Forza Motorsport PC review | Top Gear or 5th Gear? 

Forza, the popular racing simulation game, has made a comeback after a long hiatus. The game was released on October 10, 2023, for all players. However, players who purchased the Premium Edition or the Premium Add-Ons Bundle DLC via Xbox Game Pass were granted early access on October 5, 2023.

Forza was one of my main reasons for getting an Xbox back in the day, and as such, this has been a release I’ve been hugely excited about since the start of the year. Forza Motorsport was first announced at the Xbox Showcase in 2020. Although the release date was previously set for ‘Spring 2023’ it later slipped to now. With more than 500 cars and upgrades, a driver’s choice is enormous, and you can take to the road on a number of both old and new tracks, although current numbers pale in comparison to earlier games.

Forza Motorsport is the thirteenth game in the Forza series and can be played on Windows and Xbox Series X/S. No last-generation version is available due to the improvement in the game engine and systems. The game is considered a reboot of the Forza Motorsport sub-series and is the eighth title in the series. Unlike previous entries, it doesn’t use sequential numbering in its title and will likely be updated and have content for the next few years.

I’ve been driving myself crazy playing the game since release in more than one way, and I’m happy to say that the driving is as good as Forza has ever felt……but unfortunately, the game has several issues, on PC at least.

Computer specs are as follows:
5800x CPU
7900XT GPU
32GB RAM at 3200Mhz
Crucial® P5 Plus SSD at 6600MB/s

The game started with a shader optimisation screen (a good thing), and then when I hit the menus, I noticed a highly erratic framerate (a bad thing). From there, I hit the options menus to select my settings and get going on the track. As with most games on my relatively high-end GPU, I fired everything to ultra, being lucky that this normally works well and then ran the in-game benchmark. The game looked good but not as great as I had hoped, and I was surprised to see an average of under 60FPS. I carried on and picked a car to go test on track.

This was where I realised something was massively wrong with the game.

The frame rate was showing as over 60, but the game did not feel smooth at all. I changed settings up and down with minimal effect on how the game ran. This led me down the rabbit hole to YouTube to work out what was happening, and I was shocked to find some of the issues that were currently present. The settings menu, by default, turns everything to “auto” rather than defined settings like low or high; this gives you no idea how the game is trying to run and, in turn, doesn’t give you a good idea of what can be turned up or down to try and improve how the game runs.

Even worse than this is that settings have very little information about what they are; see Dynamic render quality. Even though you can choose a display output separately, changing this option affects what type of output the game tries to provide. Low equals 720, medium 1080, high 1440 and ultra 4K. As a point of warning, if your settings don’t match your actual display, expect a painful performance.

Over on my AMD GPU, I can run the game at 4K but get a hard game crash at the rewards screen of every race. I’m not sure what’s at fault here: the game or AMD drivers, but it’s fucking annoying as hell.

After many hours, a game update and much internet research, I’ve got the game running well with no crashes, but it shouldn’t be this way. If you are playing on PC, note that if you change any settings in the options menu, you’ll need to do a complete game restart. This has even been made worse by the first update the game got, and now the game will run the shader optimisation screen every time…..it’s only a few minutes, but if you need to change anything, the time somewhat adds up. I’ve even read that some players have been doing a complete system restart to get peak performance from the game.

I’ll offer some Couchy tips to get the game running well. Ensure to use the Vsync options regarding FPS; anything else seems slightly broken as the game is just now. If you change graphic options, restart the game. Finally, ensure that your in-game options match your screens abilities; if your screen is 1440p, all options must match that.

Further research online has found that the game shows graphical issues when running at less than 4k, which might explain my disappointment at some of the visuals on offer. The game seems built for very high resolutions, and low-quality textures and reflections might affect you if you need to play lower than that. However, the game can look amazing when everything is set up well and works as it should.

The game was bugging me so much that I jumped back to Forza Horizon 5 for comparison; I was greeted by an open-world game with destructible environments that looked better in many ways than what was on offer with Motorsport, with its track-based gameplay and ran wayyyyyyyy better. I can see more has gone on under the hood of the game regarding systems, and of course, this is from a different developer, but the issues I faced distracted me and isn’t a good look for the Forza name.

Now on to the good stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The driving and beautiful weather effects.

