I have always been a big fan of racing games going back to the SNES. I have put at least 400 hours into each of the Forza Motorsport games. There is an interesting trend between the odd and even entries. The games in many ways have been groundbreaking, but also, they have been held back by aspects of copy and paste. Over time many unique features were removed in favor of trends. I’m interested in the new game, but I’m not sure how becoming a service game can be good for the series.

SEVEN: This was by far the worst of the FM games. It was severely lacking content. The number of cars went down because they put them all into Forzavista. There wasn’t many tracks either. They introduced the Prague track which is meh. The one thing holding it back was this terrible one lane chicane that if someone hits the wall you’re causing a pile up. Bathurst debuted in this game. They did add Long Beach for free. They upgraded the multiplayer races to 16.

SIX: This was Forza 6.2. They took everything Forza 6 had and added a track to show off the game’s graphics. Then they took 2 or 3 tracks from earlier games and put them in. Then they added driver’s suits. They took out cars that should’ve been in the game and left really old race cars in it. They signed a strategic partnership with IMSA, and we got more old race cars than we did new ones. This was the first FM game since the first one, and there was no tracks for DLC.

FIVE: FM3 had a great amount of tracks and cars. They had three tracks in the same area in Spain and you could run them as one long variant. This was also the debut of Sedona Raceway, though it was too long and had sticky grass in the worst places. This was the first Forza to simulate tire flex. They also made it too easy to rollover and it was pretty unrealistic. They also introduced clutch in this game, which made you a second or two quicker. It was to simulate a pedal operated clutch which somehow could shift quicker than everything else. But it gets worse, SUVs made their debut, and they were only good for cat and mouse. People would choose them in lobbies and wreck others. It gets even worse, this was when T10 allowed you to convert cars to AWD that made no sense. The Viper and Ford GT could be converted and became leaderboard cars. The fastest cars in the non-R classes were AWD. This led to classes becoming very unbalanced and AWD had an advantage. Road America’s surface was very bright too.

FOUR: Forza 1 started it all. Started the whole livery design trend in racing sims. It was so cool boosting an Enzo to do ]almost 300mph. You could get it up to 1068bhp. I have a Ferrari 360 Modena with like 900bhp that was still fast but not quick enough. Back then they had an Oval Test Track where people brought their fastest cars. FM1 had the best fictional tracks NYC, Blue Mountain Raceway, Rio, Alpine, Tokyo, Sunset Pen, Pacific Shipyards and Fujima Kaido. They also had racecars from around same time. Having most of the prototypes and GTs from the ‘99 to ‘03. Still though had it not had multiplayer, the game wouldn’t have stood up to GT4

THREE: Forza 6 was a great follow up to 5 and brought a lot more content. It was the first in with rain. Night racing also came back. They upgraded the races to 24 people. However,. they had an issue where when you have over 16 people, not everyone could hear each other at it caused issues. They had a good amount of recent race cars and we were able to balance out the cars. The new tracks were good but, the new Rio track was ruined by its barriers. Watkins Glen and Abu Dhabi debuted in this game too. The Ford GT race car came as DLC and was ridiculous to balance with the others. Porsche again came back to Forza and ViR and Homestead debuted as expansions.

TWO: FM2 is my personal favorite. It took many things that were good with the first one and made them better. The game had a TV show filmed at Road Atlanta, which acted similar to the game. You got credits to get parts to upgrade your car based on your results in events they did. Ken Gushi, Clarence Darrel & Angela Cope were on there. The game brought the auction house to bid and buy cars and liveries. More real world tracks but many original ones were left out. The New York track from then on was just the short circuit from FM1. The car balancing across classes was the best it had ever been. From D to S class, AWD and FWD were balanced great. In B and C class, RWD was underpowered and outhandled by the others outside of the leaderboard cars, which just handled great. But if you were AWD you were slow on straights but fast out corners and the opposite with FWD. Each type of car we’re the fastest at different tracks. Like at Silverstone in S class the leaderboard car was the Saleen, but some Caymans were up there. Motegi it was the old Fairlady Z with an AWD & RB26 swap. Laguna Seca it was close between Renault 5s and Caymans. The Renault was RWD with the Cayman AWD swapped. One of the craziest ones in B class at Motegi East. It was a fight between the 205hp Renault 5s with race tires and 1068bhp Barracuda S with stock tires. They were separated by less than a tenth. The tires in this game were unique for the series. They had sport and race compounds, and you could choose from manufacturers. Each manufacturer had their own speed and durability stats. You had people trying the lower rated tires to lower the PI and a little more power. The tracks were good with more from the real world like Sebring and Mugello, with Motegi coming as DLC. The other cool feature was you could go online on the FM website and check leaderboards and filter them by car. This is only game you can do that on.

ONE: Forza 4 was objectively the best one.

This was the official game of the ALMS. But we didn’t get all the tracks or cars from it. Many of the P1s and P2s and the LMPCs were all in there. We had a lot of the cars and several came as DLC like the 458 GT, Level 5 and Panoz Abruzzi. Nürburgring GP and Hockenheim made their debut in Forza too. There was a new matchmaking system where you could go into them with a party and now up to 12 could be in a lobby. There was also a Porsche expansion for this one. Before that they just had Rufs, which I was a big fan of the RGT-8. FM4 was the last time Porsches didn’t understeer in the series. The 911 RSR was stable at fast but the 360 and 458 were fast on straights and momentum tracks. But the Ferrari were very twitchy and hard to drive.

FM2 is where I spent the most time I have to put Forza 4 number one as it brought together a great amount of content and community in one whole game. Probably the most relevant car list for its time when it came to race cars and the most tracks of any Forza game.