Forza Motorsport 7 Review | Rough Around Its Beautiful Edges

FM7 did not hold back when it came to car variety. Grouping the vehicles into 5 tiers, with dozens of car models in each, made the game feel more fleshed out when it came to choosing your own ride. Not to mention, there are 30 racing environments with over 200 ribbons for you to push your ride to the limit.

Over an hour was spent simply looking through the available cars, customizing them, only to realize that there are even more car designs that are made by the community. Who knew customizing your very own vehicle could be this fascinating.

FM7 game is developed both for the PC and the Xbox One, much like its predecessor. This allows it to take advantage of PC’s higher specifications to produce a gorgeous looking game, while running at a higher framerate. Cars look extremely sharp and clear, water puddles glistens beautifully under the cloudy sky, and everything just looks surreal.

However, there are some minor complaints about the game. When testing the game on a mid-range PC – i5-2400 and GTX 970 – so as to simulate the hardware specifications of typical gamers, the results were slightly disappointing. 1080p 60fps was not entirely smooth with some frame-pacing issues and random drops in frames. The reason for this could be because the i5-2400 is not powerful enough or that the game was installed on a HDD not a SSD. I would recommend turning off MSAA, instead of setting it to dynamic, as it helped to improve the framerate.

There were also some instances where the game stuttered significantly for no good reason, while the GPU usage skyrocketed to 100%. This is not possible under normal circumstances with the typical GPU usage ranging between 30-60%. Thankfully, simply restarting the game solved it.

All in all, the game is still early in the release and these problems will probably be fixed with a patch or a future driver updates (currently using 385.69).

With all things considered, racing in FM7 is extremely enjoyable. Leaning closer to a racing arcade game than a racing simulator makes the game easier to pick up as compared to other more serious titles. Not to mention, beginner assists in the form of “Suggested Line” and “Traction Control” is actually more than sufficient for almost all newcomers to racing games. However, activating all the assists would actually slow down a racing veteran, as the brakes and steering are not in the full control of the player. As a result, it starts to become clear that the game is designed to have a low skill floor and a pretty high skill ceiling.

FM7 also features a rewind feature that is actually really useful. It allows you to ‘rewind’ the time and correct mistakes that were made, without needing to reload the entire race. If only there is such a thing in real life. *Sigh*

In career mode, there is certainly a constant sense of progression after completing each series. With each series you complete, you move one step closer to being a Legend. The AI drivers are also moderately difficult, and are challenging enough to not be there to simply give you the win.

At first, there were some reservations when it came to the popularity of the Forza game series and its community. However, after experiencing what Forza has to offer, there is certainly no doubt that FM7 deserves what it has achieved within just a short span of a year.