Forza Motorsport, Good Progression or Just a Boring Grindfest?

Forza Motorsport is the latest entry into the Forza franchise and being a former Xbox User, it’s a franchise I have followed closely through both the Horizon series and Motorsport up to the 6th game. Forza as a whole has however lost my interest in its more recent entries as I’ve found them to be a bit boring and with the new Forza Motorsport coming in from scratch, I’m hoping that it can offer me something that I’ve been missing since Forza Motorsport 4.

Problems With The Forza Franchise

My first proper Forza game was Motorsport 4 on the Xbox 360, I’d previously played 3 but not enough to really remember or forge an opinion on. Motorsport 4 was a great game that truly had me hooked on a key component which is lacking in the newer Forza titles, Progression. You would start off your racing career driving more modest cars with the first race involving hot hatches such as the Ford Ka, Toyota Aygo or VW Polo really starting you off with the average car you’d see a 17-year-old revving in the Tesco car park at 1 am. Throughout the game, you would work with this car to even better cars and eventually fully-fledged LMP cars near the end game which gave you some incentive to keep playing.

The newer games following Motorsport 5 didn’t quite offer this which is why I stopped playing Motorsport after 5 and only tried 6 on a friend’s Xbox as well as the demo for 7.

The Horizon series also features this problem most notably after the 3rd game. Whilst I spent quite a few hours in Horizon 4, it was never really many at a time and it was mostly just casual cruising around the UK rather than actual racing which was down to the game not having any real goals or reasons to play. The problem with Horizon 4 and 5, is that you just get gifted too many cars, including a Bugatti Divo in my case after just 30 minutes, and on top of that the wheelspins either fill you up with clothes or money and cars. There’s no real reason to grind some races to get a new and faster car when you’ve already got some of the best cars. Now I’ll admit the seasonal events were a solid incentive to play but they honestly depended on the car reward and whether the grind was worth it.

I understand that some people do just want to enjoy the game without having to grind their time away and I 100% empathise with that, but I like a good set of goals and targets in games to feel like I’m actually achieving something. This is where the new Forza Motorsport comes in with its new Builders Cup Career mode which involves building up your car as you race, an actual progression system that on paper sounds fun, but in practice is it actually fun or just a slogging grind where the reward isn’t worth the time.

Forza Motorsport 2023

Forza Motorsport costs $69.99 for the standard edition which is an instant no, so I instead grabbed it on Game Pass which is what you should probably do as well. Now I will be going into this almost completely blind as I haven’t watched any detailed videos and only a few small bits of gameplay and news from Turn 10 themselves plus I also haven’t played any sim-racing or track racing games for a good while.

Before we start, I decided to make the game a bit more interesting by using my wheel setup which consists of the Thrustmaster TMX Pro alongside The TH8S Shifter which also means I’ll be playing the game manual with clutch and with fewer assists. This was a lot more intuitive although the shifting had a bit of a delay where shifting would just start the animation and the gear wouldn’t change until the animation was done rather than when I was done. Upgrading to a race transmission made this a non-issue as it sped up the shifting speed. Also, this review will mostly be focusing on the progression and Builders Cup aspect as opposed to improvements over more recent titles as I’m not in a position to comment down to having not played them or having not played them since 2015.

Starter Cars

The game of course starts with your intro races with the star cars consisting of both the Corvette E-Ray and the Cadillac V-Series R. These races gave me good initial impressions of the handling which was weighty and responsive, and the force feedback was quite firm as well. Moving onto the focus of the review, which is progression, at the start of the game you’re offered three starter cars including the 2018 Honda Civic Type-R, the 2019 Subaru STI S209 or the 2018 Ford Mustang GT. This isn’t quite on Forza Motorsport 4’s level of 17-year-old’s first car but it’s an ok starting point. I chose the Subaru because the Civic Type R is ugly and the Mustang will probably end up in the grandstands on turn 1.

Upgrade System

The general idea of the new Builders Cup is that you slowly build up your car with each one having its own individual level that increases by racing. With each level, you unlock new parts which are purchased using Car Points instead of Credits which simply means you can’t max upgrade your vehicle right away and you actually have to work towards your upgrades. The majority of the platform, handling and similar upgrades are mostly unlocked by level 12 whilst the engine and performance upgrades unlock in the later levels and then engine swaps and drivetrain swaps at levels 40 and 50. It only took me around 3 races to reach level 12 and unlock a lot of the parts however I was still limited by car points. The time that took I’d say is somewhere between 30-45 minutes based on my game time which means getting up to level 50 could take up to 3-5 hours, that’s a long time considering Forza has around 500 cars.

