Review: FORZA MOTORSPORT is wonderful and aims to help new players get into the series

Forza Motorsport just released on PC and Xbox Series X|S. The game was developed by Turn 10 Studios and released by Xbox Game Studios this week, and racing simulator fans seem to be pretty happy with it. It is the eighth match of the Forza Motorsport franchising. Thankfully, Xbox was kind enough to provide me with a code so I could review that game, and all thoughts below are my own. If you like what you read or want to prove me wrong, you can purchase the game from Xbox (affiliate link), your favorite retailers like GameStop (affiliate link), or access it through Xbox Game Pass (affiliate link).

I want to preface this review with the knowledge that I haven’t played Forza Motorsport I’ve been playing ever since Forza Motorsport 4. I also didn’t have the opportunity to participate in any multiplayer games outside of the three qualifying rounds, so I won’t discuss any of these features. Ultimately, I played using a controller, not a wheel/setup, so keep that in mind. Now that I’ve got the warnings out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this review.

I’ll start with things I’m not in love with about the game. For starters, I’m annoyed that the name is right Forza Motorsport. That game already exists and was released 18 years ago on the original Xbox. What was wrong with calling it Forza Motorsport 8 or something similar. I know, it’s a small thing, but I’ll say it. Secondly, in Career mode, you have to complete three test laps on a track before starting the actual race. Why? I can understand wanting to make sure people are familiar with the tracks before it really matters, but were three laps necessary? It’s actually more of a nuisance than a problem, but I wish it would let you finish the trials after just one lap. You could still practice if you wanted after that ride, but if you feel confident or just want to run during a race, you could just end the training there. My final complaint is really about the size of the roster. There are more than 500 cars Forza Motorsport which is impressive. I was just hoping we had reached a point where we would have more than 1,000, including cars I drive regularly, like my Hyundai Elantra. Again, this is a bit mean as it seems like they mostly removed the off-road vehicles and put them in Go Horizon games instead.

Before I continue, I want to point out that I encountered a couple of bugs, but I imagine they will be fixed very soon, if not already. First, I found that on one of the courses, a section was bugged so that it stopped timing you at around 6 seconds and always gave you a segment score of 10. Second, I was leading a race in career mode and suddenly lost the audio. I panicked a little thinking my TV was dying, but I did a few checks and everything else about the audio worked perfectly, then I ran into some weird bug or glitch in the game that turned it off. Finally, I ran into an issue where I saved a replay and the playback was really weird. No matter how much I jumped forward, I never saw the race actually start, everyone was stuck at the starting line with the crowd cheering. It was also during this time that I discovered that if I held LT to rewind, the cars would sink into the ground randomly and then if I held RT to fast forward they would rise into the air. It’s not helpful if you want to analyze how you could have done better, but it was fun.

Now let’s move on to everything else. If you like racing simulators, Forza Motorsport it’s amazing in my experience. Everything looks absolutely beautiful. On Xbox Series S you can play at 1080p at 60FPS while on Series X at 4K at 60FPS even if ray tracing is disabled in performance mode. The Series S will therefore only play at 30 FPS in any other mode, and ray tracing is only available in Homespace and Car Theater. However, the Series X has a setting that I think every damn game should have on the Series Meanwhile, the Series This is when you use Performance mode in all its 60 FPS glory, but turn on ray tracing for cars but not tracks. Now all modes use dynamic resolution and that doesn’t bother me at all. My TV is stuck at only 1080p and so I asked to have some sort of option to turn on ray tracing with performance mode because I don’t care about rendering the game at 4K dammit! I know I’m in the minority, but it’s nice to see that I can mix performance mode and quality mode a bit.

The career mode doesn’t look great, but I really like how the upgrades are tied to the level of your car, which increases the more you race it. This means you can’t just build up a bunch of credits, buy a random car, and immediately spruce it up to be the best version of itself. You’re forced to learn about a car, and upgrades gradually unlock as you level up. I know this might be frustrating for some, but I appreciate the effort to help bring in new players. There are over 800 upgrades that can be done and so it might seem really overwhelming for anyone who isn’t very familiar with the franchise or even cars in general. I know I still don’t quite understand how to tune a car or which upgrades are best, so it’s also nice that you can press X and the game will automatically upgrade your car based on how many points you have to tune it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how good he is at making those decisions, but in my opinion I’ve never had a problem.

Another aspect of Forza Motorsport what I like is how they’ve added a little more of a risk reward aspect before the start of a race. You can adjust the difficulty which determines the speed of your opponents. You can also adjust how low of a simulation you want it to be, including car damage, fuel and tire wear, which give you small bonuses on your winnings. However, there is one other area that I thought was a nice touch. You can change the position you are in at the start to add more push and pull. You usually start around 12th position and if you move further forward your gains decrease but it gets easier while the opposite is true if you move towards the bottom. It will also take your test runs into account to estimate where you will end up.

At the end of the day, I enjoy it Forza Motorsport. Racing simulators aren’t my favorite because I’m not good at them and don’t understand the finer points of them. However, sometimes I feel like pretending to be a car enthusiast and these games help scratch that itch. I think, outside of bug fixes and roster size, the only improvements I would ask for would be to reduce the number of practice laps required before a race and implement virtual reality. I don’t have virtual reality, but this is one area where Forcethe main competition of (Gran Turismo) will maintain an edge and heck, this would definitely lead me to more seriously consider VR and a racing sim setup. The game is gorgeous, has the Performance RT mode that makes me ecstatic on my outdated 1080p TV, and is pretty beginner friendly, which is great. Multiplayer is a different beast that I don’t feel I can comment on. If you like racing simulators, Forza Motorsport it’s a slam dunk.