Forza 2 Career Mode Hands-On

Traditional wisdom says April is a slow time in the gaming world. Now granted, there aren't a lot of new releases at the beginning of spring, but information on the biggest games we'll all be playing later this year is already coming quickly. Take Forza Motorsport 2, the sequel to the 2005 racing game for the original Xbox. We've been following the progress of this game for months now, but it wasn't until today that we got our first chance to sit down with the game, explore some of its nooks and crannies, and start putting it through its paces. Put simply, this game is massive, and there's far more to it than we can cover in a single preview, so you can expect our Forza coverage to continue right up through its release in May. But for now, let's all take a deep breath together and dive into the deep end of Forza 2.

When you first start up Forza, you've got a number of options: arcade, career, and multiplayer. While we've touched on Forza's demanding physics and challenging racing artificial intelligence in prior looks at the game, career mode has remained a mystery—until now. Thus, career mode was our first stop during our whirlwind tour of what Forza 2 has to offer. Starting a new career is similar to the previous game in the series, albeit accompanied by a sleek, new menu system that puts your need-to-know-information (such as your home base) right at your fingertips. Your first duties are to choose a geographic area and then buy your car. As in the previous game, your home locale affects which cars are available to you at the beginning of the game, not which race events you can tackle. As you progress, you'll earn significant discounts from car manufacturers based in your region (Asia, North America, or Europe), though you will be able to change your home base at any time (provided you're willing to pay the credits to do so).

Our career began by selecting Europe as our home base and a green Mini Cooper as our ride, beating out makes from such manufacturers as Volkswagen, Audi, and Peugeot. From there, it was on to the "proving grounds," your first stop on the Forza 2 career circuit. The proving grounds series is your chance to reacclimatize yourself to the cars in Forza 2, and you'll probably zip to victory in your first few races (depending on your difficulty level, that is…more on that in a bit). Depending on the car you rolling with, you'll only be eligible for a few series. In our Mini, we were able to enter the European Open, the FWD Shootout, and the Hot Hatch Rollout series.

The default difficulty level for Forza 2 is set at "intermediate," which is a good beginner setting that includes driver aids, such as antilock braking, stability control, and traction control. Intermediate difficulty also features a new take on the dynamic driving line from the original Forza. Here, you're shown only the braking areas on the tracks. As in the full driving line assist (which is available at the lowest difficulty setting), the line is color-coded depending on your speed through the corner; yellow means lift off the gas or apply light brakes, while red means more brakes are required.

At the default difficulty, race wins aren't a hard thing to come by, but the game's AI still shows flashes of brilliance that made the original game so fun. At one point, while in the lead of a race, we tried to brake-check a car that was getting too close to our bumper. Sure enough, and just as planned, our foe swerved and lifted off the throttle slightly as soon as he saw our brake lights, letting us open up a bigger gap than before. That said, tricks like that aren't going to work at higher difficulty levels, which we soon discovered.

With a few series wins under our belt and a few cars added to our garage (such as a sweet orange 1970 Porsche 914/6), we decided to switch things up and try out the game as it was meant to be played: as a simulation. Traction control, ABS, and stability control were gone, as were the suggested racing lines. We moved over to the manual gear shift, turned on simulation damage, and jacked up the opponent AI to "hard," the highest setting in the game. Essentially, we were running the game with zero assists, and while we expected a tougher time, we had no idea how tough things were about to get.

After the first race in the Hot Hatch Runoff series (which we ran with the assists), the second race felt like we were playing a practically new game. Driving without ABS, especially in Forza 2, is especially challenging. It takes more than a few laps to get your fingers feathering the brakes as opposed to slamming them into every corner. As if controlling our own car wasn't enough, dealing with the tough AI is a test of skill all its own. It wasn't long before we started seeing the same names at the top of the results tables during our multiple failed runs. Two names stuck out in particular: M. Rossi and P. Muller. It seemed that those two were always giving us the most trouble in races. We did a little research (by backing out a few screens to the "my career" page in the menu) and found profiles on each of the AI opponents in the game. Sure enough, M. Rossi and P. Muller were noted as some of the top competition we'd face in the game's single-player experience. Forza 2 doesn't just track all of your driving stats, such as total credits earned, time driven, and so on, it does so for your AI opponents as well, so you'd be wise to keep an eye on the Rossi's and Muller's of your particular Forza 2 career.

