Forza Motorsport Reviews for Xbox at Gamepublic.Com

Forza Motorsport review: You can sum up this game in two words, “Sheer Perfection”. For the better of this review though, we’ll go in to the depths of Forza a little bit more! Forza Motorsport is the first game that GameBiz has ever given a perfect score for. It’s the best racing game we’ve ever come across, and that’s saying a lot. Gran Turismo 4, eat your heart out, because there’s a new girl in town and she’s got a lot more than you ever had to offer.GameplayAfter playing Forza for 15 minutes, it was clear to us which game was the better driving simulator. Forza Motorsport is everything Gran Turismo 4 was meant to be, and then some. The handling, the cars, the upgrades, the decals, the environments, the weather conditions, the models, everything in Forza has been fitted to perfection right down to the marks on the tracks. There’s absolutely nothing to complain about in the whole game, which is what makes Forza a rather hard game to review. A review needs to be critical of the good and bad, and when there’s only good things to say, you know the game is something special.Having an average speed of over 100KPH is not something unusual in Forza Motorsport. Throughout career mode you can keep a very close watch over all your details, from how much your garage is worth to your earned credits and percentage of the game complete. Forza offers hours upon hours of offline action, whether you like to race around in already unlocked cars in Arcade Mode, or jump in to a Career mode with more options than you’ll know what to do with. Let’s start with the simplest option though, let’s Go Race.Forza Motorsport’s career racing mode has hundreds of different circuits to complete. They are all sorted out uniformly which is confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it you can see how far through the game you are, and what events you’ve forgotten about. Forza’s Career mode works on levels, and as you go up levels, more circuits will be unlocked. These come in intervals of five though, however every time you go up a level, a different upgrade will be unlocked allowing you to tune up your cars.A full Garage mode allows you to check out the statistics of all your cars, sell them, test drive them, and more. Throughout career mode you find yourself in the garage a lot checking up on what car is best for the race and what not. The garage also has all the options to upgrade your cars, tuning, painting, and adding decals. There’s so much to do on every car in the game, meaning if you’re a car modding addict you’ll probably spend upwards of 100 hours in the garage perfecting your cars. The garage is also where you can buy, sell and trade cars with other profiles. If you’ve got a mate that no longer plays Forza then grab his profile and steal all his cars so you can get some fast cash!Cars have five different meters: Speed, Acceleration, Brake, Corner and Rarity. They are each scaled between zero and ten. Speed and Acceleration are of course the most important aspects to winning races, but if you want to perfect those times for Xbox Live, or the harder races, then you’re going to need a good all-round car. The Rarity meter doesn’t really make much difference, but it helps put an estimated value on the car if you can’t be bothered checking in the options. Upgrading the car’s engine, exhaust, body-kit etc will of course raise the different meters. Creating a totally unique car also raises the Rarity meter.Handling a Forza Motorsport car is finally a refreshing glass of water in a desert of average racing games. Racing games these days are either too tight on the turns or too loose. Forza is stuck right in the middle, and handles just like you would expect the car to handle in real life. If you’re going 200KPH then you’d better slow the hell down to get around a sharp corner as it’s not going to work too well, and if you go off the track then you pay the price. There are different surfaces off the track ranging from grass to sand, and sand basically makes you stop completely. Different types of barriers on the walls cause the cars to get damaged in different ways, and if the car hits a bunch of tires then it stops very realistically, unlike other games where it just scrapes along.The damage system rivals with Burnout 3: Takedown. Big hits will cause big damage, and what separates Forza from Burnout 3 is that the damage is also internal. You’ll find the car cruising off to the side involuntarily if you slam in to a wall, and all sorts of things can go wrong if you don’t handle your car with care. Getting in the way of other cars can cause to be fatal, as they’ll slam in to you if they can’t get out of the way, and your car will get some serious damage. At the end of the race when your score is getting tallied, if you’ve done damage to your car then they will take some of your credits away to fix the car.There are ways to boost your score in Forza by turning on and off different settings. Forza Motorsport has a suggested line which is incredibly useful as it means you don’t have to be paying attention to the map for every corner, and instead you can focus more on the job at hand – your car racing on a track. The suggested line tells you when to slow down and where to go. It may not be your favourite line, but it sure helps you to get used to the circuits at first. Other settings to boost or lower the score at the end of each race include AI difficulty, Shifting, Fuel/Tire wear, Damage, Traction (TCS), Anti-lock braking (ABS), and Stability (STM).But wait, there’s more! Forza Motorsport has a little something known as a Drivatar. A Drivatar can be trained to drive just like you, and participate in events for you! You can sit back and rake in the cash while an AI car designed to drive