Forza Motorsport 5

For the video review

The Xbox brand is no stranger to launching their consoles with solid racers, with entries from Project Gotham, Ridge Racer, and Need For Speed gracing the consoles’ opening lineups. But Microsoft has never thrown their premier racing sim, the Forza series in the arms of early adopters. Forza Motorsport 5 is ready to signal a new generation of racing games, but does it deliver?

Forza 5 is the racing sim you know and love as far as the framework is concerned. You take to tracks, earn credits to buy better cars, and use those cars to do it all over again. But the career wisely ditches the linear progression of Forza 4 in favor of a myriad of leagues based on your car’s classification or performance. It’s a smart change that could make you experiment with cars you might otherwise avoid.

But how does the roster of cars and tracks stack up? As far as cars go, there are half as many as there were in Forza 4, but I find it mostly excusable since these are the rides you were probably going to make a b-line for anyway. While it’s great that F1 cars finally make an appearance, the Porsche license once again eludes the series.

Remember these course? Infineon Raceway, Fujimi Kaido, Road America, or the Hockenheimring? Well, they’re gone. The track list has been considerably downsized. While new tracks like Bathurst, Spa, and the beautiful fictional course, Prague are some of the best in the series and demonstrate the hardware well, the reduced amount of courses comes a degree of repetition, and night races once again didn’t make the cut.

But it’s the racing that truly counts, and Forza as always simultaneously nails the driving model and means to accommodate newcomers, though the physics feel slightly more demanding. The game is also the launch lineup's best demonstration of the controller’s new impulse triggers, which quite literally make the game feel different by giving you more insight into how the car is handling. It’s a nice touch, but it will probably benefit advanced players the most. Driving in Forza has always been fantastic but the difficulty could be considered a sore spot. In seemingly every race you’d start at the bottom, but once when you inevitably hit first by the third lap, you’d hold the lead, then the game practically played itself.

These situations have been almost completely removed with the new drivatar system. Essentially, the game monitors how you attack corners, pass your opponents, how aggressive you are, and so on, and creates an AI profile, or Drivatar based on your actions. Your opponents in single player are downloaded drivatars from players across the world.

It completely changes the game. Opponents are unpredictable, make mistakes, and get this, actually hit the gas on straightaways. They feel real, and the game is more challenging for it. Now, it’s ok to take 3rd, or 4th, or even 9th place. The downside is, when you race against 15 aggressive competitors, you’ll come across some comical instances, like a crash after crash on the first turn, and there was even a race where a respectable silver medal eluded me when an opponent smashed me off the road and forced me to accept 11th place.

While these situations have gradually become the exception and not the norm since launch, even the most seasoned driving vets may be glad the rewind feature is always on, and there are no penalties for even most serious wrecks. But in the end, Drivatar is here to stay and that’s for the best. With the right implementation, this could be the new norm for driving games. It makes previous entries, and other console sims feel dull by comparison.

But this is a next gen console, and with it comes the expected visual upgrade, and racing games have always been a great showcase of new hardware. Forza 5 is without a doubt a pretty, pretty game and is one of the few 1080p 60 frames per second titles at the console’s launch. Most of the improvements come in the small details, like reflections in the window, or the blinding rays of light from the sun. Otherwise, it does looks better than it’s predecessors, even if the visual leap isn’t as profound as other launch titles, though maybe that’s just a testament to how good Forza 4 looked.

The production values are as strong as ever, the cars sound accurate, the menu’s are slick, Top Gear’s input is fantastic, and though you may initially be put off by the more dramatic music, it starts to make sense when paired with Forza 5’s more demanding racing. But as is the case with games in the launch window, the load times are pretty severe. Making matters worse, you can’t back out to the main menu at the end of a race to change leagues or buy a new car, you have to load the next race, then back out, which only triggers another, albeit brief loading screen. It’s gratuitous.

But the most disappointing change is to the now sluggish player progression. By the 5 hour mark, I had only 5 cars, 5 good ones, but at this point in Forza 4, I had a little bit of everything. Forza is still addictive, but getting that one car you want can feel like work at times, practically ploying you to use microtransactions. This is especially damning when the transactions are structured in such a way that a nice Pagani hypercar will cost you 20 bucks. It feels a bit dirty.

The Verdict

Forza Motorsport 5 is not without a few disappointments, like the absence of fan favorite tracks or the work it takes to get new rides, but on the track, Forza 5 is a massive improvement and an early success from Microsoft’s cloud push and in the end that’s significantly more exciting than the expected graphical leap. If you’re looking for a launch title to sustain you for months, it’s a great choice, even if it will take that long to get some of the game’s nicest rides.