I remember back in the day when I still used my Xbox 360, I was a big fan of the Forza Motorsport series, having started with 2 and also picked up 3 and 4, and before then I had enjoyed all of the first four Gran Turismo games on the PSX and PS2. Forza Horizon, with its emphasis on arcade gameplay and absurd shenanigans, never interested me and, while I still would have liked to play Forza 5 and 6, I didn’t want to badly enough to buy an Xbox One. In the meantime, I got into PC sim racing games, starting with GTR 2 and going into RACE 07, rFactor, Shift/Shift 2, Assetto Corsa, BeamNG.drive, etc. and bought a Logitech G27 wheel. When I heard Forza was coming to the PC for the seventh installment, I was pretty excited, and even tried out Forza Motorsport 6 Apex (OK, but very shallow) and Forza Horizon 3 (hated it immediately, asked Microsoft for a refund and got it), before pre-ordering Forza 7 the day before launch. Now I’ve had the chance to play it for several hours, reach the Seeker championship, and collect a few cars. I’ll be comparing this not just to previous Forza and Gran Turismo games, but also to the more hardcore PC sims I’ve become used to.
Forza 7’s physics are good if you turn traction and stability control off. The tire physics feel nice and intuitive and it’s easy to probe the limits of a RWD car without provoking sudden oversteer, though I think the cars have too much traction overall. The force feedback isn’t bad, better than rFactor, but not up to the exquisite level of SimBin’s games. I didn’t like that there was a default deadzone with my wheel, this is an incredibly annoying trait for a wheel and the deadzone ought to be set to zero if a wheel is detected. Even with deadzone set to zero, there is a small patch at the center of wheel travel where the wheel offers no resistance at all, making fine corrections a bit more difficult and inaccurate than I’d like. I haven’t driven many full-race cars, preferring the slower street models, so I haven’t experienced the aero much yet. However, the ASM and TCS don’t feel anything like real electronic assists, but make your car feel like some kind of alien space vehicle with overly-dramatic powerslides that suddenly cut off as if someone else is drifting for you. Perhaps this might make controller users feel more like heroes, but I don’t appreciate it at all–it’s blatantly unnatural and prompts me to try to “correct” the artificially induced slides, costing me time and speed. One thing that’s missing is much of a sense of weight–you don’t feel the mass of heavier cars like you do in RACE 07 or especially Assetto Corsa. Also, if you’re in a night race, the “cosmetic damage” isn’t. If you shunt the front end, you lose your headlights. That should absolutely be mechanical damage if you’re going to have night driving.
The way Forza 7 and all the other Xbox Anywhere titles I’ve tried handle different input devices is maddening. Whereas nearly every game in existence can accept commands from multiple input devices simultaneously, Forza devotes its full attention to only one device at a time, and issuing keyboard commands while driving with the wheel can get very frustrating very fast as the computer will sometimes outright ignore commands–not good when you’re going 140 mph towards a sharp corner! After an outright miserable control experience with Forza Horizon 3, I outright disconnected the Razer Onza Xbox controller before starting to prevent it from fighting the other devices for dominance even when not being used. I hope they fixed the Xbox controller’s constant attempts to usurp control away from other devices, but I’m not eager to test it out.
I appreciate that they finally, finally axed the introductory race where you’re thrown into an extremely powerful car in a blind race without even being able to set your options, but the presentation of the career mode is still quite overcooked. There’s a reason Star Wars: A New Hope didn’t start with Luke Skywalker dispatching 16 Dark Jedi with lightsaber flourishes and force powers–he had to earn the right over three movies to say “I am a Jedi, like my father before me”, and when the game tells me from the word go that I’m entering the most exclusive and prestigious competition series in the world that “accepts only the best”, it’s downright risible. Compare to Gran Turismo 1 and 2, where you had to buy an old car from a used car dealer and fight your way through grassroots club series (simplified as they were on a primitive 32-bit console with 1MB memory) before you could even call yourself a professional. Here, your first car, if you pick the slowest series choice available, has 250-300 horsepower and after you beat that series, you’re immediately thrown into a head-to-head against Ken Block (!!!) in a car vastly more powerful than the one you just got out, on an unfamiliar track, without even the affordance of practice laps–“test drive” is locked out. This is, frankly, ludicrous, and it’s not helped by Ken Block’s phoned-in macho posturing voiceover about his passion to excel (you know, instead of talking about driving or the car I am being forced to race in) before the race. You even could, if you start off with lots of paid DLC and manage your credits wisely, get into a V12 supercar championship immediately after beating Ken Block, and the whole progression comes across as rather risible. There are tons of overly-dramatic cutscenes, overblown voiceovers full of vapid nothings about speed and versatility and the desire to win, and quite frankly, if the game needs to tell you over and over and over that you’re the best, baddest driver ever, you aren’t. Everything is just handed to you and thus has no real value when you get it.
Speaking of bad drivers (but not the good kind of bad), the drivatars drive a lot like real randos on Xbox Live would–which means they race dirtier than a gerrymandered election and ram into you on purpose! Woooooooo! Personally, I’d rather speculate on the personalities and driving styles of “M. Rossi” and “J. Davis” than end up the middle guy in a three-car pileup with XxSkrillexFan2003xX and DEEZ TRUCK NUTZ, whether they be real 13-year-olds or just their AI representations. “Limit AI aggression” doesn’t help much, they still drive like maniacs regardless. If these were real races, the entire grid would be black-flagged before the end of the first lap.
Car selection is good, but I wish the game would give more attention to the slower, older cars, which are not only a forgiving, easy-going way to get into driving without loading yourself up with too many assists, but can be loads of fun in their own right, with sublime cars like the FC RX-7 and E36 3-series that trade raw power for immaculately balanced chassis and light weight. I’d certainly have much rather had the Hot Hatch challenge with older hot hatches and taken the E36 323ti instead of the Audi S1. Not only is it a lighter, more modest car that’s more believable as an entry-level racing car, but it’s also RWD in a field of mostly FWD and AWD cars, which makes it more special than any of the modern hot hatch options. I know some people will hate the homologation, but I have no real problems with it if it will stem the plague of AWD Vipers and hyper-optimized class-dominating setups of previous games.
I also am not big on the lack of solo play options after many, many, many hours doing hotlaps in PC sims. Sometimes you don’t want the stress and frantic pace and sudden, unavoidable crashes from racing the drivatars and just want to kick back and practice your lines, or enjoy a nice car. Here, you basically just have a race all alone, waltz to the finish line, and get the shower of confetti and token payout after having beaten nobody, which feels almost insulting. Can we please have an unlimited time trial/practice feature? And while we’re at it, why not qualifying? Gran Turismo had it all the way back in 1997, and practice and qualifying are a great way to warm up for a race and/or learn a new track.
So overall, it’s enjoyable, but it feels way more in-your-face and bro’d up in its presentation than Forza 3/4. I’ll keep playing it and probably finish the career mode, and it’s probably the best racing game going on Xbox (lol if you play Assetto Corsa on Xbox, you’re not even getting 1/10 of the intended experience), but if Forza is also going to be a PC game, I think it should be measured against PC racing games, and for people who value driving over a power fantasy, it falls short not only of the PC competition, but its own predecessors.