Review: FORZA MOTORSPORT is Gorgeous and Aims to Help New Players Get Into the Series

Forza Motorsport has just released on PC and Xbox Series X|S. The game was developed by Turn 10 Studios and published by Xbox Game Studios this week and racing sim fans seem to be pretty happy. It’s the 8th game in the Forza Motorsport franchise. Thankfully, Xbox was kind enough to supply me with a code so that I could review that game and all the thoughts below are my own. If you like what you read or want to prove me wrong, you can purchase the game from Xbox (affiliate link), your favorite retailers like GameStop (affiliate link), or access it via Xbox Game Pass (affiliate link).

I want to preface this review with the knowledge that I have not played a Forza Motorsport game since Forza Motorsport 4. In addition, I have not had the opportunity to engage in any multiplayer matches outside of three qualifier rounds, so I will not be discussing any of those features. Finally, I played using a controller, not a racing wheel/setup, so take that in mind. Now that I’ve gotten the caveats out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this review.

I’m going to start with things that I’m not in love with about the game. For starters, I am annoyed that the name is just Forza Motorsport. That game already exists and was released 18 years ago on the original Xbox. What was wrong with calling it Forza Motorsport 8 or something similar. I know that’s a petty thing, but I’m saying it. Second, in the Career mode, you have to complete three practice laps on a track before doing the actual race. Why? I can understand wanting to make sure people are familiar with the tracks before it actually matters, but were three laps necessary? It’s really more of a nuisance than a problem, but I wish that it would let you finish the practice after only one lap. You could still practice if you so desired after that one lap, but if you feel confident or just want to rush through a race, you could just end the practice there. My last complaint is really the size of the roster. There are over 500 cars in Forza Motorsport which is impressive. I had just hoped that we’d reached a point where we would have had 1,000+ including the cars that I drive on a regular basis like my Hyundai Elantra. Once again, this is kind of petty as it appears they’ve mostly removed the off-roading vehicles and put them in Forza Horizon games instead.

Before moving on, I do want to point out that I’ve hit a couple of bugs, but I imagine these will be fixed pretty soon if not already. First, I found that on one of the courses, one section was bugged so that it stopped timing you at about the 6-second mark and always gave you a segment score of 10. Second, I was driving a race in the career mode and suddenly lost audio. I panicked a little thinking my TV was dying, but did some checking and all other audio worked just fine, so I just hit some weird bug or glitch in the game that muted it. Finally, I did run into a problem where I saved a replay and the playback was all kinds of weird. No matter how much I skipped ahead, I never saw the race actually start, everyone was stuck on the starting line with the crowd cheering. It was also during this time that I found if I held LT to rewind, the cars would randomly sink into the ground and then if I held RT to fast forward they would shoot up into the air. Not helpful if you want to analyze how you could’ve done better but it was funny.

Now let’s get to everything else. If you like racing sims, Forza Motorsport is incredible in my experience. Everything looks absolutely beautiful. On Xbox Series S you can play 1080p at 60FPS while the Series X in 4K with 60FPS although ray tracing is off in performance mode. The Series S will then only play at 30FPS in any other mode and ray tracing is only available in Homespace and Car Theater. However, the Series X has a setting that I think every freaking game should have on the Series X. It obviously has the traditional quality mode that aims to lock you in at 4K with ray tracing always on but it drops to 30FPS. Meanwhile, the Series X has Performance RT mode. This is when you take Performance mode with all its 60FPS glory, but turn on ray tracing for cars but not tracks. Now all the modes use dynamic resolution and I don’t mind this at all. My TV is only 1080p still and so I’ve been begging to get some kind of option to turn on ray tracing with performance mode because I don’t care about the game rendering at freaking 4K! I know that I’m in the minority with that, but it’s nice to see that I can mix performance mode and quality mode a little bit.

The career mode doesn’t feel exceptional, but I really like how upgrades are tied to your car’s level which increases as you race with it. This means that you can’t just rack up a bunch of credits, buy a random car, and immediately deck it out to be the best version of itself. You’re forced to get to know a car and upgrades gradually unlock as you level up. I know for some it might be frustrating, but I appreciate the effort to help onboard new players. There are over 800 upgrades that can be performed and so it could feel very overwhelming for anyone not super familiar with the franchise or even cars in general. I know I still don’t really understand how to tune a car or which upgrades are best, so it’s also nice that you can press X and the game will automatically upgrade your car based on how many points you have to optimize it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how good it is at making those decisions, but I never really had a problem with it in my opinion.

Another aspect of Forza Motorsport that I enjoy is how they added a bit more of a risk reward aspect before a race starts. You can adjust the difficulty that determines how fast your opponents are. You can also adjust how much of a simulation you want it to be, including damage to the car, fuel, and tire wear which gives you small bonuses to your winnings. However, there’s one more area that I thought was a nice touch. You can adjust what position you’re in at the start to add more of that push and pull. You typically start around the 12th position and if you move closer to the front your earnings decrease but it gets easier and the opposite is true if you move towards the back. It will even take your practice laps into consideration to estimate what position you will finish in.

At the end of the day, I enjoy Forza Motorsport. Racing simulators aren’t my favorite because I’m not good at them and don’t understand the finer aspects. However, I sometimes get in the mood to pretend I’m a car guy and these games help me scratch that itch. I think outside of the bug fixes and roster size the only improvements I would ask for would be to reduce the number of required practice laps before a race and implement VR. I don’t have VR, but that’s one area where Forza’s main competition (Gran Turismo) is going to maintain a leg up and heck, that would definitely get me to more seriously consider VR and a racing sim setup. The game is gorgeous, has the Performance RT mode which has me ecstatic with my outdated 1080p TV, and is pretty noob-friendly which is great. Multiplayer is a different beast that I don’t feel I can comment on. If you like racing sims, Forza Motorsport is a slam dunk.