just like you, cruises round the circuits at top speed. There are some fees though, so you won’t get as many credits, but it’s sure worth it if you’re lazy and want some quick cash. Drivatar is quite similar to the B-spec mode on Gran Turismo 4; however it doesn’t require as much effort and is more of a racing manager than a racing team-mate. Microsoft were so impressed with their own development of the Drivatar that they have created a whole website entirely based on it. Click here to check it out! The HUD allows you to keep track of all things going on in a race. You can see where the other cars are on the track, you can check out how damaged your car is ranging from superficial damage to internal damage, and it displays whenever you use the different computer chips (ABS, TSC, STM) in your car too.MultiplayerForza has full support for 4-player split screen, and 8-player on system link and Xbox Live. You can use your cars from your career mode to start a whole new era on Xbox Live as you challenge real people from around the world for more credits. Exchanging cars, racing cars, and keeping track of your online statistics are all part of the wonders of Forza Motorsport, and if you’ve got Xbox Live set up, we don’t see how you won’t be spending hours upon hours racing online with others. There’s no noticeable downsizing of graphics when you slip in to some split screen action either – it’s just some good old classic racing goodness brought to you by our friends at Microsoft.GraphicsForza is the most realistic looking racing game the Xbox is ever going to see. Because of this, it’s hard to compare it to anything else on the market. Project Gotham 2 and Burnout 3: Takedown both had awesome graphics, Gran Turismo 4 topped them both, but there was still a certain aspect of the game that didn’t give it that totally realistic feel to it. Forza on the other hand is a pure example of the power of the Xbox being fully utilized. At speeds of over 400KPH, the scenery goes by incredibly fast but still looks absolutely breath-taking, and if you slow down to have a look at the different environments, you’ll see that weeks upon weeks of work has been put in to making every little tweak and cranny of Forza Motorsport look as perfect as possible.The camera is adjustable in four different views: on the number plate, in the drivers seat, and a zoomed in and out view behind the car. When zoomed out, you can rotate around to have a look at the car from different angles (in case you need to check out the damage you caused to your car on that last hit), however you can only do the smooth rotation from behind (We’re talking about camera angles, right?). Forza shall be known in the future as the game with the shiniest, smoothest looking cars that could all be modified in any way the player wanted. The car models have been designed perfectly down to the smallest points, and the way they handle exploits this even more.SoundRealism has been a key feature of this review, comparing Forza Motorsport to other Racing Simulators and to real life. Never before have engines sounded this good either. We’ve compared Forza’s engine noises to the noises coming out of the “engines” in Gran Turismo 4 and there’s simply no comparison or competition when it comes to the better sounding game. The engines are far more prevalent in Forza Motorsport than in any other game we’ve experienced here at GameBiz. Whether it’s screeching round the corner or cruising past thousands of fans cheering you on, Forza’s environmental noises never cease to amaze. The witches hats are unusually loud though – when you hit one you may think something is wrong with your car for a moment, but it’s actually just the witches hat stumbling down the track.The soundtrack is great, nothing too outstanding though in terms of bands and songs, but that doesn’t really matter seeing as you can use your custom soundtracks. There’s no radio function though, unlike in the Project Gotham series, so you can’t skip to the next track or change radio stations or adjust the volume while racing – in fact, unfortunately Forza doesn’t have radio stations, but that doesn’t mean it’s any worse than it was to begin with!OverallWhatever you’re doing, stop right now. If you’ve got an Xbox then you should have Forza Motorsport in its disc drive, and you should be playing it. Forza is the game that we’ve been waiting for on the Xbox. It’s the Gran Turismo 4 killer, it’s THE Racing Simulator of 2005, and some will even consider it the Halo killer! There is literally no reason for us to tell you not to purchase this game right now, if you’re not a racing fan here’s your chance to give the genre a go as this game will not disappoint you. The only way you won’t be excited by this game is if you don’t have enough time to put in to it. Forza is a big game and takes many, many hours to get through the career mode so if you have a busy lifestyle, you probably won’t be able to enjoy everything that Forza has to offer. The Arcade mode allows you to use some pretty nice cars though, so there’s room for everybody!Thumbs Up The most realistic racing game ever. More upgrades and modifications than any rev-head would know what to do with. A list of award winning, gorgeous looking vehicles, not to mention rarities and gems in the enormous list of Forza Motorsport cars. Xbox Live play expands the hours of gameplay to infinity. Drivatar mode – the best way to win Forza if you’re as lazy as my dad.Thumbs Down Although the camera has a rotation from the back of the car, for some reason you can’t rotate around the front of the car while driving, unlike Project Gotham Racing 2. Absolutely minor frame glitches in one particular course as you go over a hill, however it’s barely noticeable. full size >>

Forza Motorsport for Xbox Reviews