I can't believe they're only using trilinear filtering for textures! That's probably what the original Forza on the first Xbox used.
I hardly think Eurogamer would let a sim noob review Forza 5...
The reviewer was Martin Robinsion, their features editor who is apparently 'passionate about driving games'
He did their
FM4 review too and this is what he said then:
So if he's now saying the handling model is more tail happy than Forza 4 that's not good - for a putative sim racer.
I have a Polo GTI and it is ridiculously adjustable in Forza 4; you're able to frequently drift around corners, whereas in real life it behaves like a typical FWD car and will understeer if pushed too hard.
Yup, I also noticed the AF is not the game's forte, but the game looks beyond gorgeous.
Quick impressions (good and bad):
Good
- This game looks beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. On a calibrated HDTV this is truly a sight to behold!!
- Forza 5 has the best cockpit camera I've seen in a racing game. In other racing games, including all the Forzas, I just liked it but it didn't help me much and I often switched to the hood camera or bumper camera.
In Forza 5, however, I got used to it in a jiffy and I didn't even tested the rest of the cameras because I don't want to.
I don't know if it was the unrealistic shadowing in other racing games in cockpit view, the artificial look of the car's interior because of that or the non windshield thing, but it was never my favourite option.
In the end I can't explain why it is so good for me!
I think that it is because of the dashboard reflections on the windshield. You can see your driver there, and it gives a sense of depth no other racing game has shown to date. :smile2:
It might be because it feels like real life for once.
- Drivatars work (more on that in the bad impressions)
- Lens flare is more realistic than it seemed to be on videos. Mostly the sun's lighting than the lens flare itself.
Videos don't do justice to it. When your car is facing the sun, the sun's light bathes everything. The HDR looks amazing (more on HDR below)
- Rainbow coloured patches are visible on the windshield. Amazing, amazing stuff.
- The windshield reflections should become a standard from now on. I don't feel like playing a racing game where the cockpit feel void of depth anymore.
Think of driving in real life without a windshield.
- The game doesn't just encourage people to try to win the race for the sake of it. The first three positions grant you a Gold medal. I like that, it's all about your driving skills, not your position -it's so difficult to overtake in some tracks-.
- The Career is much better than the boring career in all the previous Forzas.
- The helicopters in the sky above the tracks.
- Much better interface than previous Forza games.
Bad:
- The drivatars try to imitate their real life counterparts, and each one behaves differently, but the races can become a mess.
Some drivatars in a 16 player game were from random people, 3 of them belonged to 3 Xbox Live friends.
One of my Xbox Live friends has a drivatar which races fast but ramming everyone at sight, making some races a true PITA, almost unplayable if you want to end the race clean.
After many frustrating races, increasing the difficulty level to Expert -I chose Skilled initially, but quickly got the hang of the cockpit view thanks to its awesomeness- drivatars helped, they space out a little more.
- I raced enough to build a Drivatar, but I didn't like the conditions to build it at first.
The problem is that you are playing career races against other people's Drivatar and like in real life the traffic and things that can happen are not entirely dependent on you.
That's realistic, but when Drivatars are ramming you and you want to race clean you feel like restarting the race, which can be frustrating.
As I said, one of the Drivatars was a true killer, and it was constant, so in that sense perhaps they got him right -the other Drivatars weren't nowhere near as him-, but I would love to drive around empty tracks to gather data and share my Drivatar.
I think that a better approach would be let you drive alone to gather data of your racing tendencies then drive along people to measure how aggressive or clean you are.
- The game is aliased despite being an obvious native 1080p game. Nothing major but I wonder why they didn't enable AA during Autovista at least, during replays... etc.
- The AF seems to be low.
(((interference))) I'd wholeheartedly recommend you to try this game at a friend's house or somewhere else. It's certainly worth it. Trust me on this one. Try it on a decent TV and you are in for a treat.
Photos don't make it justice. And videos... well, it's not the same than the real thing.
