What makes Forza 2 as good as it is are the car physics. Every single car in the game handles differently. The front wheel drive Acura Integra has some ridiculous understeer. The Nissan S15 slides around like the track is covered in oil. The R34 Skyline drives like it is on rails. The GT40 thinks brakes are for losers. With over 300 cars in the game, making them actually feel different is an incredible accomplishment. Extending this further is the modification system. You can drop in a new engine block, whack on a new exhaust or bolt on an intercooler for some extra power. But there are also all kinds of adjustable components, like new suspension, anti-roll bars, and fugly carbon fibre wings. When your car starts getting into the ‘we’re going to die’ category of speed, you will NEED to add these parts and adjust them accordingly if you want to actually turn that corner. This staggeringly in-depth customisation is absolutely heaven for all those would-be car tuners out there, albeit somewhat daunting for everyone else.
Seconds later, this photographer died.
There’s a great damage model, too. As well as superficial things like broken lights and bent panels, mechanical damage is also taken into account. For instance, a head-on collision will not only result in a mangled front end, but an engine that simply won’t go above 10kmp/h. Oh, and then there’s the in car telemetry. Hit up on the d-pad, and you will be overwhelmed with all sorts of utterly useless information – the g-forces on the car, how each individual tyre is wearing, and so on. It’s useless for all but the most dedicated of tuners, but it looks very, very cool, and shows you that the lads at Turn 10 know their stuff.
The game is based around three separate areas – arcade, career and multiplayer. Nothing out of the ordinary there. In arcade you can quickly pick a car and race through a series of events. Crazy. There’s also a time trial option which is basically the same thing, but sees you attempting to beat a pre-determined lap time. Shocking, no? However, career mode is where you will spend the bulk of your time in Forza 2. It works more or less the same as it did in the first game – pick a region, buy your first - inevitably crap - car, and then race it with the hope of gaining credits for modifications, or entirely new cars. There are various series of progressively longer and harder races, all the while the prize money going up. There is no shortage of races either, so working your way through them won’t happen overnight. Most races have limitations as to which cars can entry – some might only be accessible from a particular region, while others have a class restriction applied to all entrants.
Like the first game, all cars are classed according to speed, acceleration, braking, handling and rarity. The higher these attributes, the higher the class of the car. Obviously. Classes range from D to A, with a special U class for uber-modded cars, plus four specific ‘racing’ classes. And even within these classes, cars can still have wildly different attributes – like a class B Vauxhall Monaro which has a crazy top speed but no brakes, compared to a highly modified Toyota Sprinter which about as fast as an overweight turtle, but handles brilliantly. Having class restrictions on a large number of races means you will actually have to drive lower class cars quite regularly during the game, meaning you can’t jump in a U999 car and win every race by thirty seconds, as you can in certain other racing games.
A lesson from the Matt Keller school of driving.
This is no doubt a ploy to make you actually drive a sizeable portion of the cars on offer, and because of this, the game feels much more varied as it otherwise would. Forza 2 has various driving assists available, which novices won’t be able to live without. We’re talking the usual stuff here – traction control, ABS, and so on. However, there is incentive for more experienced players to turn them off. For example, driving with a manual transmission will increase your winnings by 10%. Turning off the racing line gives you another 10%. Setting the game difficulty to hard gives you another 10%. This system of rewards encourages people to be better drivers, which is a tremendous idea.
As if the career mode wouldn’t keep you busy long enough, you can also take the game onto Xbox Live. There are about a billion race options available – there’s your standard, non-ranked race. You can watch the top players battle it out on the track. There’s online career races which cater to all levels of ability, from useless newbies to hardened veteran. Plus, there are even knockout tournaments, with lots and lots of credits up for grabs should you manage to win one. You can gift cars to your friends if you are feeling generous. Then there’s the auction house, where you can attempt to sell off cars for profit. But if you want to make any real money of this, you’re going to have to auction your custom painted cars.
Forza 2 has a ridiculously in-depth system for painting your cars. It doesn’t look like much – yay, shapes on my car! – but in the hands of an (incredibly patient) artist, there is absolutely no limit as to what can be achieved. If you’re good at it, and have a lot of time to spend on making designs, it can be quite profitable too, as good custom cars go for all kinds of credits in the auction house.
Expect to zoom around a lot of corners in Forza 2.
Despite often being criticised as ‘ugly’, Forza 2 is anything but. No, it won’t win any awards for looking pretty, but it does well with what it has. Cars are nicely detailed - especially custom painted cars – although some tend to be a bit jaggy. Given the racing environments are predominately race circuits, there’s very little in the way of scenery – looking at sand traps and grass, with a few clouds on the distance, isn’t terribly interesting, but it is realistic. However, all this is understandable given the game’s silky smooth 60 frames-per-second, even when there are eight cars on screen at once. Stills do not do the game justice - you really have to see it in motion to appreciate it. There’s a similar approach taken with the audio. There’s no in-race music as such – just the growl of the engine, the squeal of gripping tyres, and the occasional smash of metal. Thankfully, just like the physics, the trained ear will noticed that all the engine noises are unique, and change with exhaust modifications. Not only that, but they sound just like the real thing, which will no doubt send motoring enthusiasts to their happy place.
So, that’s a whole lot of good stuff. So, what about the bad? Well, to be honest, there isn’t much wrong with Forza 2. It’s probably a little too similar to the first game – but the first game was pretty damn good, so it’s not much of a strong argument. If we do have a big problem with Forza 2, it’s just that there aren’t enough tracks – and most of which come from the first game. We would have liked a few more, especially street circuits, where we could look at scenery which actually borders on interesting. But ultimately, these are minor concerns. Forza Motorsport 2 is a brilliant game – possibly one of the best we will see this year. It has an ambitious goal of appealing to both casual racing fans, and hardcore driving nuts, and delivers in spades. If you even remotely like racing games, you need to get your filthy mits on this game.
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