Forza Motorsport 7 Review – Beautiful, but cynical

But aside from how attractive the game is and how weather changes things up, a lot of what you’ll be doing from moment to moment is the same thing you’ve been doing for the last decade.

The game features six cups, each with a variety of possible race types. You might pick “Hot Hatch Genesis,” or “Birth of the Supercar,” and then pick from the huge selection of cars from that. It’s the same as it ever was.

And you’ll do that over and over, with track length and number of laps steadily increasing alongside the expected power of the cars you’ll be driving.

Alongside these, though, are “Showcase” races. In a personal favorite, I was asked to race one-on-one versus a professional driver’s Drivatar, while another was a “passing” race that required me to pass a certain number of cars before I finished a single lap around the track.

These add some nice variety and fun to the game, but, that’s just it.

These showcases feel, more than ever, like they’re admitting the that the rest of the game is kind of boring.

Don’t get me wrong. Driving the cars themselves is as fun as it’s ever been. Picking out your favorite car, visiting a challenging track, and putting in a new best lap is thrilling. Drafting behind an opponent and then passing them in a corner feels like little else. It’s deeply satisfying.

But the act of racing a huge group of 23 other cars for 2, 3, or 4 laps around a course? That gets old.

Exacerbating that is the continued “first corner” problem that racing games still haven’t solved. And really, I’d chalk it up to the number of other cars on the track at this point. For the first half of any given race, it’s not a race at all. It’s a struggle to simply stay on the track. The cars seem to have gotten even more aggressive in the two years since Forza Motorsport 6, and they’re willing to not just tap you, but to slam into you at full speed if you make the mistake of braking before a sharp corner. I feel a little shame when I use the game’s rewind feature because of one of my mistakes, but when it’s because a car just rammed me at 90MPH going into a corner, I’m annoyed.

On a big NASCAR track, 24 cars isn’t so bad. But in when you drop into Nurburgring, it feels downright claustrophobic. It feels like they asked, “can we fit 24 high-poly cars on-screen at once,” but never stopped to ask “should we.”

Racing against so many cars is just not fun.

One of my favorite moments while playing the game running up to review happened when I was exploring the weather options in the game’s Free Play mode. I dropped into the Maple Valley Speedway track and turned on rain. I dropped the number of other cars on the track to just one, and then I cranked the difficulty up a couple notches higher than I usually go. I set the race to just one lap, and we were off.

And it was a blast. The whole race was intense, and it wasn’t because I was gritting my teeth trying to not swear at the other cars ramming into me. It was because I was having to concentrate on every element of my driving. Every corner had to be perfect, and the rain I’d turned on certainly didn’t help.

In a normal race against 24 cars, turning the difficulty up so high is an exercise in frustration. I would spend so much time fighting to stay on the track and not get pushed off by an overzealous Drivatar that by the time I got anywhere near the front, the top three cars had pulled out so far ahead that it was beyond unmanageable. It was physically impossible to catch up.

In this race, though, it felt like a competition. I was pitting myself against another driver, and putting our skills to the test. At the very end of the lap, in the last corner, I finally passed my opponent, and got my nose out in front of theirs just in time to take first place.

Wow. There’s a genuine rush to be had in Forza Motorsport. So why does the game ask me to play bumper cars for the first 5-10 minutes of every race?

I should mention, too, that the tuning the Forza Motorsport games were previously known for seems to be toned down in this game. It’s still there, sure, but every race you run in is “homologated,” meaning that the cars have been evened out in hopes of making driver skill the winning factor, not whoever has the best muffler and air filter. I can seem some sense in this – I imagine most people were just clicking the “auto-upgrade” button in Forza Motorsport 6, and Turn 10 was likely collecting usage data on that. As a response to that, this seems to make sense. But it doesn’t seem to be an option in Forza Motorsport 7. Homologation is just how things are done. I should be able to turn it off. Tuning is an important part of racing, but Forza Motorsport 7 doesn’t seem to know that.

And I should mention that load times are absurd this time around. I’m not quite sure why, but tracks in this game take forever to load. Nurburgring leaves you sitting for over a minute on the Xbox One S’s internal hard drive before you can get rolling. If you have lots of mod selection to do, this isn’t so bad, but that’s just not always the case.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/forza-motorsport-7-review/