After a six-year absence, Forza Motorsport returns to the track, rebooted, reworked and primed to reclaim its old place on the podium of racing greats. In that time, its own spin-off, the action-packed, free-roaming Forza Horizon, has stolen its place as the champion Xbox racer. Meanwhile, its old rival - Sony’s Gran Turismo - is back on top with its own tie-in movie and the superb Gran Turismo 7. Has the eighth Forza Motorsport done enough to regain pole position?
Well, if anything, the success of the Forza Horizon series has enabled the team at Turn 10 Studios to double down on what Forza does best. The Top Gear antics and extravagant challenges of earlier installments are gone, with the new game focused on real cars, mostly real tracks and serious racing.
This is evident from the minute you first strap yourself in for the career mode, with races typically lasting six laps or longer and preceded by at least three mandatory practice laps. There’s no more hopping into a race cold and winging it with the assumption that you’re going to win. Instead, the game forces you to get a feel for how your current car will handle on the track, and to refine your approach to each corner, so that you can take it at a decent lick without spinning off the tarmac.
This makes it sound like practice is a chore, yet it’s not, because the driving experience is exceptionally good. It might not seem to at first. In a bid to make the racing more accessible, the game eases you in with a pitifully easy difficulty level and driving assists so generous that it’s a challenge not to hold the racing line. But start removing the braking and steering assists, tone down the stabilisation, and the classic Forza feel kicks in, only with even more realism and detail.
Forza’s handling still hasn’t quite got the tyres-meet-track grit of Gran Turismo 7, but it’s different in an interesting way, with a fantastic sense of shifting weight and momentum that brings the cars to life.
Simply throwing a 2004 Honda Civic Type R around the curves of Silverstone is thrilling enough to be getting in with, but try spinning a Ford GT into the corkscrew turn of Laguna Seca, or speeding a Mercedes AMG-GT through the high-speed straights and brutal hairpins of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya track. Each class of car and each individual motor delivers a different but brilliant experience, ensuring no two races are ever quite the same.
Speed up to level up
In a way, the new Forza is a much more serious racing sim, yet it’s still more accessible than hardcore efforts like Assetto Corsa. After a short intro series of events, you’re thrown into a grid of themed competitions, where completing one series unlocks others to compete in. What’s clever is the way the game encourages you to up the challenge and toss your driving aids away.
To get the cars, you’ll need to compete you’ll need to earn a lot of credits, and the best way to earn more credits is to push the skill level of the AI competition upwards, and put your own racing skills to the test. You can even earn bonus credits by taking a position further back in the grid for the next race. The bigger the risk, the greater the reward.
And it’s not just you that’s levelling up as a driver. As you race around each track, completing sections skillfully and shaving seconds off your time will earn your car experience points. Drive lazy, missing corners and slamming into the competition? You’re missing points that could be yours. Keep levelling it up and you unlock new tiers of upgrades, which you can spend your points on to boost its handling, braking, acceleration and top speed.
Don’t worry, petrolheads. If you want to go deep picking different parts to improve your exhaust systems, filters, gears, turbo chargers and suspension, then Forza Motorsports has all the gear you could wish for. And if you just want to enjoy the racing? There’s an auto-upgrade option that will get you set up and ready for the next big race.
Fast and Furious
It’s worth pushing the AI speed and skill level up as well, because on the initial setting, they’ll give you no real competition, but on higher levels, they’re much more inclined to take risks, and even drive aggressively. Where Gran Turismo’s rival racers can be a little too polite, Forza’s Drivatars, using moves cloned from real players, have a tendency to push things too far for comfort, flying off the track through reckless manoeuvres or trading paint on crowded bends. But while this makes the start of many races into a smash and shunt-fest, the AI’s gung-ho attitude creates compelling face-offs in the closing laps.
There’s an awful lot here for car and motorsport enthusiasts, with career mode competitions that focus on classic cars or much-loved eras, and a terrific line-up that goes from legendary sixties sports coupes like the Aston Martin DB5 through eighties boy racer hatchbacks to cutting-edge hypercars from Rimac and Bugatti.
What’s more, the multiplayer has a focus on keeping things straight and fair, with a mandatory qualifying series where you can get to grips with the rules around staying on the track and avoiding collisions, and punitive time penalties for bad behaviour. Who knows if this will work in practice, but at least the team at Turn 10 Studios seem aware of the problems.
This is a great-looking, atmospheric racer, where the fancy-pants ray-traced lighting on the cars looks stunning, and the cinematic replays dish out all the eye candy you could need. But if Forza Motorsports has a downside, it’s that it’s all a bit po-faced. The focus on real tracks, with a handful of fictional Forza classics, keeps things consistent, but the majority look broadly similar, and you come to miss the thrills of the coastal, countryside and city courses that used to spice the older Forza Motorsports up.
Of course, if you’re looking for fun and variety, Forza Horizon 5 already has you covered. But if the new Forza Motorsport has the drive and the ambition to exceed its former glories, it’s still missing just a little of the classic Forzas’ flair.
