The Xbox equivalent to Gran Turismo makes a long-awaited return, with some of the most realistic car handling ever seen in a racing game.
There was a time when racing games like Need For Speed and Midnight Club – and before that Ridge Racer and Sega Rally – were amongst the biggest triple-A blockbusters of their era. Those days of supremacy are past, but there are still driving franchises whose success platform owners can still rely on. For Sony that’s Gran Turismo and for Microsoft it’s Forza, a brand that’s split into two discrete series: Horizon, with its open world environment and faux pop culture, and Motorsport, which just gets on with the racing.
The latter’s last outing was 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7, and astute observers will notice both the six year gap and the fact that this year’s Motorsport has dropped the number, indicating a reboot for the franchise. That encompasses new game modes and a different approach to online multiplayer, while also preserving numerous elements of the previous games.
The most expected of those is its 500+ car line-up, which will inevitably receive numerous additional vehicles over the coming year. It’s a massive list and while it doesn’t stretch quite as wide as Gran Turismo 7, it’s still got everything from vintage Formula 1 cars to modern exotics, via every sort of hot hatch, GT, and sports classic imaginable.
It also features 20 real world racing tracks. That may not sound like many, but with a range of configurations for each circuit, varying times of day and weather conditions, and the contrasting experience of driving a family saloon compared with, say, a Le Mans-ready 1964 Ford GT40 Mk I, that feels like plenty.
You’ll also be glad to hear the reboot retains the series’ trademark time rewind functionality, which lets you instantly undo mistakes you make on the track. That might sound like a relatively superficial adjunct, but it makes a huge difference, eliminating the frustrating bugbear of last lap fever, where you ruin a long and arduous race by messing up the final bend. The ability to rewind means you never need to fret, with no mistake proving catastrophic.
It also helps you learn. Taking a tricky corner again and again until you get the line right stands you in good stead for future laps, giving you concentrated experience of a very specific portion of the track without having to race the whole thing multiple times. Of course, the downside is that races never feel all that tense, but that feels like a small price to pay, and you can always turn it off if it’s making the game too relaxing.
Speaking of difficulty, 2023’s Motorsport does a superb job with its customisation options. As well as driving aids like ABS, traction control, and steering and braking assistance, you can also adjust the skill of competitors and set where in the grid you’ll start, with rewards granted for being nearer the back and for choosing more aggressive adversaries. It’s worth noting that for once AI-controlled cars rarely feel as though they’re joined to you by an invisible rubber band. It makes races feel more natural and at higher difficulties will leave you jostling for position right to the finish line.
Most of the more noticeable changes are structural, with the heart of the single-player now being the Builder Cup, where you start with a preset car, which you gradually modify and improve over the course of a series of races themed around a particular driving genre, like muscle cars, compacts, or vintage cars. There are 25 events to play through, each of which is made up of five or six races, with each race comprising a two or three lap practise followed by the race itself.
That sounds fine in principle, but moving straight from a practice session to a race means you’ll be spending on average 15 straight minutes – sometimes more – driving on a single circuit for each race in each event. You can skip practice laps, but it’s a fiddly manoeuvre in the menus, and you’re incentivised not to, with large numbers of car points doled out during the warm-up, as well as the main race.
Car points let you upgrade your car, adding performance parts to make it faster, better at cornering and improving its brakes, so if you skip practises your car will be lower level, making you less likely to win – which in turn reduces your chances in the rest of the series.
Rivals, the other new single-player mode, is less substantial, offering one-off time trials against other drivers’ ghosts. Choose a car class, a track, and its configuration, then buy or borrow a car in the correct class if you don’t happen to own one, and off you go. Tracks are completely empty other than your rival’s ghost, giving you the full width of the tarmac to work on shaving off those milliseconds, while leaderboards provide their own pull for competitive drivers.
Multiplayer is something of an oddity, as your only online option is a preselected group event that takes place every half hour, day and night. To enter, you start with as many practise laps as you like within the time limit, followed by three qualifying laps to determine your grid position and then, at the ordained time, the race itself. That can mean a lot of sitting around in the multiplayer lobby if you don’t time it just right, but at least races are generally fully populated.
The game does have a few bugs, one of which lost us nearly 20 minutes of gameplay after we were forced to restart, but they’re mostly minor graphical glitches that will hopefully be patched out of existence sooner rather than later. It’s still a mild disappointment, although fortunately not one that ruins the experience.
Perhaps most importantly, Forza Motorsport’s handling has somehow been improved. It was already fanatically detailed, and now even using a controller rather than a race wheel, the sensation of torque in faster cars, and the feel of momentum balanced by the grip of four tyres is palpable. Turn 10 have also managed to wring what feels like haptic feedback from the Xbox controllers’ somewhat more primitive rumble device. Plus, to look at, this is easily the most beautiful Forza ever.
Some of Motorsport’s more obscure design choices – the peculiar approach to multiplayer and the insistence on practise sessions in the Builder Cup – have a chance to prove themselves over time but even if they don’t manage it there’s plenty to enjoy with the excellent presentation and first class racing and car handling. Forza Horizon’s colourful festival trappings may make it look more accessible, but Forza Motorsport is a serious and refined alternative.
Forza Motorsport review summary
In Short: A fabulously detailed racing game with a huge car roster and engrossing single-player modes, slightly marred by forcefully encouraging you to perform practise laps before races.
Pros: The most involved handling model of any racing game ever. Spectacularly detailed cars and tracks, and rival AI that doesn’t feel as though it’s cheating.
Cons: Rigidly timed multiplayer events won’t be for everyone and single player is a little thin on content. The racing line can be hard to see when the sun reflects off the track.
Score: 8/10
Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £69.99*
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Turn 10 Studios
Release Date: 10th October 2023
Age Rating: 3
*Permanently on Game Pass
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