Forza Motorsport 5

Forza 5 will do as a holdover racing game for now, but for all the bombast that next-gen brings, the game is awfully stagnant, and its lack of competition has never been more apparent.

Forza Motorsport 5 is an entertaining but bland experience. On one hand it impresses on the track with good visuals and fantastic handling. On the other hand it lacks content and the career mode is very dull outside of the races.

Looks lovely, drives great but feels more like a Forza Light.

Forza Motorsport 5 is a technical triumph, offering up incredible achievement in both precision and realistic graphics good enough to show off your new Xbox One. Unfortunately a few baffling design decisions ultimately hold it back from feeling truly next-gen, making Forza Motorsport 5 a good racer, but certainly not built for everyone.

Forza Motorsport 5 is quite simply car porn running at 1080p, 60fps. Visually stunning and without a rival on the next gen stage.

With limited content that is painfully slow to unlock, not to mention issues with AI and multiplayer, Forza 5 scrapes by as [a] decent launch title thanks to its immaculate presentation. [Feb 2014, p.70]

Forza Motorsport 5 is a truly great game burdened with very bad marketing choices. It has an excellent driving model and superb graphics, but lack of some basic elements and the publisher's greed, that makes gamers pay lots of extra money for something that should be free, are really serious flaws. In case this extra content is made available for free, I will happily modify my opinion.

While Forza Motorsport 5 is a strong launch-day title for Xbox One, it has more style than substance and serves better as a foundation for future next-gen Forza Motorsport titles than the limited sampler that it really is.

An excellent driving game but one sullied by cheapskate microtransactions. a lack of tracks, and the dubious worth of the Drivatar technology.

A fantastic driving game for fans of the genre, but it takes almost no chances. It’s content to drive a straight line, which is a little disappointing given that we’re now supposed to be at the dawn of a new era of gaming. If anything, last year’s Forza Horizon – which featured an open world and a storyline on top of the series’ usual car fetishism – was a much bolder and more exciting game. In retrospect, it might have been the better showcase for the next generation.

There’s no way to sell unused cars back to the AI or to other players, no bespoke onscreen speedometers, no test driving a car before purchase, no kid-friendly Kinect steering or Kinect support in Forzavista, no opportunity to load a circuit-specific tuning setup before a career race, no exiting from a race series without loading up the next track, no unicorn cars, no ‘reasonably priced car’, no auction house, no storefront, and no surprise, really.

It's quite possibly the best looking next-gen title. Hardcore fans will enjoy it to its full extent, but it's fairly forgiving to newcomers as well. There's just not a ton of middle ground, you'll either really love it or not be interested at all.

With Forza Motorsport 5, Turn 10's created a driving experience both accessible and beautiful - but it's been stripped back to make Xbox One's launch, and augmented with a host of ugly extras that only serve Microsoft's bid to make a few dollars more.

On one hand, the cars have never looked better, but on the other hand, there are a lot fewer cars than before, and fewer locations to zoom about in. And in a game in a genre that relies heavily on repetition, having fewer cars and tracks than your predecessor is a poor showing, especially at the start of a generation.

So much of the experience is locked off due to an inbalanced in-game economy and even more has just been cut entirely. Forza 5 was just good enough enough to keep me from going back to Forza 4: the addition of drivatars and the desire to compete for slots on the global leader board in particular just managed to keep me invested.

Forza Motorsport 5’s Career mode is a shell of its former self, giving little reason for players to keep coming back. Couple this with a dismal launch lineup of cars and tracks, and this is a surprising step backward for the Forza franchise as it helps kick off Microsoft’s next-gen console.

It’s hard to give new Forza a balanced rating. It has a great driving model, innovative gamepad controls, drivatars, point awarding system acknowledging the fact that even the best drivers don’t win all the time, and Full HD visuals so detailed that even the indicators on the dashboards work. It could have been a 9/10. But on the other hand we have small choice of cars and tracks, tons of microtransactions and long loading times. [02/2014, p.50]

The end result is, that not through lack of effort, Forza 5 turns out to be the first true regression the series has seen since its inception.

Forza Motorsport 5 is fantastic in its best moments, but the game is lacking in content and feels unfinished overall. This full price game is also riddled with and harshly balanced around micro transactions.