Microsoft's more "hardcore" version of its regular racing series is back, claiming to be better than ever. But is it?
Forza Motorsport is, deceptively, the successor to Forza Motorsport 7, despite not being called "Forza Motorsport 8" as would make sense. But I'm not here to analyze the stupid marketing gimmicks modern video game companies (and movie studios) use when titling things. Let's talk about the game itself.
Once again this product comes courtesy of Turn 10 Studios, Microsoft's in-house racing experts responsible for every Forza game across both the Motorsport series and the more casual Horizon games. The game runs on the ForzaTech engine, which has been around for a while although this time has been augmented with a host of new graphical capabilities which were a large portion of the game's marketing. Real-time ray tracing? Enhanced particle effects? It's all there.
Some Perspective
Before I address the gameplay, I need to explain myself a bit in terms of how I reviewed this. First off, this is the first Forza Motorsport game I have actually owned, although I have played a bit of the previous titles before at a friend's house. I also owned Forza Horizon 5 as well, although that's kind of a different kettle of fish. Although this is the first Forza I have owned, it it most certainly not the first racing game.
I have owned every F1 game from Codemasters since 2012, as well as Gran Turismo 5, 6, Sport, and 7. Since transitioning to PC and away from console games, I also regularly use iRacing, and have driven a fair bit in Assetto Corsa, Assetto Corsa Competitizione, and Project CARS 2. So I feel I have a pretty wide library of racing games to compare to when assessing the gameplay of Forza without having engrained expectations of how the game handles compared to previous entries in the series. Basically, I consider myself an outsider.
Most pertinent to this review is the fact that I do not play on a controller, so if that is your preferred way to play I recommend going elsewhere if you want specifics to that style. Instead, I use a Moza R5 base, which is entry-level for the type but more hardcore than a Logitech G29, G920, or G923, for example, connected to a Moza KS wheel. I also have load cell pedals, although in this game that does not appear to impact the experience. So I am coming at this from an angle that is probably not that common in the grand scope of Forza players, where a controller or a basic wheel are going to be the most common control types.
Graphics and Presentation
This is the aspect of the game that Forza seems to pride itself mostly on. Look at any promotional material or trailer and there is guaranteed to be at least a partial focus on the game's ray tracing ability and the overall visual fidelity. Playing the game on PC with very high settings, I'd report a mixed bag. Sometimes, the game looks great and it feels like one of the most beautiful games out there. Other times, it is woefully underwhelming. A lot of this depends on the car and track combination; some cars look great, others not so much. Same with some tracks.
Consistently Inconsistent
For example, WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca looks great in the game, full of color and detail while feeling somewhat realistic, even if the asphalt is very light despite the real track having been recently repaved and appearing basically black. The 'original' (i.e., imaginary) circuits all look pretty good too. Meanwhile the Indianapolis Motor Speedway looks like it came straight out of 2004; it's very desaturated, most of the kerbs are almost impossible to see, the lighting is extremely flat. Honestly it looks worse than the version in iRacing which would be fine if iRacing wasn't a game that was 15 years old and hasn't had Indianapolis re-scanned since 2018.
It's just a huge mixed bag that hints towards the game prioritizing a handful of cars and tracks in an order to speed up development and reduce costs. This would be fine if: a) this game didn't have less cars and tracks than the previous game, and b) this wasn't the longest wait between 'Motorsport' entries in the history of the series. If you're going to strip down the car and track list, then you better make sure each of the cars is either refreshed or completely remodeled, like Gran Turismo 7 did, and every track better be an absolute stunner. Much of this game looks like it could have come out in 2019, two years after Motorsport 7, rather than a full six years later.
Mirror Finish
With Forza's new ray tracing abilities, much was made of the improved reflections generated by cars, track surfaces, and other objects. But I think their definition of improvement favors quantity over quality, because at times everything in this game looks like it's got a mirror finish. It's not really notable in the dry, although if you race in cockpit view, you can tell that anti-reflective glass has never been invented in the Forza universe because there are a lot of reflections on the windshield to the point of distraction. And you better hope it doesn't rain.
Yes, one positive aspect of the new game is that every track comes with dynamic weather and time adjustment, which is very nice and should not dismissed as a general positive. The dynamic weather does include rain, and while the—ahem—merits of the rain physics will be discussed later, let's talk about the look of it. Have you ever wondered what a race track made completely of mirrors would look like? That's exactly what it looks like when there's rain in the game.
While the amount of reflections rendered is technically impressive, it's not realistic. Sure, a real track surface does get a bit shiny when it rains, but that's only where there's standing water. Not everywhere. Also, when it rains, the grass, runoff, gravel, and many other surfaces just turn into reflection generators. If you go outside when it rains and stand over a patch of grass, would you be able to see yourself as if it were a mirror? Of course not. Unless you were standing alongside a race track in this game. Not every track is like this, but some are worse than others, continuing the inconsistency mentioned earlier.
