Bart

TLDR; If you enjoy online multiplayer racing, this game is for you. As someone who prefers the online multiplayer aspects of games, this game is easily the best Forza Motorsport I've played. I am seeing a ton of hate for this game, and while I understand why, I do not believe it deserves it at all. I have the game through Xbox game pass, so I haven't spent any money on it, so this review is unbiased. My first hour or so playing this game I was very unimpressed. I was averaging 30-40 fps, which is among the worst I have ever seen on my current hardware (RTX 3070 and Ryzen 5800x) on a game out of the box. The singleplayer experience and AI was meh at best. The physics felt terrible on my wheel. However, I spent some time tuning my graphics and force feedback settings with the help of some youtube videos. This drastically improved my experience. The game felt awesome on my wheel, and I was easily maintaining 60 fps. I play many simracing games, including Assetto Corsa and Gran Turismo, so the physics feeling good to me says something. The game caps the fps to 60 in multiplayer to keep it fair to console players. I wasn't really bothered by this because 60 fps feels perfectly fine to me, however I can see some PC gamers being annoyed by this. After tuning my settings and doing a singleplayer race to get a feel for the physics, I decided to jump right into the multiplayer. There's online multiplayer and local multiplayer. The online racing is called "Featured Multiplayer" and contains many different racing events with set start times. They allow you to set qualifying lap times before the race. My first race, I failed to set a qualifying lap time because I was unknowingly in practice instead of official qualifying. Thus, even though I had the 3rd or 4th fastest lap, I started the race dead last in 13th. However, I still managed to come in 4th, right behind the top 3, because the race was still long enough for me to fight my way past all those people. It was a really fun race. It was an even playing field because everyone used the same car. I liked the penalty system as it successfully keeps players from being too reckless, unlike previous Forza games (Although, I have heard that people have had unfair experiences with it. I have yet to have such a experience). I also enjoyed the strategic aspects (i.e. managing your fuel and tires). I clearly managed my fuel and tires better than some people, allowing me to pass them with ease towards the end of the race. My second race, I managed to actually set the fastest qualifying lap, and started pole position. I managed to fend off anyone from overtaking me the entire race (Which was a god damn challenge to say the least, I was sweating my balls off), and I won the race. My tires were dying and I almost ran out of fuel the last lap of the race. After this race I was given a safety rating and skill rating so that I can continue to be matched up with other respectable drivers. All in all, the multiplayer aspect of this game is extremely promising and has tons of potential. The singleplayer career mode, on the other hand, is monotonous and boring, in my opinion. However, given that I mainly prefer online aspects of video games anyway, I'm giving the game 4 out of 5 stars, only taking off that 1 star purely because of how poorly the game felt and ran out of the box.