Forza Motorsport is OK with being the boring Forza

Forza MotorsportDeveloper Turn 10 Studios finds itself in a strange position. It is the eighth game in a series that was once a flagship product for the Xbox. And yet, after an unusual six years away, he returns to find that his fun younger series, Forza Horizon, has stolen the show. This process was already underway when Forza Motorsport7 was released in 2017 – which is probably why Microsoft felt that an extended break for motorsport was both comfortable and necessary – but in the meantime, the two strongest Horizon titles to date have found a huge new audience on Game Pass and beyond. That means Forza Motorsport has to explain itself again to a new generation of Forza fans raised on Playground Games’ freewheeling automotive vacation.

The good news is that he does it with confidence and authority. There’s no hint of an identity crisis in motorsport’s rebooted return, nor of the desperate pursuit of trends that blighted its Xbox One era with microtransactions, loot boxes, and gaming systems. random services. There is virtually no evidence in Forza Motorsport that Horizon games exist, unless you count the studied way they don’t do any of the things Horizon does. This is a circuit racing game with a strong focus on real-world motorsport.

If anything, Forza Motorsport is excessively determined. Coming from the bubbling party of Horizon 5 – or even the eccentric nerdy of Gran Turismo 7 — you might be surprised by the lack of variety in event design and the absence of a distinctive voice, a personality to guide you through this world of asphalt and piston. But that’s the Forza Motorsport way. The series has always worked best as a framework, a toolbox, that delivers what you put into it.

This is where Turn 10 has devoted most of its efforts over the past six years. Some aspects, like the livery and car tuning editors it shares with the Horizon games, required little work. Somewhere else, Forza Motorsport required a more serious revision. Long-missing features like dynamic time of day and weather systems – which may seem like a checkbox, but are critically important to the sim racing community – have finally been brought into play. work, and beautifully too. There’s an impressive spectrum of rain in this game, from a misty drizzle that can create a dangerously slippery surface to a view-obliterating downpour. The lighting at sunset and at night is rich and dramatic, and even at midday the position of the sun can have gameplay implications; face the sun at the Laguna Seca circuit, for example, and the glare from the track surface can make its edges, blurred by dust, difficult to read.

Forza’s car driving physics have also been reworked. While Playground took the same fundamentals and molded them into Horizon’s arcade-sim hybrid that was both hugely entertaining and suited to navigating an open-world map, Turn 10 had struggled to give the simulation a more realistic shape in motorsport games; the driving was often nervous and unpredictable, and poorly managed on the steering wheels. Even if it is still less planted and more flamboyant than Gran Turismo, with more of a tendency to oversteer, Forza Motorsport is an involving, plausible and much more coherent approach. (I haven’t had a chance to try it on a wheel myself, but I’m told it performs much better.)

Round 10 also had a lot of ground to make up in multiplayer. After taking an early lead in this area thanks to Microsoft’s networking expertise, the Motorsport series was left behind around 2017, as Gran Turismo Sport and others implemented the safety and driver skills assessments of hardcore sims like iRacing in order to promote a fairer and more sporting environment for online racing. In this context, Forza Motorsport7By comparison, chaotic and aggressive lobbies seemed old-fashioned.

Image: Turn 10 Studios/Xbox Game Studios

Turn 10 has now done what it absolutely had to do and followed suit with driver qualifications, a penalty system and a mandatory three-race training phase before being able to compete in any of the Forza MotorsportFeatured multiplayer races (as opposed to private races). Settling in for a multiplayer session is now a commitment, that’s for sure – races have fixed entry times, as well as practice and qualifying stages that accumulate over “race weekends” which last about half an hour at least. But you are rewarded with close, fair and exhilarating races. Supported by a strong network and a fast, simple interface, Forza MotorsportOnline multiplayer finally has its place in the top drawer.

This all adds up to solid and important structural engineering for the future of the Forza Motorsport series. Turn 10 apparently knew there was no way they could release another game without all of this, and they did a good job. But there’s just a little innovation and imagination to go with it.

