1 Hour Review: Forza Motorsport

I'm just an hour and twenty minutes, about 5 sessions, into Forza and I have to admit: it's a total Gran Turismo killer. This is coming from someone who not only played every Gran Turismo game, but just got Forza a few weeks ago. I know I'm not getting a PS3 anytime soon, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to test the Xbox sim racing waters, also known previously as 'that other racing platform'.

Gran Turismo was our Bible; the Holy Grail of racing games. But not anymore.

Even with all that Gran Turismo under my belt, Forza has won me over in just over an hour. The reason it probably took that long was because I finally started racing tracks that exist on both games (Tsukuba, Laguna Seca) and I actually couldn't tell the games apart. Now I wasn't sitting side by side, shot for shot with each course, but I'm not that particular about anything.

The game already had it's strong points over GT. What I would call a marriage of Need for Speed: Underground and Gran Turismo. Two of the very best genre racing games out there. Forza has the pedigree of GT with the street slang of NFS:U. Having the ability to do layers of tweakable graphics (better than the static graphics of NFS:U) and painting cars was, honestly, one of the more annoying things left out of each Gran Turismo game. Affective body damage is also nice, but nothing I really complained about in GT.

What I don't like so far is the progression system. You have to level up your profile to get harder A.I. and bigger cars. So far it seems natural, but it's impossible to take one car to the top. You have to win cars in sets of races to complete, say the novice races, before moving to the professional races. The licenses in GT could be fun, but they were also helpful in learning how to sim race. That whole system is just gone here.

The camera system also sucks. You do get more views for racing (just one), but the beautiful replays only get one "t.v." camera. The others are normal racing views from the different angles of around or inside the car. So many times I've pulled a sweet drift around a corner and I can't watch it because that happens to be a turn where the t.v.-style camera jumps to the cockpit view of the race.

But all in all, it's a better game than Gran Turismo. If you want to test the waters, pick up a used copy for under $20 and realize that you don't need (and possibly not even want) a PS3 anytime soon to fill your racing jones.