Forza 4 Review: What I hate!
I have a Playstation 3. I prefer the Playstation 3. I loathe the fact that Turn 10 Studios is a Microsoft company. The only reason I have an XBox 360 at all is because of the Forza Motorsport series. This shows dedication, and in general, I love the game! But, if I have to replace an XBox once a year(not a joke) to get my Forza on, I expect near perfection. This is what I hate about Forza Motorsport 4.
The Load Times of Forza 4
This was a problem in Forza 3, and it’s a problem in Gran Turismo 5. If you want a feature-rich experience, you’ll have to wait around for awhile. As if I needed to wait to drive a painfully slow Ford Ka around a track. Every day, new technologies are being shoved at us to speed up this or that by a small amount. We don’t notice how far technology has advanced in the last few years until we load up the ole gaming console. I thought cramming my hard drive full of nearly 4 gigabytes of content would help speed things along, but no.
The organization of Forza 4
Look, not everyone wants to do the World Tour. I like it to an extent, but I love buying and modifying cars for specific events that I choose. If I want to spend an hour straight of racing a Corvette ZR1, I will. So since they provide the option, you’d think they’d make it look “presentable”. Spoiler alert: It looks like crap! Not the “Oh, this baby pooped, but it’s still kind of cute” crap. No no, this is the ugly kind(I don’t need to be more descriptive than that). Some grey, blue, and green boxes that look tiny even on my 56″ screen is not acceptable in my mind. Spice it up, would ya?
Also, menus, menus, menus. Too many to do what I want. The game is filled with content and you need a way to access it, but is this really the best way?
The difficulty of Forza 4
You can customize your experience with Forza 4 to make it as hard or as easy as you want. I’m not one who turns off every aid on Expert level and tries to lay the smack down, but the ‘Hard’ level of AI cars is surprisingly easy. Lapping cars on ‘Medium’ happens quite often even when I’m in a disadvantaged car.
No Porsche in Forza 4
Yes, this is not a Turn 10 problem. EA Sports is holding out on us since they have the exclusive rights to Porsche in video games. But with all the sales of Forza and the DLC, couldn’t they have dumped a truck-full of money and EA’s door, stormed in, and chained themselves to a proverbial tree until they got their way? I know in the first week of Forza, I personally spent $140 on it. Big deal, they have Ruf cars you say? Not the same, I don’t have the option of racing a Porsche Cayman R or a Panamera Turbo(loved this in Forza 3). Instead I have something that resembles a 911 but has none of the character of one. Believe me, the cars in the game have character.
Kinect on Forza 4
My thought is that Microsoft gave Turn 10 a bunch of money to integrate Kinect into a game that has no business having Kinect. I’ve used Kinect for Dance Central, which is the perfect example of Kinect integration. Forza does not need it and I consider it a waste of space. Head tracking is a gimmick. AutoVista is another. The time and energy could’ve been spent bettering the 4 things above.
Overall this game is a winner and I expect demand you to pick it up, but these are changes I demand in the future versions of Forza. I’m not above switching to a new game, I used to be a Gran Turismo loyalist after all. And now I’m off to kill a couple hours playing Forza.
-Trent Bray
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