Where Forza Horizon invites players to explore a map, and Gran Turismo 7 offers the menu of its picturesque Café to choose from, Forza Motorsport just presents a functional event grid. There are five circuits, each made up of four series of four to six races each, plus a showcase event as a cornerstone. Each series explores a different class, from modern super sedans to retro exotics. If you’ve played a Forza game, these won’t come as a surprise, and they’ve certainly been more imaginatively set and presented more attractively before. There’s also a “featured” tab with a tour of additional series that unlock on a weekly basis, similar to Forza Horizon’s seasonal playlists.

Image: Turn 10 Studios/Xbox Game Studios

Each of these series is structured similarly – although, to be fair to Turn 10, it has somewhat challenged the status quo of the “CarPG” genre with some interesting quirks within that structure. Once you’ve chosen a car for a series, it’s locked and each car must be upgraded individually, unlocking upgrades (along with the special currency needed to purchase them) as you go. It’s mandatory to complete three practice laps before each race, and this is where you can get the best Car XP rewards to refine your cornering techniques and improve your lap times. In other words, the better you drive, the faster your car becomes.

This system – and it’s also applied in multiplayer – makes it effectively impossible to spend your speed in any car using credits. Instead, you need to spend time driving it and building it up gradually. In one of the few areas where it seems to live up to the Horizon series, Turn 10 actively counters those games’ overabundance of reward cars and their indulgence in silly, game-changing builds that let you swap out an engine’s engine of 1,000 horsepower. unit in a 1950s micro-car. (Engine and transmission swaps are the final unlocks, at car levels 40 and 50, respectively.) It’s grating, but I appreciate the more realistic philosophy behind it behind it and the dedication to building a relationship between players and their cars – as well as the In this way, it marginalizes some of the more irritating aspects of the Forza meta, such as the overwhelming dominance of AWD tunes that suppress individual characteristics cars.

However, within each career series, I’m not sure it works as well. More like Diablo 4, Forza Motorsport distributes upgrades so gradually that it’s hard to feel the difference they’ve made, especially when you’re faced with rival AIs whose cars also evolve to match the power of yours. There’s a smoothing effect that dulls the feeling of progression, and some more out-of-the-box approaches – like jumping into a faster car and driving it without upgrades – are completely ruled out.

Image: Turn 10/Xbox Game Studios

Added to this is an extremely repetitive event design. Although Forza Motorsport offers a wide selection of tracks – including quite a few completely new originals as well as lesser-known real-world circuits like Kyalami in South Africa – all you do there is practice, practice, practice train, then run, run, run.

In all honesty, this loop is beautifully implemented. The workouts work really well, creating both atmosphere and familiarity, and helping you refine your line in key areas. The freedom to choose your own position on the grid (no higher than third) is initially counterintuitive, but mostly encourages you to challenge yourself, either by starting further back and mixing it with other cars, or by increasing the difficulty. The result is tension and excitement on the track, and fewer races where victory is a given. Taken in isolation, a career race in Forza Motorsport is a perfectly structured 20 minute game. But – aside from the Rivals time trial mode – this loop is pretty much the only thing the game offers. And since races are usually at least five laps long, plus practice, that’s a pretty long loop. Repeatedly, this can become mind-numbing.

Forza Motorsport this is a serious matter. Take your time, says round 10; do your laps, shave the seconds off, make that little adjustment, get that win. I respect his focus and refusal to pander to the fun-loving Horizon players, instead offering them a clearly articulated invitation to join his more austere church. It’s a game about going in circles, a little faster each time, with no excuses. It proved compelling enough to found an entire sport, so maybe that’s fair enough. But a little more variety would have been very helpful.

Forza Motorsport will be released on October 10 for Windows PC and Xbox Series X. The game was tested on Xbox Series X using a preliminary download code provided by Microsoft. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.