Hands-on With Forza Motorsport: Back on Track

ign.com:

It’s been six years since Forza Motorsport 7 was released, and a fraction under two years since it was delisted. That’s right; it’s been over 725 days since you could buy a Forza Motorsport game this side of the second-hand market. Fortunately, that’s about to change next month – but ahead of the much-anticipated launch of Forza Motorsport on PC and Xbox Series X|S consoles on October 10, 2023 we’ve finally been able to get behind the wheel. Unsurprisingly, it does look and feel fabulous – but it’s the more thoughtful tweaks to the moment-to-moment racing out on track that have me the most interested.

While our time with the Forza Motorsport preview build has essentially been unlimited since we were granted access to it, we should stress that it’s admittedly only an extremely narrow sliver of the complete game.

It begins with a brief playable intro, featuring a few laps in the high-powered cover cars – the hybrid, all-wheel drive 2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray (the fastest production ’Vette ever made) and the 2023 Cadillac V-Series.R (the sports prototype that snatched a podium at this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans after a two-decade absence from the event for Cadillac). This first taste of the new Forza Motorsport reintroduces us to Maple Valley (which has been a stalwart circuit in the series since the original Forza Motorsport in 2005) and highlights the new Hakone circuit (another fictional, Grand Prix-style track based in Japan).

I’ll need a lot more laps of Hakone until I can make up my mind on its merits as a racetrack. At first blush, it seems like a very quick circuit with largely constant-radius corners – although it’s quite flat and there aren’t too many challenging segments in this layout. There’s a lot going on