Extremely overrated. Here's why...
First off I’d like to say that Gran Turismo has this game beaten by quite a long shot. I’m a huge racing fan and love my Xbox, but I’m disappointed by this game. The whole package just seems to be missing the most important part: fun. From unbelievably impossible AI to blah track selection and limited customization, this game was nothing like the review seemed to say. Let’s start with graphics and sound.
While the graphics in this game are certainly not bad, there’s absolutely nothing special about them. You would think that the Xbox, being way more powerful graphically than the PS2 would make driving games look better, right? Too bad! Gran Turismo’s shiny and beautiful game blows this out of the water. Things that you would expect to be all shiny and pretty end up looking dull and flat in Forza, and some of the tracks are boring as hell to look at, let alone race. (Cough, Silverstone, cough.) The weather effects and sky are nothing to write home about. The sound is slightly better, with some nice engine sounds, but they tend to get repetitive, and you’ll swear your Saleen S7 sounds just like that Toyota you just had.
At the beginning of the game the AI seems to be just fine, with the exception that they will run you off the road to win, which can be quite annoying. As you progress through the game it provides a nice challenge until it reaches the point where you can’t win anymore. Once I reached the last and hardest series of races it is nearly impossible to do well. The AI drives so perfectly it’s just retarded. If you make one mistake, you’re done, which will really piss you off after you’ve been driving for 10 minutes just to lose on the last lap. I tried turning the difficulty down using the sliders, but this either didn’t make it much easier to win or I won so little money there was no point. As with most racing games, you try to buy a car that is better than your opponents so that you have an advantage over them, but when you have to race the same car as the computer or even in the GT races (the ones with the most powerful cars) you auto lose because their car is either the same or almost as good as yours but they drive better than you can. Trust me. I believe myself to be a good racing sim driver, but I quit because of this.
Also this game happens to have an extremely gay glitch that can ruin an entire championship just because of one race: no matter if you’re in first place or not, if you don’t get exactly first place on the last race of any championship in the game, too bad for you! You lose, and all those races were for nothing. Congrats!
Moving on to driving feel and track selection. In Gran Turismo, it’s a joy to drive any car in the game, and you can have fun with almost any car because the game handles really well. In Forza, the whole game comes across as feeling very stiff. What I mean is, it never seems like your car wants to turn unless you go like 5 mph around a turn, otherwise your tires squeal and you go in the dirt, which by the way will slow your car going 200 mph down to about 10 mph in about three feet. Realistic, isn’t it? I know it’s a sim, but Gran Turismo’s handling feels so much better than this. It feels like your car is only good for going in a straight line in Forza. I found the track selection in Forza to be abysmal. There are a few courses that were fine such as Laguna Seca, and all the rest of them were a chore to drive. Silverstone circuit, I believe it’s called, is one of the worst courses I’ve ever seen. This is due in large part to never being able to see where the turns are! Until you run the course many times you will find yourself flying off the track and losing all the time because you can never tell when a turn is coming, and even after you think you know it you still lose every once in a while. I don’t know how they managed to hide the turns that well because I’ve never seen anything like it in any other racing game: the turns seem to just sometimes just appear, giving you no time to react, especially on Silverstone. Therefore, many times it’s annoying and not fun to drive, which is missing the whole point of the racing genre. Many of the tracks are drab and just plain boring to drive, such as the New York courses. Another thing that happens the more you progress in this game: the races keep getting longer and longer. Races that you only had to do 2 laps on before now you have to do 6 laps, and the whole race ends up being much longer than it needs to be. You've practically got it won or lost by the second lap, so what's the point of wasting our time and making us do 4 more laps? All this seems to do is increase your chances of making one mistake and losing a ten minute race at the very end. If the courses were more enjoyable, maybe I wouldn't be complaining, but that's not the case here. Most of the real world tracks are good, but the fictional ones tend to be a pain to drive. Note to game developers: longer doesn't equal more fun. There's a lot of content here for your money, but you probably won't want to play it.
The damage in the game is realistic, but really the only person it ever ends up hurting is you. The computer never seems to be that affected by damage, yet after you hit a wall going fast, your car’s steering is so bad you have to quit the race. Damage takes away from your winnings too, so if the computer bumps you or you rev your engine to high at the starting line, you have to pay for it. And this whole “drivatar” thing is pretty pointless too. You can try and train it, but unless you drive perfectly it tends to suck. And if you let it race and somehow manages to win, it takes almost all of your money, leaving you with almost no credits. It keeps you from cheating, but its stupid because the only races it can win are the easy ones that you could win anyway and get all your money, and it doesn’t help when you get to the tougher races.
Customization is a cool idea, but ends up being very limited and not very creative here. It seemed like every car I wanted to customize, you just can’t customize that specific car, and so my dreams of making an awesome looking Mustang were thrown out the window, because you can’t change the body panels on the car! It seemed like it was that way with many other cars too, and about the only thing you could “customize” was the paint. Woohoo!
So, in conclusion, I have to say this game is not what I thought it would be, but maybe you will have a different experience and magically find this game fun. This is what I found after playing this game almost all the way through, and there are way better racing games out there, namely Gran Turismo. Here’s to hoping the sequel is significantly better! Hope I could be of some help to you.