The Forza Motorsport franchise has been around since 2005, and with the release of the Xbox One, Turn 10 studios made another Forza game called Forza Motorsport 5, an Xbox One exclusive.

The car selection in Forza 5 is as vast as an ocean. With 200 cars or more, every race can be a whole new experience. And the customization you can do to your vehicle is astounding. If you feel like having a luxurious race car, you can buy a Cadillac CTS. If you feel like driving a super fast car that sounds like a rocket, you can buy a Lamborghini Murcielago. If you feel like being funny, you can buy a ’63 Volkswagen Beatle. If you know something about cars, you can put upgrades into your ride, or you can ask the game to do it for you. These upgrades go into a ton of depth about how it will effect the performance of the car. Sometimes the navigating through the upgrades is troublesome, but it’s really cool how you can change how the car drives just by changing the tires on a car.

When you have upgraded your car and you race it and you just wished that your car could go into a turn a little faster, you can tune it. Getting to the tune menu is a little rough and takes a while to load up, but the tuning in the game is really in-depth. You can change the amount of downforce in the back or front of the car to improve speed or improve turning. Also, you can tilt the tires from being straight up and down (camber) which helps get more rubber on the ground while turning, and you can change the gears of the transmission to improve acceleration or top speed. You can make the springs in the car really tight or you can loosen them and increase body roll through a turn.

In most racing video games the A.I that you race against tend to follow the same path every single lap, but in Forza 5 that is a thing of the past using the power of Microsoft’s “Cloud.” The Cloud is a huge amount of virtual servers that Microsoft uses to store information. Forza is the first game to have used a new type of A.I called “Driveatars.” While you race, the Driveatar will collect information about how you race. It will know what turns you go fast or slow through, and if you have a tendency to crash into other peoples cars and attempt to push them out of the way. The Driveatar then sends that info to the “Cloud.” Your Driveatar is then downloaded by other players all over the world and they get to race a digital version of you. You also download Driveatars and race against them. My father and I have already gotten angry at each other because of one’s Driveatar hitting the other. The Driveatar is the best part of the game because it gives the game an everlasting difficulty.

While this game has its amazing parts, there are still some flaws. First, in modern racing, the racers get the chance to qualify and try to start in first place. In Forza 5, you don’t have the option to qualify, and you have to start near the rear of the field in every career race. Second, the races inside the career mode last only 2-5 laps, which is too short to get past 14 cars while racing in a nice clean fashion. Third, the applying of decals is a little goofy. Some spots on quite a few cars are unpaintable without changing the whole color of the car.

Overall the game is amazing, and I absolutely love the game. Visually, it is astounding because of the amount of detail. However, there are some content problems that could easily be fixed. I recommend this game to anyone, but especially to those who love racing or cars or would like to learn how to love racing.