Sounds Good
The best part of the presentation is probably the sound design. Compared to other games I mentioned above, with the possible exception of Project CARS 2, the sound design in this game is in fact very good. The cars sound decently realistic (it still struggles to hit the more bass-y notes compared to some games), and the spatial audio is quite helpful and technically impressive. If you have a good pair of headphones you will probably not be disappointed playing this.
Graphics and Presentation Rating: 7/10
It's impressive on a technical level but the point of the tech is to increase realism and they've gone a bit too far in places for my liking. Also, some car models and tracks that look like they are 10-15 years old are unacceptable for a game claiming to be all-new and a complete graphical and technical showcase. By definition it's not complete, or new.
Handling and Physics
Oh boy. This is where I was really left disappointed with the game compared to almost any other racing game I listed in the introduction. Now, I have to add the caveat that I have not played this on a controller. Maybe the game handles great on a gamepad and given that's probably how a majority of players experience it, that's somewhat understandable. I just don't know. But on a wheel, this game is a real head-scratcher.
Wheel-y Bad Problems
First of all, it's great that there is expanded wheel support for this game compared to previous entries in the series, but that still is not enough to include many of the popular steering wheels available on the market today. I, for example, have to configure the wheel as an "advanced input" rather than an actual wheel. While this is functional, it is annoying (especially because the game does not remember your control scheme each time it's launched, so you have to reselect it).
What is most baffling is the default wheel parameters. Like every modern racing game, Forza lets you tune specific details about the force feedback you receive in the game, like the damping, vibration, road effects, and much more. But the default settings for this are bafflingly bad, to the point where the car is borderline undrivable.
This forces the player to tinker with every setting in order to get a game that is even remotely playable, and even then the experience is not that great. I have not yet settled on a great setting that satisfies me and I've been tinkering for a few days. And I have experience doing this in games like F1, iRacing, etc., although in those games its mostly a matter of just fine tuning a couple parameters from a good baseline. If this is your first game like this, I'm sorry for you. Hit up Reddit or other forums for help because it feels like the developers absolutely did not do their job here.
Float Like a Butterfly, Sting...like a Butterfly
Once you have gotten the settings to a workable state, you can experience the handling of this game as it was intended. That is to say that the cars are all quite floaty, there is a general lack of traction, and there will be a lot of drifting going on whether intentional or not. Now I would have been naïve to go into this game expecting pure sim handling like iRacing or Assetto Corsa. My benchmarks instead were Project CARS 2 and Gran Turismo Sport/GT7, since these are also "simcade" titles designed for a wide audience. I would say that I was still left disappointed given that GT Sport and PCARS 2 are each six years old and Forza Motorsport still feels like a step down.
Surely "the most technically advanced racing game ever made"—not my words, the words of developer Turn 10's Creative Director Chris Esaki—can do better than this. When driving, there is almost no feedback in the middle 60° of the steering range, and the cars are extremely wishy-washy. This is OK (still not ideal) for slower vehicles, like mid-range road cars, old race cars, or touring cars, but is completely unacceptable for higher speed cars.
It is almost like there is no understanding of the value of downforce, because even LMP1 cars will still drift around corners when in reality they are almost F1 car-like in their stickiness. Changing direction at high speed is a complete guessing game in Forza Motorsport; you have no idea where the front tires are pointing, you don't know when you're going to go into a slide, only that you're going to crash when you do because you can't sense the grip well enough to correct it.
There is little to no feeling generated by running over kerbs, and there is almost no feeling of the limit of grip—something you kind of need in a competition where optimum lap time is achieved by dancing on the limit of grip. It's probably the least confidence-inspiring racing game I have ever driven, and it's not really acceptable when this is the eighth entry in the series, it's had the longest development phase of any entry, and is meant to be a technical showcase. But hey, maybe I have to spend a few more hours troubleshooting the wheel settings in order to optimize it. You know, like the developers should have done?
Oh, and that dynamic weather we talked about earlier? It's kind of worthless when half the time the same lap time can be achieved on dry tires in the rain compared to wet tires in the same weather. What is the point of wet tires then? On face value, it's great that each track offers dynamic weather, and also that most races offer a soft, medium, and hard tire option as well as wet tires in the rain. But every race you just pick the medium tire because the soft tires disintegrate and the hard tires are too slow. If it rains, you lose the same amount of lap time relative to the dry pace if you stay on slicks or use wets. Like, really? Games on the PS3 did a better job of simulating wet conditions. It doesn't happen all the time, but happens too often to be overlooked. Do better.
Handling and Physics Rating: 3/10
I was pretty disappointed to find out that Forza Motorsport in 2023 on a direct drive wheel handled more or less exactly how Forza Motorsport 5 did on my friend's Xbox One on a Logitech G920 almost 10 years ago.
Multiplayer Experience
The multiplayer experience is, for the most part, pretty OK. The game has a preset group of races focused on specific vehicle classes which allow players to join and race whatever they want as long as it fits in the class. Most of these classes allow tuning for the vehicles which can limit your chances of winning early on given your car will likely not be upgraded, but if you keep it clean you'll still run mid-pack and pick up some credits to help you upgrade the car. This seems decently well-balanced.
