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Forza Motorsport Review: Page 3
The Gameplay cont.
In Forza Motorsport you pay with credits. You earn credits by winning or selling parts or cars. You spend credits by buying cars and upgrading them. You won’t need an accountant, as you’ll receive plenty of credits to upgrade your cars fairly well. The main purpose of credits is to increase your level, which is based on your cumulative credits. This progressive system of levels will unlock new cars, open relationships with aftermarket manufacturers and give you discounts.
The difficulty of the game can be adjusted and directly affects your earnings. Besides basic aids such as Traction Control, Stability Management and ABS, is one of Forza Motorsport’s unique features: the suggested line. This is a line projected on the racing track indicating a good line, turning green if you can accelerate or red if you really need to start thinking about slamming onto those brakes. The suggested line teaches a gamer unfamiliar with racing simulations the basics of entering, apexing and exiting a corner.
As one of the few racing simulations on a console, Forza Motorsport features damage. Real damaging damage. Damage affecting your car's body as well as its performance. Touching a wall leaves paint at that particular place and scratches on your car will remain for the entire race. Crashing into opponents or walls will obviously cause significant damage, but continuously bottoming out your suspension or running high revs will also decrease your car’s performance. Careless driving or taking shortcuts is penalized with time added to your current lap time. This ridiculously simple system is the perfect solution guaranteeing honest and fair racing.
Increasing the level of the AI, setting damage to full simulation or turning off driving aids, rewards you with a percentage-based bonus of your race earnings. The A.I. is perhaps one of the most challenging seen today’s racing games. When set on high, you’ll be in for a real race against competitors with some human-like behaviour. They look for places to attempt a pass, block you when you try to make an attempt, use your slipstream, and make small errors. However, the AI is not perfect by all means. They have sporadic, aggressive moments making fair racing a bit of a problem. One of the most frustrating characteristics is their near perfect braking. It’s one thing to get behind an opponent, but passing him is something completely different. Not being able to drive defensively is a serious flaw in the A.I. in Forza Motorsport.
Besides the huge Career Mode, there are several other offline modes available from the start. The Arcade Mode puts you in the seat racing against other A.I. drivers. Finishing first unlocks a car and for each three races a special car is unlocked. Free Run allows you to practice in any car on any tracks. Finally, Time Trials is a tough mode requiring you to aim for the fastest single-lap time on a specific track with a specific car. Evidentely, every lap time is uploaded to the leader boards.