Review: Forza Motorsports 2 (Xbox 360)

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With more than 300 cars to unlock, the vehicle lineup is as impressive as Leno’s private collection. For those that are afraid it’s ‘ricer heavy’, fear not. While there are a lot of cars from the Asian continent, they’ve sent their best and fastest, all thoroughbred racing stock. The European market includes their racing heritage in the cars represented, with brands like Ferrari, BMW, and Jaguar featured prominently. The North American market is geared more toward muscle cars. Lucky us.

Cone Eater

And like Lee Majors of Six Million Dollar Man fame, we can make it better. A vast cornucopia of brand-name aftermarket parts are available to turn your rides into asphalt-eating monsters. Each car has a Performance Indicator (PI). The PI is essentially the same thing as a vehicle class, and adding performance upgrades to your car can take just about any vehicle and raise or lower it’s PI to compete in various races.

A vehicle’s PI is important for a lot of reasons. The races in single-player mode are restricted by PI in a lot of cases and in multiplayer, you can use PI restrictions on the field of cars to keep things fair. In addition to the PI of the cars, there are two other crucial areas that can be tuned to personal preferences to make your driving experience the best possible.

The Aggie Camaro...

...and the Texas DPS

Don’t like the appearance of your car? FM2 contains a paint shop with enough tools to create some of the most innovative (and gaudiest) looks imaginable. Beware. You will lose a couple of hours of daylight playing around with this feature and it’s very likely that you might be the only person that appreciates what you did.

Hey, Merle…What’s This Button Do?

First, FM2 includes in its Options Menu the ability to completely control the settings of your wheel, just like any PC title. It says a lot that simulations have come this far in popularity that in 2007 even console fans will eventually figure out how to adjust braking response and will finally understand what the hell "deadzone" means for steering wheels.

Ferrari F430

It looks no different than what I’ve seen in PC simulations and it makes a huge difference. I kept noticing that I would barely feather the brakes and my poor virtual driver was getting the visor on his helmet smashed by the steering wheel when inertia invariably took over. My braking response was set to about 2% sensitivity, so I backed it WAY off and noticed I was able to brake effectively without looking like I was braking late.

But the best and most comprehensive way to tune your car’s performance to achieve that perfect apex in a turn (wow, I’m even sounding like a motorsport simulation aficionado) is to use the complete and thorough set of garage tuning options. From adjusting individual gear ratios, tire camber, tire pressure, to anti-roll bar sensitivity, every possible tweak is there.

Some titles have included this only to have it literally make zero difference on the track. The TOCA series from Codemasters comes to mind here. Not so in this case. In FM2, it makes a big difference, but it only makes a difference for those who know how to drive. For me, the only difference it made was how hard and at what angle I hit walls, concrete dividers, trees, and fans in grandstands. I may sound like a motorsport sim fan, but I still can’t drive like one.

Don’t know what to tweak and how to tweak it? A telemetry tool is included for you to be able to determine what your car is doing at any exact moment so that you have the ability to go back into the tuning options and get your setup as precise as you need it to be.

Another feature that’s loads of fun to play around with are the Replay and Photo Modes. You can save replays from single- and multi-player sessions and then go back and take incriminating photos of you or your friends and the more embarrassing driving habits we tend to have. You can then upload those photos to the FM2 community web site and download them. Too bad the replays don’t include our communications audio.

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