What I Hate About Forza 4

Although I bought it on release day, only during the last weeks I got to try out the new Forza 4 release. As usual it is a great 3d car encyclopedia, featuring countless cars. But unfortunately it is not really what I would call a racing simulation. There is not feeling of immersion whatsoever. Most of the races consist of you starting pretty low on the grid (there is no qualification process) and trying to overtake everybody as fast as possible, since the race is over after three laps or so. Meaning, to win the race, you pretty much have to dive-bomb all the AI-opponents, which is no problem, since you can always rewind the race if your ambitioned overtaking-maneuver shouldn’t work out, or continue anyway as you will not get any penalties and the damage to the car does not affect your result too much. You do not want to fiddle around with the multitude of available settings of your car, because a three laps race is not really worth the effort and your car will probably outmatch the others even without doing so. After the race you will be rewarded with a shiny new car anyway and you will probably not be able to use your old car on the next “World Tour” race, because there will be no race matching the “class” of it.

After some time grinding through this three to six lap races, I got to a 15 laps race featuring decent “R1” racing cars on an oval course. That is the point at which the game simply got silly. The AI now makes mistakes, which is a nice addition, but have absolutely devastating consequences on an oval track with 300+ kph. Leading to me winning the race lapping even the second guy multiple times thanks to the fact, that they kept crashing into the walls, crippling (but not totally disabling) their cars. The main task of the race is just to try not to ram into the other cars crawling around on the track which just appear in the turns being 200kph slower than you are without any warning (yellow flags, anyone?).

Ranking showing the slow AI
Ranking showing the slow AI

Some of the cars didn’t even make it to the finish line lying on their roofs at full throttle