Finished: Forza Motorsport 2 |
 Positives The majority of the game falls into this category. I'm going to start off with the most important aspect of the game and that is the gameplay, aka, the racing/driving aspect. Forza 2 is probably the best driving sim that I have ever played, it trumps anything that Gran Turismo ever did. Where as Gran Turismo likes to over exaggerate everything (body roll and braking power, for example) Forza 2 behaves in a more down to earth manner. The game controls super smoothly and each car has its quirks, many of them from real-life. Now I have never driven a Shelby Cobra 427, but in the game the car is super touchy, but according to my research (asking a couple of car guys) that is true to the real-life car as well. That is just one example, but I'm sure there are many more. The other thing that makes the driving in Forza 2 so great is that the game is easily adjustable to your difficulty range. Don't know the track at all? Only missing the braking zones? Keep putting too much power down and spinning out? AI too fast for you? Keep crashing and breaking your car? Well, Forza 2 has a setting that is right for YOU! The answer to the first two questions is the dynamic racing line, the first setting is the full racing line which draws a line around the entire track with colored triangles, when you need to brake it turns red and it turns green when you need to accelerate. If you are passed that level you can upgrade it to Braking only and it only appears when you need to brake. The other options are much more standard, but still very useful to tuning the game to your ability, besides the more of the assists that you turn off, the more credits you earn as a bonus (up to 50%). Forza 2 is probably the first simulator that can be played by anyone even people who hate driving sims or can't seem to find the brakes. Next up is the games career mode, this is probably one of the better career modes in a sim game, manly because it doesn't fall into the Gran Turismo trap, which is buy a starting car, race the same series over and over to win money and sell the useless prize car over and over. No, FM2 avoids that by actually giving you prize cars that you CAN ACTUALLY USE. In fact you hardly have to buy many cars at all in the game, you usually have the car ready or there is probably another series that you can win to get one. Also the race types are very varied and the mode will take you probably 50 hours or more, but unfortunately the rest of career mode falls in to the Negative section. On of the really great aspects of Forza 2 is the amazing paint editor that is available inside of Career Mode. You can take every production car (and some of the tuner cars) in the game and paint them to your heart's content. Sometimes the tools are overly simple, but, with a bit of extra effort (and talent) you can create pretty much anything that you want. You've seen my examples over the last few weeks and I have even joined a union here on GameSpot devoted to painting and designing beautiful rides in Forza 2. If you have the time (you don't necessarily need talent) you can make a car your own. To close out the positives, the game has amazing sound, the engine sounds, the squealing tires, the cringe inducing crash sounds and even some of the licensed music is pretty good. The graphics are pretty decent too, the car models steal the show, because they obviously cut some corners on the track graphics to keep the 60 FPS frame rate, but they do their job and I can't complain too much about them. Another graphical effect of note is the car damage, you can smash windows, dent and even break off bumpers, lose your wing, scratch the crap out of your paint, smash out your head and tail lights and that is just on the outside. Crash hard enough and you can mess up your steering, drive-train, gearbox (the grinding gear sound is painful to listen to, in a good way), damage your brakes and jack up your engine to the point that plumes of smoke are pouring out of the back of your car. Of course this all affects the quality of your car, up to the point where you might have to just limp back to the pits at a pathetic 65 MPH with your car constantly pulling to the left. It is a nice thing to have in sim racing game and awesome to see in a game with licensed cars. Finally, a fairly robust online portion with tournament, career races (which actually contribute credits to your single player career) and a flawed online auction house (which I will get to in Negatives). Negatives Forza Motorsport 2 isn't perfect, it is a really great game but there are definitely a few things that could be improved and that is what I'm going to cover here. Are you wondering why I never mentioned the CPU driver AI yet? That is because even though it is probably some of the smartest AI yet, it still boarders on stupid. Occasionally they will make some really realistic moves, for example they will scatter away from you if you come flying wildly on to the track in an attempt to avoid you, but conversely if you end up in the middle of a corner or on the straight after spinning out, they will just driver straight into you without even an attempt to dodge. It's always good and bad with them, another example is in the corners, sometimes they will be professional about corners and concede to you if you beat them into one, but then other times they will just slam into you like you weren't even there. Besides I have seen them do some boneheaded things on their own with out me even being involved. Occasionally on Road Atlanta, if you start on the pole (aka first place) sometimes the CPU next to you will just cut wildly towards you from the second spot right off the start. They also like to spin you out right off the start in Laguna Seca as you come down the hill into the hairpin. In New York, they crash into the walls on the inside of the first corner and bump into the wall over and over when going around the fountain. It is a step in the right direction, but I couldn't stand the AI myself on Medium after awhile so a sacrificed a bit of credits for the Easy AI, which I could just blow away and never have to deal with... Which actually leads to my next problem with the game... Okay, so this isn't really a fault of Forza 