Digital Sportspage Blog

Forza2 is a very good game. It’s well above average and a very polished release. It is, for better or worse, the best realistic racing game available on the 360, maybe the only one, and it does a lot of things right. However, there are many elements of the game that keep it from being a truly great racing game. After having lived with the game for some time now, running countless laps in various modes online and offline, and ultimately becoming bored of the game as a whole (despite enjoying the moment to moment experience of hot-lapping a given car), I feel I have to air my views on what is missing.

My problems with Forza center around the racing, not the sim qualities or the pure driving which I think are excellent. 8 cars are simply not enough to give much longevity to the game either within a race or from race to race, especially offline against the AI. In fact I think it’s a real drop of the ball in this next generation. They only had 8 cars per race in the first one on Xbox, so you’d think they could have stepped it up for the 360.

Further, I would really, really like to have a more complete race experience both online and off. There should be more to a race online or offline than just a cold start and a 3 or 5 lap sprint. Online, why can’t there be an open practice mode, where people can pop in and out and tweak their setup (perhaps even right on track the way you can in the test drive mode)? Why can’t there be some kind of qualifying to set the grid order? And why can’t the devs understand the concept of a checkered flag? Why in God’s name would lapped cars have to complete their laps after the leader crosses the line?

Now, I know most people seem to be fine with the 3 or 5 lap sprints, and whether that’s because gamers tend to have short attention spans and get bored, or because gamers tend to be sore losers and want to ‘win or go home’ all the time, I don’t know. What I do know is that the excellent quality of the sim aspects of this game really come to light only in a longer race (say, 20-35 minutes). With the tire degradation, the rubbering in of the track, the damage model, the game really separates itself from the competition, but only as you stretch into the middle laps of a longer race. In short sprints, you miss a lot of the better stuff going on under the hood.

Having only 8 cars on track really detracts from an excellent long race experience, though, so it’s tough to maintain enthusiasm for longer races. Half an hour of racing really isn’t that long, when you compare it to your average sports game, especially football or 9 innings of baseball. If Forza2 could support, say, 20 cars on track, well, then even in a longer race you’d have a pretty good chance of having some actual racing over the course of the entire race distance. With only 8 cars, you’re lucky to see any other car at all after only a few laps. Sure, I understand it would be very tough to have a full 20 car public room that didn’t have griefers, but one can dream, no? And sometimes people like to and indeed can put together private rooms and not just race public ‘randoms’ all the time. Oh, and limiting race length to 10, 25, 50, and 75 lap options is just nonsensical. I simply see no reason not to allow us to set the race to say, 16 laps, or 21 laps, so that we can tailor our race time to a target duration, depending on the circuit and the class of cars. I’d love to do a half hour race at Suzuka in D-class cars with my friends, for example, but we can’t. It’s either 10 laps (about 17 minutes maybe) or 25 laps (about 45 minutes or more). This severely limits our options as to track/ class combinations, and with the relative paucity of tracks available in the game, this kind of limit isn’t helping the longevity of the title.

The lack of a cockpit view has a direct relation with the lack of a sense of speed, I believe. In Dirt, with the ‘helmet cam’ view, the body of the car moves independently of the camera, so the shimmy and shake, and the jolting around really add to the sensation of speed in the absence of wind in the hair, or the vibrations of your rear end in the seat. This is another area where if Forza2 did a better job, it would have a much greater draw to bring you back once you set it aside.

Forza2 is a very good driving sim, with a really great tire model. It’s an excellent car collection game, complete with outstanding upgrade and tuning options. But the racing itself, including the less than thrilling sense of speed (and immersiveness of a cockpit view as well) is very much lacking, just like it was in the first Forza. I think it’s a real shame they didn’t see these problems that are so clear to me and try to add more of a race event experience to what is a great driving simulator.