By Linnie W. Phillips 
I’m not exactly the target audience for simulation racing games. I like cool Supercars and all that, but I can get them in Arcade style racers. Basically, I don’t know the functional difference between a V6 and a V8; I’m not a car fool. I got into the Forza Motorsport series by surprise because I needed a family launch game for the Xbox One at the time. But since then, I’ve been all over this series, and although I still prefer people like Forza Horizon, I’ve been as excited about the new Forza Motorsport without a number as anyone. So from the perspective of a Forza fan (if not a simulation racing fan), how does it stack up?
The Forza Series has been Microsoft’s graphic showcase for Xbox consoles for some time now, and although it took Forza Motorsport a while to come out, it absolutely delivers on the promise of the Xbox Series X. There are so many details about the masses and the stretches, to the point that I can tell what fabric the seat covers are made of. Although I know that some have complained about the use of older models for some vehicles, overall everything seems first-rate to me. I wish the lighting in the main “Showroom” area was better to really see all the details of the cars, but they still shine. However, FM’s greatest graphic strength is its depiction of racing in the rain. It’s hard to describe, and the screenshots can’t do much, but trust me: it blows its competition out of the water (pun intended.) With the right camera angles, you may be able to convince someone to look at a photo, except that ray tracking makes the reflections look too good to be true.
It’s one thing to nail the sights and sounds of real cars and racing tracks; the Forza series has already used the features of this generation of consoles in Horizon 4 updates. But what makes FM better than any racing game I’ve ever played is the feeling. A combination of controller force feedback and realistic physics gives the impression that you are really managing the weight and speed of your vehicle when playing Forza Motorsport. Believe it or not, I don’t really drive. But even I have no doubt that this game is particularly realistic.
Pro: Pimp my turn
This is nothing new, but I wanted to take a moment and appreciate the level of visual customization that Forza games allow for each car in their Collection. People have already started creating complex designs, and the Palette of color types returns from previous games. Since all this art has to be done freehand and how difficult it must be to moderate it, I am always impressed by the players and the developers.
With: Career Self-destruction
We’ve already talked a lot about Forza Motorsport’s new career mode, the Builder’s Cup. This new mode focuses on starting a production car and slowly upgrading and adapting over a series of about five races. The concept is solid, but it poses a whole series of problems. On the one hand, upgrading your cars is now completely linked to your “car level”, which means that you will have to spend a lot of time in each car if you want to customize it or upgrade it completely. On the other hand, because you are supposed to build this car over time, you are tied to one car per series (from a relatively small range) and stick to it for about five races. For me, collecting a variety of cars has always been a draw for this series, so getting stuck with just one per series seems like an unnecessary limitation.
With: Glitchy Trigger Finger
Although there have been improvements in this area since its launch, the game still seems to have more than its fair share of bugs. Although navigating through the menus is not as difficult as when starting up, the user interface sometimes seems quite slow. And remember what I said about the possibility of visually customizing your cars? The game often takes a while to display these customizations, so you may not see them when you scroll through your car collection. Fortunately, once you are on the track, things work out, although I have heard other people describe problems with their road bikes; I don’t have any, so I don’t know if it has already been solved.
Mixed: driving a car
It seems silly to say that a game that starts with 20 tracks and more than 500 cars lacks content, that’s why I’m putting this one on the “mixed” pile. But other games, including other games in this series, have surpassed it. Some pillars of the series were absent at launch, and the Track Listing in particular is overshadowed by FM’s direct predecessor, Forza Motorsport 7. I have no doubt that the developers of Turn 10 would say that they put quality above quantity, but it’s still a little pathetic.