Forza Motorsport 2 the second chapter of what Turn 10 and Microsoft Game Studios back in May 3rd 2005. Now about 2 years and one console later we have the next installment of the game. The game is a hardcore driving simulator in the vein of Gran Turismo. Turn 10 has certainly tried to make this title accessible to everyone; using assists and the ability to before each race to change settings like tire wear, A.I., and damage. The developer touts the fact that you can totally destroy your car and pieces of the vehicle will remain on the track during the race. The driving simulator part of the game is probably where the game goes a little wrong from a non-hardcore standpoint. Let's begin...

The player has a lot of options when they begin Forza Motorsport 2. The Arcade portion of the game consists of three parts. First, the Exhibition mode which allows the player to play with any class of car against other cars on every track available in the game 12 variations in all but only 9 actual tracks. Second, there is the Time Trial mode which you must use a specific car on a specific track and meet or beat a specific time. Finally, there is the Free Run mode which allows the player to play against a previously recorded ghost or just drive whatever they want on whatever track they want. All of both exhibition and Free Run also allow the player to use the cars in his/her career garage as well as the unlocked cars in the rest of the game. Exhibition and Career races can be done online as well as offline but if the player wants to complete these races quickly and successfully then offline is probably a better choice.

The next area of the game is that of the Career mode. The driver begins by picking a base difficulty and region. The player has a choice of North America, Asia, or Europe. This will dictate for the first half of the game probably until the player reaches around driver level 5-10 the types of cars the driver will have access to from the dealerships in the game. The basic setop of career mode is to allow the player to play through various races to gain driver points to get discounts and free cars from their home regions manufacturers. Also the cars themselves level up 5 which will allow the driver to get discounts at the manufacturer of the car. As the driver level increases so do the accessible manufacturers. Which is good because with more than 300 cars in the game discounts are good.

The Artificial Intelligence in the game is a bigger issue than one might think. Even with the difficulty set on Easy or Medium the A.I. Will fight tooth and nail to get by the player at any opportunity. As the player's driver level increases this will get worse and one will find that by the time the plater reaches the level cap of 50 the A.I. Borders on acting a whole level of difficulty more aggressive than they started at. This really makes it harder for the average player to begin shutting off assists like ABS, Stability, and Traction control. Of course, the damage simulation in the game is great and most players seems to be successful financially by keeping this setting to simulation considering even occasionally hitting another car the player won't usually incur that much damage to make it worth the 10% cut off the winnings.

Getting back to the A.I. One of the big problems is that on Medium difficulty which is supposed to be the default once you reach driver level 10-13 the A.I. May hit you for no reason and run you off the road to get ahead. This is difficult to understand considering in general the A.I. Will hang back at least a little until the player makes a visible mistake. These random problems could be bugs but there is also the problem of the instances in the latter part of the game where the 2nd place A.I. Driver will hang back just until you reach the last two or three feet away from the finish line and then draft sling themselves around you and across the line right before you. There are also the instances of lap cars racing the leader. That is really the worst part. All the rest could be explained as understandable bugs or quirks of one A.I. Profile or another but at Easy or Medium difficulty to have lap cars racing the leader is ridiculous and obviously a sign that the developers were a little too good at this game when they shipped to retail.

The biggest differentiator of Forza Motorsport 2 other than the very detailed simulation model is the fact that you can buy upgrades for 90% of all the cars in game by buying them and installing them. This is wonderful and very fun but even after upgrades on some cars are done to the highest level the car still might not be able to compete evenly with the higher classes cars that were built for racing. The classes range from D class to R1 Class. This is a very wide range and the D class cars couldn't probably out run your street car but the R1 Class cars tend to be more F1 type vehicles than street cars. All of that said, the developers were obviously interested in getting the driver to pick one type of car and stick with it for the majority of the game, upgrading as they go. This does mostly work, at least until you reach about the halfway completion mark.

The online multiplayer is just like the regular game except it's online. The other part of the game is the Microsoft sponsored tourneya are great but they too have the problem of being too little too late in most instances because only 192 people are allowed to compete in each tourney and considering as of this writing all most 400,00 people are playing the game that seems like a small number. Even with around 10 tourneys going on weekly most competitors find that competing in them takes a little too much effort. Most get notices that say their tourney starts at noon on Tuesday for example and they say well, "Great I'll leave work for the tourney right?" Wrong. Just because Turn 10 has a job playing this game, it doesn't mean that everyone else does.

There is also the Auction House where the player can sell his/her acquired cars. The Auction House needs some updates. The search tools are very limited and with no proxy bidding, many players feel that getting highly sought after cars nearly impossible. Also the system of looking up locked vehicle designs doesn't work and players all ways seem to get a few unlocked designs. This has resulted in some disillusionment over the great quantity of similar designs being spammed onto the Auction House. Turn 10 has promised to monitor the AH and stop people from using a money cheat that has allowed a bunch of people to makes millions for nothing. Also a duping cheat that allows people to copy whole cars instantly which also is leading to problems. Turn 10 has promised to fix these problems but as yet no patch has been forthcoming.

This also plays into the Livery system which allows the player to create custom designs that he/she can lock to a car so that the buyer can either only keep the Livery or paint over it permanently. This is great, but considering way back when; Microsoft seemed to gently imply via a Live Anywhere demonstration at E3 that Forza Motorsport 2 would allow players to import pictures from their computers or at the very least create the designs on their computers. This turned out to only be a demonstration. There are certainly lots of ways of making wonderful designs; the depth and power of the tool is extensive but not exactly comprehensive. Which has contributed to people buying unlocked designs on the Auction House and attempting to change them slightly and sell them again to make money. Currently there are about four or five designs that have been spammed to death on the AH which makes searching for a descent car of a good design very difficult. The complexity of the tools and the difficulty to create art certainly adds to it's value but it certainly doesn't draw new people in to play the game or create art in it.

All of this coupled with the in depth tuning system allowing the player to change and adjust all most all of the areas of the car that are tunable. The player can, through upgrades and tuning change a street car into a drift car. This kind of thing certainly creates a lot of depth on an all ready deep game.


The biggest problem with Forza Motorsport are some of the things that the game is strangely lacking in comparison to the last big racer from Microsoft, that being PGR 3. No night racing, not enough tracks, no garages, no weather effects, high resolutions backgrounds with crowds, and all of this may have been the victim of a 360 frame per second frame rate for physics. This may be understandable for some people who really love simulation and have every installment of GT for the PC and have built racing pod setups to put their $100 racing wheels on, but for everyone else it looks like they shorted them on some basic stuff. The game has the best looking cars in racing. Even in PGR 4, which isn't even out yet, doesn't have better looking cars.

In the end, the game is the best racing game on the XBOX 360 or any other console. Certainly the next few games coming this year have a very tall order to live up to, to even compete with Forza Motorsport 2, unfortunately the developer missed the opportunity to totally dominate the genre by adding too much simulation and too little graphics.

I give the game a 9/10...