2 so much, as a fault that really plagues sim racing games (most arcade s.tyle games are exempt from this point, really). You ALWAYS HAVE TO WIN to progress in the game, sure you could finish 2nd, but why would you want to when you need the gold trophy to get the prize car or the achievements. Okay, okay, so no one honestly wants to finish 2nd, but no racer is going to win every race in his career, so why should I have to here? In fact only the professional series has a points standings over a series of races in Forza 2 and even in that you still may as well just win on your first try because you need the gold trophy in every race in the series to get the most out of the game. Point is, it gets to the point where you want/need to win every race and every time that you aren't going to win, you restart the race, because finishing second is a waste of time. I guess personally I'd just like to see a different type of career mode in a sim where I could compete over a series of races (a league) and be happy with consistency more than just our-right winning every single race. Another thing about career mode that started to get to me was the lack of tracks, there are a lot of great tracks in Forza 2 (Road Atlanta, being a new favorite of mine), but they repeat far too often especially when you get into the later stages of each event category in career. At first you start off on the sort versions of most of the tracks, then you start to see the medium sized versions, then you might see some of the full courses start getting added in, then it becomes nothing but the full courses, of which there are only about 8 of them Sebring, Silverstone, Road Atlanta, Laguna Seca, Suzuka Circuit, Maple Valley, Mugello and Sunset Peninsula Infield. So get used to seeing combinations of these 8 in series of 4 or 5 over and over. Though, Maple Valley and Sunset Peninsula Infield have reverse versions. Also occasionally you will see Nurburgring or the full test track called King Cobra thrown in just to be annoying. King Cobra is a stupidly curvy track that for some reason the developers liked to force you to drive the fastest cars around. I have a car that can go 170+ MPH and for most of the track I am stuck at 45-90. Silly. The next career complaint/oddity is that in some series the developers throw in the fast car of that type into the race, but these are highly tuned cars so even if you do manage to upgrade a car to the same level it probably still won't be able to compete and get this, the only way to get that car is to win that series of races. What were they thinking? Besides, even if they where trying to force you to upgrade, all the other cars in the race don't even match up, it's silly to see a race with 4 B c.lass cars and 3 S c.lass cars, when you could have just filled out the field with equivalently matched cars. The biggest culprits of this are the Manufacturer Club races. The last thing about career mode that I have to kind of bicker about is, while the game doesn't fall into the Gran Turismo trap through the whole game, it does when it comes to buying all the cars in the game, I made over just under 10 million credits over the course of the game (not including the over 500,000 that I wasted by wrecking my car all the time) and you need over 14 million to buy all the cars in one fell swoop. So that leaves you to do races over and over if you want to get a good chunk of the achievement points. Finally, I want to talk about the auction house in the game, it sounds like a great idea on paper, but first, it's on the internets, second, it isn't designed that well. It is just loaded with 100's and 100's of useless cars that people are selling just trying to make a quick buck (mostly for the buy/sell 10 cars on the auction house achievement), or over saturated with cars with some (on occasion naked) anime chick on it that some dude forgot to lock the design on and everyone is trying to sell as their own. Another awkward thing is that people only seem to bid on cars that have 1 minute left on them, so when you are forced to set 2 hours minimum on your auction, your aren't going to see any bids for a good long while. On the other side of things when placing bids, to prevent "sniping" (the act of placing a bid at the last second to basically steal an auction) the timer always seems to reset to 2 minutes (even if it is at 1 minute) every time a new bid is placed, this leads to endless battles. I mean, maybe I don't get it and it is totally awesome, there are some totally amazing cars on there, they are just impossible to find (and to get). In Summary Forza Motorsport 2 is an amazingly great game that has a few flaws that hopefully they will work out in the next version of the game (or in the case of tracks with DLC). There was a reason that I played the game for more than 50 hours to complete the career mode and that is because the driving engine is sublime. That is the biggest reason to play Forza 2 in my opinion, all you have to do is like driving/racing games and you will find something here that you like. Be it the paint editor, online play, tuning, time attacks, car clubs or just driving (and crashing) over 300 of the worlds greatest cars. FINAL SCORE: 9.0 out of 10 A Look at the Week Ahead I just wanted to give you a quick update before I go, I'm probably going to be picking up a couple of games this week, The Darkness (a fun looking FPS), The Bigs (it just looks like stupid fun) and maybe even Transformers: The Game (only if it gets 7.5 or higher on GameSpot), so I will have plenty of coverage during the week of those games as I get them. I will have NLU Weekly #38 to close out the week as usual. Just in case you care, I broke out Dig-Dug (on XBLA) and grabbed 100 more points from it in only 15 minutes, so I have all but the two hardest achievements in that game. I am also nearing 10,000 Gamescore (currently at 9,667) and want to try to nail that milestone before Thursday's NLU Weekly, so I will either nail that with my current games or will definitely nail it with those two new games. Okay, I think I am about done talking for now, this was quite a long one, I told ya I had a lot to say about Forza 2. 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POSTED ON JUNE 26, 2007 |