If you’re unfamiliar with Motorsport, don’t expect anything like Forza’s more recent Horizon versions. This is track-based racing, with no big open worlds, and the joy of the game is nailing corners to perfection and shaving hundreds of a second off your lap time. Motorsport has launched the Builders Cup, which consists of five tours, each with unique restrictions and entry requirements. Each tour comprises four main events and an additional Showcase Event where you can test your new prize car.

You’re now encouraged to progress through the career in a sequential manner, as the later tours need the completion of previous ones to be unlocked. Upon finishing all the events in a Tour, players receive a particular prize car, which can’t be obtained anywhere else.

You’ll complete practice laps for each race, which can be skipped (although some players have missed this option). If you want to level up your car quickly, I recommend doing these, as the more laps you complete will make this slightly quicker. To level up your car, you need to complete the sectors of the track quickly and hold the ideal line for each corner; every so often, you’ll get a score for the sector. The faster you go, and the better you hold the line, your score out of ten improves.

The game physics are fantastic; each car feels completely different, and the changes to how a car handles after each upgrade can vary massively. Jumping from a low-level everyday car to a higher-level GT3 racer takes a while to get used to, but once it’s mastered, they all have their own joy to experience. As you ramp up the difficulty, tires, fuel and damage all come into play, and you’ll need a solid race strategy to try and finish on the podium.

Early reviews were highly critical of the car levels and upgrades that come with them. Since the first update, this has been improved massively, unless you like having multiple versions of the same car, which would mean levelling up the same car on each purchase. Personally, I’ll change each car and tune as I need, but I understand this won’t be for everyone.

In terms of upgrades, as your car level increases, you’ll have access to more and more to make your car drive faster and handle better. For every upgrade possible, you are looking at about 3 hours of solid driving time. Nevertheless, you’ll need to reach level 50 to add them to your car, which will be a fair bit longer. As your car score level increases, so do your available car points needed for upgrades. Again, this was only changed as of the most recent update, and it took a lot longer before this.

The Builders Cup comes with a bunch of set races; pick a car style, hot hatch, muscle car or supercar, and a set performance index (PI) from D, C, B, A to S1, S2, and X class. If you stay within the recommended PI, you’ll also have a few Cups where your car selection is open. With the races you have to choose from and the timed featured Cups, which change weekly, there is plenty to choose from and keep your racing feeling fresh.

As I said earlier, this is not Horizon, and there is some fantastic scaling on offer, depending on how you want to race and change your difficulty. I’m not that good to turn off all the assists, but the game could be scaled for almost anyone, with steering, braking, and acceleration assist all available. So much so that my five-year-old son has very much enjoyed trying to blast around tracks that I’ve later struggled on.

If you understand that this is a different beast than the arcade style of Horizon, there is much fun for anyone who likes track-based racers. The section of tracks is good, but I would like more to be added regularly to keep the game feeling fresh; this, alongside more curated Builders Cups, could see the game get played for many years to come.

The graphics on offer range from totally fine to mind-blowing. Motorsport is at its best when it showcases its weather and lighting effects. The more the lighting changes, the better the game tends to look. Races at night and in heavy rain deserve particular praise as all the systems fall in line to provide an unbelievable-looking game. However, some races can look a little bland with uninspired lighting and don’t look that much better than previous entries in the series.

Regarding visuals, I’d like to address the elephant in the room: this game doesn’t look as good as it did when it was first showcased. It can still look great, but I do not doubt that the game has had some downgrades from the trailer shown off earlier in 2023, which was “in engine”. The Ray Tracing features are nowhere near what we were led to expect, and elements of trackside details have been turned down. This, alongside the issues with the PC port, has left a sour taste in my mouth, as much as I love the driving experience.

Another point of note is the audio on offer. This is a feature where the game excels, especially when using headphones and Dolby Atmos. Being lucky enough to have access to this feature on either a TV speaker or Headphones, the game always sounds incredible. However, I recommend using headphones where possible. The directional audio is amazing to experience and takes the presentation to the next level. Motorsport is a fantastic way to ignore your loved ones and drive your hours away into the early morning hours.

Overall, when the game works, I love it. However, it is massively disappointing that the game is not as polished as I hoped. Turn 10 are fantastic developers, and I was hoping for more from this rebirth of Forza. This is a game I’ll sink countless hours into going forward, but I genuinely hope it gets the updates and fixes it deserves. Unfortunately, these issues I’ve had drag the score down on this game, but that doesn’t detract from how much I love the gameplay loop.

-Couchy