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Forza Motorsport 2 is a game that has been able to realistically simulate the aspects of driving and give us the thrill of driving at 300+ kilometres an hour, without the risk of seriously injuring yourself. Created by Take Two, Forza is an authentic racing simulator that lets you tweak your car to suit its high performance needs. Based off the original on the Xbox, Forza Motorsport 2 clearly outshines its inferior current-gen older brother.

Forza Motorsport was the game which was supposedly supposed to be Sony’s Gran Turismo’s main competitor. With Microsoft already having a strong racing franchise in Project Gotham, Forza was set to redefine the way we played racing games. With Forza 2, not only has it surpassed its previous title, it enhances it with more customisable parts, cars, races and most importantly, the choice of having over 1000 decals on one side, as compared to 100 so that you can get some serious detail down.

Graphically, the cars in this game are very polished and the lighting bounces off at wonderful angles so that it gives you a real professional, realistic experience. In my opinion, when comparing a car I had taken a photo of with the photo-mode and the real life version, I found it hard to believe the decals and car shaping were virtually impeccable and compared very nicely to the original. Alas, whilst this game has so many beautiful cars, there is always a let down and this is shown in the way the environments are imposed. But, once again, as you are concentrating on the race course itself, it’s not very noticeable, especially when in photo mode you have a lot of motion blur on the environments.

As stated earlier, this game plays almost as if in reality. The cars are made so as to respond when you tune even the most intricate of details, you notice the difference. The fact that when you put in a new engine for example, from before sounding like Mika singing “Grace Kelly”, it now sounds like Barry White singing “I Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love Baby”. When driving there are several assists that most cars have in real life that you are able to turn off and believe me, there is a HUGE difference in the way that it reacts. In your average arcade car racer, you can brake only a few metres away from a corner and just turn with ease, however with Forza, you must brake sufficiently enough so that you are slowed down in time to take the turn. When turning, if your foot is still on the brake, then your going to slide as friction takes course, but if you have slowed down adequately, you can take the turn with relative ease. My most beloved feature of this game is definitely the ability to put in decals. I have spent 9 hours working on a Rick Kelly Holden Racing Team look-alike and I can say the hours were well worth it and the praise you receive is next to priceless.

This game has a wonderful soundtrack and has songs that will keep you motivated enough to work on the new decal. But most importantly, when you upgrade your car, the noises will change according to what you put in. This gives an enormous sense of self-satisfaction at the ability to think “Yes, I made it sound like that, I am the king of this baby”. The sound is very well done in this game and keeps on adding the realistic effect to the game.

The lasting value of this game is very long, with hundreds of tracks to race on and even though there are so many tracks, they are all just different renditions of the same race courses and this makes the game lack the ability to play this game for hours on end (after the first week of purchase that is). With only 13 tracks to choose from, this game would last a lot longer if it did have more race tracks to choose from.

Overall, this game was a magnificently put together work of art and truly is brilliant. Beware however as this style of racing is not everyone’s cup of tea and if you’re not a person who loves the simulator genre, you’ll probably find it too hard to control.