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Forza Motorsport has returned to tear up the track

10K View2023-10-11

Forza Motorsport

9.5

SportsFirst-PersonRealisticRacingMultiplayerSingleplayerThird PersonSimulation

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SHOULD I PLAY FORZA MOTORSPORT?

Play it if you’ve been pining for some old-school, round-the-track racing action. It’s best to think of Forza Motorsport almost as a throwback game, because it feels remarkably constrained after six years of boundless open worlds in Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5. This is a classic racer: You buy cool cars, you race in increasingly challenging events on some of the world’s most iconic racetracks, and you pop new parts in them to shave crucial tenths of a second off your lap time. If you’re looking for the adventure and freedom of Forza Horizon, you won’t find that here—this is just the races. The thing is, those races are really good.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve put in five hours behind the wheel in Forza Motorsport so far, and I’m sure I’ll be spending a lot more time with it in the months to come. I’ve been driving a 2021 Volkswagen Golf R and a 2022 Toyota GR Supra through a couple of the early racing series. I’ve leveled both cars up and fitted them with loads of upgrades: wider racing wheels, sport-tuned exhausts, aftermarket flywheels and suspension, and the occasional body modification.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT FORZA MOTORSPORT

• Smooth, responsive racing. Forza Motorsport might have the best-feeling driving I’ve ever experienced in a game, and that’s thanks to a combination of silky smooth visuals, growly engine bass, and precision controls. It just felt great to drive anything in Forza Motorsport, whether it was a completely vanilla Camry or a Koenigsegg supercar with a seven-figure price tag. While the game’s graphics options for PC aren’t as full-featured as they should be, it shouldn’t be too hard for anyone with the minimum hardware to find a combination that works well on their machine.

• Tunable difficulty. Something I’ve always appreciated about Forza games is the freedom they give me in selecting my difficulty options. Newcomers to racing can set it up so they see the optimal line through the course at all times, while I typically like to set that to only show me the braking lines into and out of turns. Forza Motorsport let me pick difficulty options before each race, including how tough my opponents were going to be and where I’d line up in the grid. There are also options for assistance with braking and steering. Like the rest of the series, Forza Motorsport is welcoming to anyone, regardless of ability or experience level, and I think that’s pretty cool.

• A huge selection of cars. With hundreds of fully customizable cars available in the standard edition of Forza Motorsport, I won’t be running out of things to do any time soon. As I mentioned above, the game’s garage runs the gamut from off-the-lot daily drivers to specially tuned racing models, hitting everything in between on the way. Sure, a few favorites might be missing here and there, but what impressed me the most as I looked through the available cars was that there was zero filler—everything available looked like something I’d at least want to take out for a spin.

• Fun array of event series. Forza Motorsport’s career mode is organized around themed event series, which is where I picked up my Golf and Supra. There are a bunch of series based on everyday sports cars and hatchbacks, while others are themed around specific manufacturers, decades, or performance classes. On the other hand, if I wasn’t feeling interested in any of those, I could always hop into the free drive mode and set up my own event with whatever cars, however many drivers, and on whatever track I wanted.

• Luxe presentation. It’s hard to nail this down to just one thing, but Forza Motorsport just has this money feel to it, like sitting in the bucket seat of a Cadillac CTS-V or feeling the leather wrapped around a premium sport steering wheel. It’s a similar effect that Destiny 2’s menus have—the UI and ambient music convey a sense of stateliness, power, luxury, and performance engineering. I felt like I was in a company showroom for a brand of car I’ll never be able to afford.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT FORZA MOTORSPORT?

• The right settings can be tricky to find. I mentioned earlier that it’s possible to find the right settings for your PC, but that could take a while. A lot of Forza Motorsport’s graphics settings are designed around dynamic resolution and upscaling, and performance can wobble a lot while it’s changing those settings midrace. Personally I’d prefer a more granular set of options that I could dial in myself.

• Ray tracing just isn’t worth it. Yeah, it looks very pretty, but Forza Motorsport’s implementation of ray tracing annihilated my framerate, and I was playing at 1440p on a RTX 4070ti. That should be enough to handle some ray-traced ambient occlusion, but I had to abandon that dream—the performance hit on the track was just too heavy. Hopefully developer Turn 10 will roll out some further optimizations in the near future, because I’d love to play with everything cranked up to eleven.

• A little old-fashioned. There’s no escaping the fact that Forza Motorsport is a dad game at this point, and after the exuberance of the Forza Horizon games, coming back to Motorsport definitely felt a bit like walking into a more formal event. That’s not a bad thing on its face, because the stodgier atmosphere certainly fits with the serious about motorsports theme, but I do find myself missing the goofy festival mood now and then.

[Review written by TapTap editor Ian Boudreau]

💬 What do you think? Will you be taking Forza Motorsport out for a spin? Are you more of a Gran Turismo fan? Let us know in the comments!