Games

Forza Motorsport 4

Editors note: You’ll have to forgive me as I’m going to try and avoid any Jeremy Clarkson-isms but with the giant swathe of exotics cars and inclusion of Top Gear content, some can potentially sneak in.

With sounds that could deafen a stadium and visuals that require one to mop the drool off the floor - Turn 10 has their latest iteration of Forza comes roaring out of the gates. Everything is bigger, better, and prettier than their previous incarnations. The developers have focused on giving players an incredible amount of options with the game.

Career mode is more flexible this time around. It continues the tradition of gifting various cars that allow you to progress in your career, each track provides 3 options to choose from. Allowing a greater range of car choices and rewards that the player chooses. Starting from a small front wheel hatchback eventually climbing up to the blistering fast R3 class racing cars. As with Gran Turismo 5, the career mode is immensely lengthy. If you want to get all the achievements, you won’t be able to power through the game. You’ll have to earn it.

Multi-player also saw a significant boost. Rival mode allows you to compete with players and friends even when they’re offline. It downloads their best lap ghost and allows you to try and beat them for credit you can use to buy cars for both multi-player and career mode. When it was just the demo, there was a constant stream of attempting to beat each other’s time. Find ways to shave of milliseconds in each turn or shifting to make use of every straightaway. With the full set of tracks and one’s full game garage to choose from - it is something that could drive friendly competition for years. Creating a shared garage (an equivalent to a clan in various shooters) now allows you to share cars with those on your team. Allow each player to focus on cars they’d like and build a vast collection of eclectic tastes.

One of the biggest additions to the series is Autovista. It’s a new feature that puts its entire emphasis on just enjoying the aesthetics and engineering behind the cars. Here, the player gets to look over select cars and explode out various parts. Engines, dashboards, and various locations of cars provide vocal descriptions of stats and absolutely gorgeous visuals in what can be described as the most well thought out interactive way to bring car porn to one’s living room. If that wasn’t enough, each car has a short description provided by Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson. Funny, insightful, and delightfully British - whether you’re a fan of the show or not, his commentary comes close to warranting a purchase of the game alone.

Forza 4 brings a new feature for gaming on the 360 - “Better with the Kinect”. While it isn’t required, the Kinect provides an alternative method of interacting with the game. The Kinect driving is a bit childish as you only concern yourself with steering while the game accelerates and breaks. Autovista inclusions and menu redesigns is appreciated but a bit too unreliable as the sensitivity bounces from molasses to the motion equivalent of violently rolling one’s mouse wheel. Trying to use it as a party game quickly grew to be tiresome and everyone resorted to using controllers shortly after. Using the Kinect to change of your driver’s point of view works well enough but is something that requires you to sit completely upright the entire time. Which, quite honestly, is not something I do when I’m playing a game to relax.

There are some bigger problems with Forza 4...

An interesting addition to the game’s marketplace is the introduction of “car tokens”. Instead of saving up for a particular car, you can use Microsoft points to purchase tokens. Each car varies in price but never goes above 3 car tokens. For more casual players or those limited on time, this allows them to play with dream cars without having played the considerable amount of time to purchase multi-million dollar cars. While getting ahead at an additional real world cost is common in many mobile and Facebook games, it’s still a rare sight in full console games. Something that could very well alienate their more hardcore audience. Ultimately something that will require more time to see where the chips fall.

For those who want to race their Porsche 911s, you may want to sit down. Because the Porsches? There aren’t any. Zip. Nil. None. The licensing issue that occurred in Gran Turismo 5 seems to remain prevalent in the latest installment of Forza. While there are certainly a number of other cars but it missing manufacturer and their iconic rear wheel rear engine cars just makes it feel just a bit incomplete.

Any issue or problems I have with the game just melt away as I progress through the menus. Forza 4 is the ultimate love letter to motorheads around the world. Each pixel, each sound, each calculation is filled with passion that is felt in every aspect of the game. Do yourself a favour and try this game. Buy or go to a friend’s play to try it. The demo just simply doesn’t do the game justice. This game, is far and away the one of the best racing games you can get on the Xbox 360.

9/10

Xbox 360 Exclusive