I do think this system is ok but it does have its flaws. It hits that target of a meaningful progression as each car you have to work to upgrade, which gives you an incentive to race more, unlock more parts and more car points to build up your car. Additionally, with the way the levels appear to be scaled, you seem to unlock things before you have enough car points to take advantage meaning you have to spend your car points wisely for the exact needs of your car, or just click auto upgrade and it’ll spend your points for you. Unfortunately, you will usually complete a series before even getting half way upgraded.

On the other hand, some could argue that this restricts the freedom to upgrade the car how you please, and also restricts those who don’t have the time to be grinding away for car points. Like I said before, it could take up to 5 hours to fully upgrade a car meaning those without the time to grind will feel a bit left behind especially when wanting to race with friends who’ve spent more time in the game. Pleasing both sides is a difficult thing to achieve but at the very least free play allows you to rent cars for a quick race as well as private multiplayer races which should just about alleviate some of those concerns.

Graphics & Performance

Forza Has always been great for having stunning and realistic visuals and it definitely helps with the Motorsport series being confined to a race track which allows for more headroom as opposed to the full open world in Horizon. The game once again keeps to Forza’s track record and offers beautiful visuals although the colours do seem a bit washed out in some areas. However, graphics are subjective, especially considering some people think covering the GTA V map in puddles is good graphics.

I’m running Forza on the following system:

• Case: Corsair 4000D
• Motherboard: ASUS TUF B450M Pro II
• CPU: Ryzen 5 5600X
• Cooler: Arctic Freezer II 240mm
• GPU: EVGA RTX 3090 Ti (Undervolt Curve)
• RAM: 32GB Patriot Viper Steel 3600MHz
• Storage: 1TB Samsung 860 EVO, 1TB Kingston SA2000, 2TB WD Blue SN570
• PSU: CORSAIR HX1000
• Monitor: electriQ UltraWide 3440×1440

Now before you point it out, yes I’m aware of the 5600X – 3090 Ti bottleneck, I do have a 12900K waiting around but I need a new case to fit my new AIO so I’m stuck with it for now.

The game received some backlash over a 60 FPS limit in multiplayer and whilst that doesn’t apply to singleplayer, I found myself better off using it anyway. I stuck to the AUTO settings with balanced DLSS and my FPS was hovering around 60-70 with the occasional 40 FPS drop mostly near the finish line. Locking to 60 FPS gave me a smoother experience which is plenty for a racing game but the frame drops were still there. Installing the 12900K could possibly offer a more stable experience here.

UPDATE: 11/10/23

Driver updates are usually something I don’t bother with if my system is running fine, it’s often a good practice that a lot of people go by as some driver updates can cause issues. Naturally, with a new game, NVIDIA has released a driver for it which I didn’t have at the time of writing so here is an update on the performance after installing that update. Below are the benchmark results which are mostly identical within the margin of error, however, in the actual gameplay I felt as if the stutters were fewer and the game a lot smoother, plus it seems like the memory usage on both RAM and VRAM has been decreased. Now it does vary depending on the track you choose as well as whilst Road America was smooth, Spa still had a few drops near the starting line.

Final Thoughts

All in all, Forza Motorsport has definitely grabbed my attention a lot more than Motorsport 5 did, and I can see myself spending some good time on this during my month of Game Pass, but do I recommend it? While the game is enjoyable in the first few hours I’ve played, the progressions system is a bit of a slog which in all fairness, will definitely lead you to get your money’s worth in terms of hours played of the $69.99 that this game cost, but will all those hours actually be that enjoyable. The level of grind here could almost be compared to that of a mobile game and some people would just get bored repeatedly racing in the same car that gets slightly faster after every race.

For £69.99 or heaven forbid £89.99 for the Premium Edition, I personally cannot recommend this game unless you are a die-hard Forza Fan and even then it’s a hard sell. GamePass is just £7.99 grab that, give it a go and if it’s not for you then great you’ve only spent £7.99 and you’ve got a whole library of over 400 other games that you can enjoy to get your money’s worth.

I’m enjoying the game so far, let me know what your thoughts are.