For gear head’s there are two thing’s that they love racing and car show’s. Forza 4 Motorsport open’s up
with the BBC’s Top Gear host Jermey Clark talking about how this game is for car enthusiast’s and not people who are concerned with how many miles to the gallon a car gets and how environmentally friendly a car is. This is because we don’t care! we want the raw power, we want to hear the noise of the engines screeching as we take that corner a little fast and most importantly we want to feel a live.

Players will notice a quicker push to level 50, which was the maximum level in Forza 3 that’s gone now. In Forza 4 the maximum level is 150 to reward those die hard Forza fan’s. As I write this I’m already in the mid 40’s and the fact that I’m now given a choice of car’s as a reward time I level is fantastic. I really enjoy the fact that I get to choose my reward. After hitting level 50 the car rewards are gone and replaced with credit bonus’s ranging from 100k to 350k. Car manufacture affinity rewards you to being loyal to your favourite car manufacture. Love Ferrari? only drive Ferrari? levelling your car manufacturing affinity gives you bonuses like free parts, badges and titles for your player card.

You’ll notice in the early stages that the AI is quite different then in Forza 3. In Forza 3 they removed power from the AI to make slower on easier difficulties. This isn’t the case in Forza 4 what they do is reduce there confidence when there in corners. What this does it makes the AI brake earlier into corners which is where you as the player can out break them and slip in front of them. The moment the AI it’s the apex in the corner they will be flat out regardless of the difficulty level.

The key to beating them on the straight’s is to block them down the straights. What I’ve found so far is that this is producing closer, better wheel to wheel racing and I’ve actually lost a few races to the AI. This is a great improvement as generally there really isn’t much of a contest from the AI.

The team over at Turn 10 partnered with Pirelli tires with new data which mean’s the tires in Forza 4 behave exactly as they tests indicate on real tracks on the real cars. Hardcore racer’s will notice that car’s behave a bit different and that’s because Turn 10 made some changes to their steering model, let’s be real not all track’s are smooth and are there some bumps along the way, so expect to see a bit of track bumpiness as well. These changes truly impact the way the car’s handle very different from Forza 3 and for me make it a bit harder to handle with most of the assist’s turn offed.

One of my favourite little features to Forza that is completely separate from the overall in game experience is the ability to navigate the menu’s using my voice and the power of Kinect. When I first discovered this I played around about 5 minutes going Xbox, My Garage. Simple use of Kinect but so very convenient.

Turn 10 has also gone a head to implement the ability for racers to drive with there arms. Gas and Braking are controlled by the game for the gamer and all the racer need’s to do is steer using there arms. I’m not a huge fan of this to be honest and this is suppose to be a sim racer and well this portion of it isn’t but I understand that it’s trying to get the family together. I appreciate that but would rather they hadn’t.

Autovista is a new feature that integrates Kinect into the Forza experience. Imagine your own personal automotive showroom that allows you to fully explore supercars like the Ferrari 458 Italia, Lexus LF-A, 1993 McLaren F1, 2008 Lamborghini Reventon the 2006 Koenigsegg CCX. With Kinect this allows the player to walk around the car, open doors, sit in the car, turn the engine on and most importantly hear what gear head Jeremy Clark has to say about these cars. This is a really cool feature but it’s not available on all cars.

So should you buy Forza 4? that’s the question and since it’s notably the best in the franchise you should. The visual upgrade isn’t significant but the changes to the physics, AI and community are sure to make this game worth your dollars.