Forza Motorsport First Impressions

Racing games have always been hit or miss for me. I tend to gravitate toward the more casual part of the track with kart racers and more arcade-y titles. With the addition of Game Pass to day-to-day life, it's easier than ever to try out new things you would've otherwise thought twice about spending money on. This is why we wanted to bring you our initial impressions of Forza Motorsport. While we may not be the most car or tech savvy, we know when a game is able to pull off the starting grid with a successful formula. With a series that's 18 years old at this point, a much-needed reboot was welcomed by many. In trying to improve on what the series has done before, however, they managed to take a few too many steps back to cement this new era as a first-place finish.

This is personally my first entry into the motorsport series ever. I've gotten super into the accompanying Horizon series, starting with 3, but have veered far away from the simulation side of things. Immediately, I was pleased to see a very minimalistic choice of design in the menus and overall UI of the game. It was a refreshing thing to see in a time where people are blasting as many windows and notifications at you from every which way. The clean, simplistic design and a relaxing choice for background music made the experience akin to being in a high-end dealership for top-of-the-line buyers or enthusiasts. Motorsport now almost has an elitist feel to the overall mood. Menus are easy to navigate and very quick to move through, taking just a few seconds from finding the sort of race you want to actually being on the track.

My first race in Motorpsort threw at me felt like something I was not prepared for or expecting. The control and handling of the car felt immediately heavier and gave the car a real weight. You have to balance trying to control it. The second thing I noticed right away was the way my tires sounded, crosing over from track to curb to dirt. The oar of engines firing up and wheels tearing off the starting grid Everything sounds so realistic and helps define the way you feel navigating your car throughout the track. Graphically, Motorsport is a beautiful game. I know some people have been experiencing some graphical bugs, but on my end, personally using the game in "Visual Mode," sacrificing frames for visual quality, I've had no issues. The game at times makes some vehicles come across as sort of blocky or cartoonish, but it's a visual showcase no matter how you look at it. If this is the basis Turn 10 has to work with for years to come, it's going to be a graphical powerhouse pushing the console to its limits for many years to come. The dynamic time and weather effects really add to a race's tone and can drastically change the way you approach each race, lap by lap. If rain starts and persists throughout the race, your car will behave very differently and become a new hurdle you have to navigate while making a pit stop.

With every upgrade the folks at Turn 10 have done for Forza Motorsport, that doesn't mean everything is perfect. By now, you've probably heard about their new upgrade system. Each individual car has its own rank that you level up by doing almost anything: practice races, qualifying laps, compelting certain parts of a track with a good time—literally everything you do slowly earns you XP. The problem comes from what's locked behind levels. Every car has a set upgrade path where, at one level, you may be unlocking the ability to customize rims, and at the next, your transmission. On the surface, you may find it odd to lock these features behind hours of driving, but then you realize this upgrade path is specific to each car individually, not even a manufacturer-wide thing. This turns the idea of naturally upgrading your vehicle the more you use it into a grindfest where you're spending hours on every car you may even have an interest in just to get them on par with others. It's definitely a questionable move that I'd bet gets tweaked or changed entirely as time goes on. The other downside for me personally has been multiplayer; once you get into a lobby, you have up to 20 minutes to get qualifying laps in and see where you will be placed for the main event. Once you get your laps in, though, you're just stuck, kind of waiting for the timer to tick down to go back through the track for the actual session. For people with limited time for gaming, where they may only have an hour or so in the evening, being able to complete only one event at a time could be a large turnoff. Your one gaming session gets turned into a half-hour ordeal just to get through one session. I'd like to see the addition of a quick race feature with random map pools as a more direct and fast way to compete online.

Forza Motorsport excels at so many things that make racing games fantastic. However, while in the transition to its new formula and trying to make the game follow a more grindy structure, it loses its initial charm that car enthusiasts had for the series. If you're a fan of racing games as a whole, there's nothing here that should turn you away from what Turn 10 has built here. With promises of future car packs and tracks already lined up, I can only see the experiences gaining even more traction from here on out. Forza Motorsport is available now on Xbox Series Consoles, PC via Microsoft and Steam store pages, and via Game Pass for PC and Console.