting, but it was annoying and unexpected and prevents top marks in an otherwise floorless graphical performance so when you start pushing that Cadillac R around at 195mph and you see how well Forza handles the feeling of speed, any small mishap is soon forgiven.

My only other issues were two crashes to dashboard, like the above they were isolated (once each one each console) and it’s highly likely these issues will all be resolved before you’ve even got your helmet on, but it shows how much Forza is pushing the boundaries, on what’s currently possible.

While I’m not a racing aficionado, I’ve loved every minute with Forza Motorsport and will definitely be returning time and time again, there’s such a wide range of incredibly unique feeling vehicles, with never ending supply of events both on and offline, I know there’ll always be something fresh to tackle.

Cars might look more realistic and part of the game-world than ever before, but it’s how they feel that makes Forza Motorsport the best racing game ever.

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