Unable to score an "assist"-less win in the second Hot Hatch race, we realized it was time to dip into our wallets and put some of our race winnings back into our feisty little Mini Cooper. The first item on the menu was horsepower. We just weren't getting enough "oomph" down the longer straits of the track, and our starting power was just embarrassing. With horsepower in mind, we upgraded two essential systems: intake and exhaust with the best parts available. The new racing intake system, courtesy of BMW Motorsports, provided a +22 boost to horsepower on top of the +24 power boost from the exhaust system. And we got all of that at the relatively inexpensive cost of 3,700 credits.

Upgrades in Forza 2 have been improved from the previous game, thanks to a new classification system known as the performance index. While every car in the game is still rated in classes (such as A, B, C, D), a car's performance index is a more accurate indicator of how that ride will perform within that class. Our stock Mini Cooper was rated as a Class D, with a performance index of 248 (D 248). With the new engine upgrades, we immediately bumped the car to D 386, which was a significant improvement. You're free to upgrade your car into new classes by piling on the upgrades, but we were curious to see how far we could take our little Mini without upgrading it to the next class level. After a brake upgrade and a set of new, slightly wider tires later, we had our ride performing at D 396 level, which is nearly as good as the car can get before the next class (a performance index of 400 would mean the car would switch up to the next class).

Back on the track with our new ride, the power and performance was much more to our liking, as were the results. We sped around P. Muller in the first corner and were able to take down the extremely skilled M. Rossi in the final corner to take the second win in the Hot Hatch Runoff series. With just one race left, we were feeling pretty good about our chances.

As if responding to our newfound confidence, the AI kicked it up a notch for the third and final race in the Hot Hatch series. Racing on the daunting, twisty Malayan Krait circuit (a variation on the test circuit from the original game), we got a full taste of the AI's capabilities in Forza 2. At the start, we easily overtook two of the scrubs ahead of us, only to run into the familiar bumpers of Muller and Rossi. Neither driver was willing to give an inch on any turn, nor were they afraid of a little contact here and there. It was only after running the race a few times that we noticed both drivers were slightly hesitant at one particularly quick corner in the middle of the track. If we were going to overtake them, it was going to have to be there—and only there. After a few more attempts, we were able to get past them and take the win, which was about as satisfying an accomplishment as we'd had with the game yet.

In the mood to celebrate, we took our plucky little Mini into the shop to get her a new paint job. We aren't exactly what you'd call the Picasso of car pimping, but we were impressed with the amount of custom work you could do with just a few clicks using the game's layer tools, vinyls, and decals. Paint junkies will probably love the flexibility of all the new vinyl patterns at their fingertips, as well as the ability to easily save patterns for use on other cars in their collection. We suspect the last option will be great for online car clubs that want to have a uniform look and feel each time they take to Xbox Live and represent.

After getting our customization on, it was time to take out a few rides we'd earned along the way, including a 1961 Jaguar E-type S1, a 2001 Mazda Mazdaspeed Roadster, and a 2003 Renault Sport Clio V6 RS. Test driving the cars on a few of the new tracks in the game, including Mugello, Sebring, and Suzuka, we also had a chance to try out the new photo tool that lets you take snapshots of your car at any time on the track, save them to your hard drive, and even upload them to the Forza 2 Web site for sharing with friends. The photo tool is flexible, giving you lots of choices for camera angle and focus, as well as more advanced photographic effects, such as contrast, aperture, shutter speed, and so on. The screenshots you see accompanying this feature were all taken with the photo tool.

There's so much more to explore in Forza 2; thus, we've only just cracked the surface. We'll be bringing you much more on the game in the coming weeks leading up to the game's May release. In the meantime, if you have questions about the game, let us know in the official Forza Motorsport 2 forum, and we'll do our best to answer them for you.