Forza Motorsport 4 is superb - if you like racing simulators you should go out and buy it the minute you can afford it. It has all the bells and whistles you might want to tweak your car’s parts and settings, but they’re well hidden so as a person who just loves the on-the-track part of racing you’ll simply enjoy yourself without all that technical stuff.

Top quality graphics, lots of content, tight controls (depending on your car of course) and lots of difficulty settings make Forza Motorsport 4 great value for your money and a racing game worth investing your time into.

Take a World Tour

The game’s structure is very streamlined. In the main career mode you take part in a ‘World Tour,’ which is really just a tour of the USA, Europe and Japan. This mode has a number of years, starting with Amateur which has just six races, followed by Clubman with a few more races, and then Sportsman, Semi-Pro and so on for ten years. Each event takes place at a predefined track but you get to choose between three different events, and the available events change depending on the car you have selected.

If your current car is not quite powerful enough for a race you can do an auto-upgrade which will upgrade parts in the car to reach the maximum the race allows. This means you never have to worry about not having the car you need to race and each event basically requires you to select your car and go - this focuses you completely on the racing itself. You can still go in and fiddle with individual parts but it’s not a feature that is well advertised as it took me some time to find it.

The pacing of the World Tour mode is great too – you start out with short races in slower cars and slowly build up to longer races in super fast cars. I would very much have liked a little more in the way of continuity between races on this World Tour, but for just getting down and racing it’s an excellent format.

In each race you win a number of credits as well as driver experience and affinity points. Credits are used to buy parts, or to buy cars on auction (if you have an Xbox Live Gold account). Driver experience points contribute to your driver level, and each time you level up you get to choose a new car from a set of similar cars. Affinity points track your affinity to a particular car manufacturer’s cars and as you level up your affinity level you get bonus credits as well as significant discounts on parts from that manufacturer.

Cars are graded from ‘F’ through ‘A,’ then ‘S,’ then ‘R3,’ ‘R2 ‘and ‘R1’ (where R is for Racing). As you play and level up you will be given better and better cars and after starting in the ‘F’ class you will move up through the classes culminating in the racing classes where things get really fast. What is a little odd is that even if you fail to win or come in the top few of an event you still complete the event and move on, so there doesn’t seem to be any completion criteria for events in the World tour.

Racing without assists is fun!

The game starts with most driving assists turned on. I tried driving like this and couldn’t figure out how exactly I was influencing the outcome of anything, so I highly recommend turning a bunch of them off unless you’re a beginner at realistic-styled racing games. You can toggle things like racing line, auto-braking, auto-throttle, rewind and manual transmission.

With each thing you turn off you get an extra percentage amount added to your driving bonus, which means you will collect credits faster if you play with the assists off. Once all the assists were off (except ABS braking) I enjoyed myself a lot more too – where is the fun of racing if there’s no risk of you going flying off the track?

Racing itself is sheer joy. As in real life, some cars are dogs, some are crazy wild horses (that you have to constantly nudge and concentrate on just to keep them from flying off the rails), some are pure engineering perfection and respond just like you’d expect, and some go incredibly fast in a straight line (but don’t even think about braking or turning in them!). Different drive-train driven cars behave as you’d expect (rear-wheel drive still being my favourite.)

The 360 controller works brilliantly for racing, with the standard setup using the triggers as accelerator and brake and ‘X’ and ‘B’ as gear up and gear down. The variety and quantity of cars available is astounding – 500 cars, all beautifully modeled (note that you will need to install a disc to your hard drive or USB stick to get all the cars.) The tyre system has been overhauled for Forza Motorsport 4 which just adds to the variety (tyres heat up, and wear out over a race, for example). Races can now have as many as sixteen cars on the track too, a significant upgrade from the eight of Forza Motorsport 3.

Some great new stuff

The online component is huge too. There are public auctions to buy or sell your favourites, car clubs (where a group of people can share cars they own), leaderboards for everything, a messaging system and an (Need For Speed) Autolog-type feature called Rivals allowing you to race friends or respond to challenges in an asynchronous fashion. There are even online modes where you can actually race. (Astounding! - Ed)

Almost all online features require an Xbox Live Gold account, but fortunately the Rivals feature doesn’t need this so there is some online functionality without Gold. There is also a marketplace within the game where you can buy downloadable content (DLC) for the game, and there are already a few car packs available and some extra tracks, with Turn 10 promising a lot more in the coming months. Of course, you can buy a ‘season pass’ to get it all at a discount, or just buy each one separately.

A completely new feature in Forza Motorsport 4 is Autovista. In this mode you can look around at some of the most impressive motorcars ever made. It supports Kinect which means you can walk around the car and interact with it using your hands.

Fortunately it also supports controller interaction. As you walk around the car certain points will pop up and if you choose to interact you will be treated to a short talk on a particular feature of the car. You can open the bonnet, the boot, the car doors and even virtually get inside and look at the dash (or if you want you can get in the passenger seat and see how it all looks from there).

Each of the cars in the Autovista mode also has a voice-only ‘review’ by Jeremy Clarkson, and if you’ve watched Top Gear you’ll know what to expect from those. Some cars are already available when you start the game, but to unlock the rest of the Autovista cars you will need to complete a challenge with each car. With twenty or more cars available this new mode is a significant addition to the game, especially if you really like your top-of-the-range sports cars.

The only downside to Forza Motorsport 4 is that we’ve seen a lot of the content before. There are only a handful of brand new tracks in this iteration, for example. We’ve never seen the cars or tracks look or sound as good as they do here though (the in-game graphics and the engine and tyre sounds are all superb). And the new features such as Autovista and Rivals add significantly to the mix, so this is still a definite must-buy even for Forza Motorsport 3 owners.

If you like realistic driving then Forza Motorsport 4 is the pinnacle of the form on the Xbox 360.

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