As far as driving standards, it's about what you'd expect; most people are decently respectful, some are ignorant, and some are outright dirty drivers. But this is not unique to Forza, so I can't hold it against the game for not controlling people's ego and/or lack of spatial awareness. The game does its best to assess a penalty to drivers it deems responsible for collisions, but I haven't really noticed a pattern to determine how it decides who is at fault. Sometimes it's the car behind, sometimes it's the car ahead, sometimes there's no penalty. Where the penalty system struggles, like other games, is in the chain-reaction crashes where a first driver hits a second driver into a third driver; even though the second driver did nothing wrong, they will likely end up receiving a penalty. But like I said, other games have this problem too.
I do wish the online was a bit more open to be able to just pick a lobby and join it. although there are privately hosted sessions it is not as simple or straightforward as just having a pool of lobbies to join with some details prominently displayed. GT Sport also had the preset-races-on-a-schedule setup as well as a lobby browser and I think it was done better there. But overall I would say the online multiplayer of this game is fairly adequate; the net code is pretty stable, the races are decently organized, and it moves along fast enough that you're not discouraged by one bad race.
Multiplayer Experience Rating: 8.5/10
The multiplayer experience on Forza is about what you'd expect from a modern day racing game. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking or innovative about the process or the execution but nothing severely wrong with it.
Single Player Experience
To be honest, I haven't played much of the career mode at the time of writing (I do plan to in order to make money for more cars easily) but the general setup appears to be the same as most games of the type; a collection of sets of races around a specific car, class, or theme which get progressively harder. There's not a lot you can do to deviate from the formula I suppose, but there's nothing particularly groundbreaking here. Career modes in racing games exist as a way for you to make money and learn the cars and/or tracks, and that's about it without getting into scripting territory.
While it is possible to make one-off races at certain tracks using AI drivers, some of the default settings in that mode are baffling. Like why would I want a random layout of a track I picked, for example? Just default to the "main" layouts of each track. Likewise, it's more complicated than it should be just to do a single-person test session at any track. Every other game has it as a main option. Why do I have to select this from a drop down menu of a "race mode" when it's not a race? Yes that's very nitpicky but this is an honest review so I'm just saying what I think.
Collecting Cars
Both Forza and Gran Turismo are often derided for devolving into "car collecting games" with fairly repetitive gameplay loops. While somewhat true, you have to feel like the cars are worth buying, and/or are appropriately priced to make this worthwhile. A big problem with GT7 when it released was that the cars were very expensive in relation to the rate at which you collected money. In Forza Motorsport, the economy does seem far more balanced, which is nice.
The car count is OK, even if there aren't a lot of "brand new" cars out there; most are a good 3+ years old, and there are also a lot of "Forza Edition" cars, which are just regular cars with a body kit and engine tweaks that the game passes as an all-new car, which seems like cheating.
The car upgrading system is again OK, although it uses its own currency that I don't understand a) why it's called what it is (and specifically abbreviated to what it is), and b) why it exists. You already have credits in the game that you use to buy cars. Just use that to upgrade cars. Instead, we have to gain the second currency from driving the car. That means each car has to be driven individually just to be unlock upgrades for that car, rather than using your global experience level. Personally, I'm more in favor of the latter even if I understand why it is how it is.
Tech's Hottest Topic
Yes, I'm talking about AI. Not some image generator capable of definitely-not-stealing artwork from known artists, or some program designed to analyze your trends and predict the future; I'm talking about Forza's computer racers, or "Drivatars" if you work at Microsoft and call everything by its marketing name. I haven't raced against AI in other Forza games (besides Horizon 5, but I'm not counting Horizon games since they are so casual), but in this game they seem OK. They are better than the AI of Gran Turismo, which even in GT7 are still too slow and unreactive to fool even the most ignorant of players.
The AI drivers in Forza Motorsport are more realistic, and they will make mistakes that real players would make, which is a plus. However I feel like it's hard to get a good balance of AI racers across an entire race; there will be some that are just way ahead, while others are way behind. I'd like to see the standard deviation lowered a bit there. While they will race you decently, they are still far from the Codemasters F1 AI, which I feel like are the most "human" of all the games I've played.
Single Player Experience Rating: 7.5/10
In Summary
After a few days of playing any game can you really draw a definitive conclusion from it? Probably not, so I guess you should take most of what is mentioned here with a grain of salt. But certain things will no doubt be the same regardless of play time. Here's what I liked and didn't like about the game:
What I liked:
Enjoyable casual multiplayer
Well-balanced in-game economy
Dynamic weather available at all tracks
Sound design
What I didn't like:
Inexcusable wheel calibration
Poor handling characteristics
Refection overkill in some scenarios
Fiddly car upgrade process
Overall Score: 6.5/10
Forza Motorsport is an OK game. It may well be the "most technically advanced racing game ever made" but a lot of the time it doesn't really feel like it. If you want a game made just to enjoy the experience of driving, look elsewhere because the handling really is not great (on a wheel at least). If you approach this as a fun semi-serious game to play with your friends instead of grinding out iRacing lap times, then it will probably serve you well. Just don't call it a sim unless you want to embarrass yourself.