Rev up your engine, as Forza offers high-speed entertainment not found anywhere else on the Xbox
Yet now, Microsoft has offered their own driving simulation game, Forza: Motorsport, for Xbox gamers. It is all it needs to be, a powerhouse featuring a competent library of automobiles, immersive graphics, online play, innovative driving physics, and impressive artificial-intelligence. From the get-go, Forza's presentation is good. Doubtless to say, the menus aren't all that pretty, so navigation isn't very good. However, when you find what you're looking for after those somewhat tasteless menus (3 pages just to get to my garage? Puh-lease!), you forget all about them, so they become an anachronism (at least for a while). Much of what you saw in Gran Turismo is here: A garage for your cars, a tune shop, and a library of the game's events in several modes. New to the driving simulator genre is the paint shop, which offers pretty much endless possibilities in what you can do with the aesthetics of your vehicle. The arcade mode in Forza is not too interesting, as it can be looked on as a practice mode at most. However, the Simulation mode is robust. In either mode, the driving AI offers strong competition, especially when you enable the car physics, which includes fuel depletion, tire wear/tear, and vehicle damage. The courses, though some of which are fictional courses, make for just the right roster. You should have some good fun in some of them, even with a number of them being quite challenging in the layout and obstacles alone. Just you wait 'till you are zooming at two-hundred miles an hour down a straight strip in the New York track, and hit that wall at the 90 degree turn. Since the physics really help push the fun factor with not only the challenge but the pure happening of it, you can't go much more wrong.
Online play is another story. While I haven't played it on Xbox live myself, I know what it offers. Since you can download content, from my knowledge, it shouldn't lose much extra possibility with your game experience. Not only the extra possibilities being offered, but you can play against unforgiving, unpredictable human opponents too. In that mode, you can really show your skills.
However, what sort of brings Forza: Motorsport down is the shallow content. Though the auto-manufacturer list is pretty darn' good for a driving sim, especially compared to Gran Turismo, all you really get are one category cars that range from economy to super cars. There is no background information on any car, and in my opinion, the specs of some of the vehicles seem a bit too low for my tastes. The tuning shop is great, but some more information on the parts could have been useful, as well as more of them. There could have been categories of cars in each manufacturers page, and way more cars in general, because such a feature would have made Forza so much better in the end. As well, the amount of highly-customizable, durable, and flexible Asian cars could have been much better, as that was the more varied and enjoyable part of Gran Turismo. And lastly, if there were at all, any Rally mode, plus vehicles for it, Forza would have been nearly twice better, if that's even possible.
So, in the end, the package is excellent. Great graphics, awesome physics, challenging AI, and a robust round of content makes for a keeper. If you haven't played this yet, but enjoy(ed) Gran Turismo's power, then you should not be different to this one.