Forza Motorsport Review: Perfectly vast and comprehensive

By a wide measure, Forza Motorsport is the best-feeling game in the Motorsport franchise to date. It isn’t a complete reimagining of the Forza formula, and it still has that familiar degree of forgiveness baked in when you’re at and just beyond the limits of control. This is a series that has always been about giving us the confidence to grasp a vehicle by the scruff of its collar and step the rear end out with a boot-full of gas without continuously over-rotating, and that remains true here.

Forza Motorsport doesn’t waste any time getting you on the track, putting you behind the wheel of its cover vehicle, the 2024 Corvette E-Ray, on the tarmac of Maple Valley Raceway, the series’ oldest fictitious track. The golden sunset illumination and autumnal colours around the track contrast beautifully with the gleaming blue metal of the roaring hypercar at your fingertips, with the following race at a cherry-blossom-laden track in Japan showcasing beautiful nighttime lighting as dozens of smoothed liveries careen near corners.

Each of Forza Motorsport’s precisely recreated automobiles is a sight to behold on the track, but they also stand up to inspection when you explore their beautifully recreated interiors. Forza Motorsport raises the bar for what you will now anticipate from subsequent games in this genre if you obsess over the finer elements of excellent car engineering.

Forza’s automobiles have a renewed feeling of weight. They tell you how much their tyres are rebelling against the G-forces you’re applying to the platform in far more detail than 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7. And the effects get more severe as you approach the limits of traction. In the best-case situation, you’re chopping away at the steering wheel like a ship’s captain, attempting to countersteer the back end back into control while losing time due to drifting. Worst case scenario, you spiral into an irreversible tank slapper and seesaw into a tyre wall. Motorsport has elements of Forza Horizon’s personality, but it’s considerably more rigorous, closer to the old Gran Turismo in terms of realism level.

A real, continuous day and night cycle, as well as more believable changing weather, have been included to this toolbox. While it may appear to be exclusively for endurance racing anoraks willing to risk deep vein thrombosis to compete for 24 hours straight, the true benefit is that even shorter races are more likely to be memorable. You’ll recall holding your breath as a drizzle turned into a deluge, when a critical turn became a blind corner due to the sinking sun, or any other instance when you’re expected to dash through thick fog.

At the centre of Forza Motorsport is a reworked career mode that combines aspects from previous entries in the series with a new set of mechanics aimed to create a stronger affinity between you and your chosen cars. The Builder’s Cup is a series of competitions that include theme-specific events as well as different showcase events. Each one celebrates the beauty of the automobile industry through the lens of its subject, restricting your vehicle selection to a single historical period, a collection of regional manufacturers, or a specific class of consumer car.

If the previous game, Forza Motorsport 7, has any notable handling flaws, it’s that the sense of grip is frequently lacking in bite. That’s completely gone in this follow-up, six years later. Forza Motorsport’s grip is significantly more obvious and accurate, and vehicles feel more authentically glued to the road than ever before. When you exceed the capacity of your tyres, grip will taper off instead of falling off a cliff, causing automobiles to squirm more and skate less.

Individually advancing each new automobile you buy also helps you to develop a unique relationship with each one, since the differences between a consumer hatchback and a premium sports car necessitate a different strategy. Each vehicle you buy is entirely stock the first time you drive it on the track, before swiftly transforming into a precise weapon you can use to attack each apex when you customise it to your desire. This development isn’t arduous, with the substantial amounts of experience that actions reward you with allowing you to make major changes to each new car in just a number of races, so bouncing between new cars isn’t a drag.

Microsoft positioned Forza Motorsport 7 as the ultimate automotive playground, and it’s difficult to disagree. The quantity of driving, testing, and racing here is truly massive, with enough vehicles to fill a dozen collections and the most comprehensive selection of courses in the series to yet. Forza Motorsport feels nearly experimental at debut, with mixed results. The Builder’s Cup career mode wrapper left us cold, with the much-touted upgrade process feeling completely unrelated to what occurs on track. The platform method, on the other hand, promises that the game will continuously drip feed new experiences, ones that should reach deeper dark corners of what is an extremely potent game