Well, I just put in a few laps on the Forza demo, and I guess it's alright. There are plenty of cars to choose from, but you really can't get a good judge of what the full game will give with only one track (and a sucky one at that). I've read on another board where people were less than impressed with the graphics, but I think it's because the particular track that Microsoft has put in the demo. It's the same track that was in the MotoGP demo, and if you remember that one, it's not a spectacular track by any means.
The cars look good, and the damage is a welcome addition. I cut across one of the s-curves and nailed another car in the side. That car's spoiler and one side mirror flew off, in addition to both my mirrors and some black curved bar from the front. Another car hit me in the side during this, and while doing a frame-by-frame advance in reply mode, you could see his fender crumple up. Nothing spectacular, but could've been with more speed involved. One thing I did like was that this happened on the first lap, and the debris remained on the side of the track through all 3 laps. Not sure what would happen if some was on the track. In another race, I nailed a car in the rear that was braking for a curve, and his taillights and band window shattered. There was a slight animation of glass flying through the air, but it would've been cool to see it land on the track.
The replay system, however, was both awesome and repulsive at the same time. When you first get in there, the amount of real-time info is staggering. All kinds of constantly changing readouts while your watching the replay. However, once you start trying to fast forward, rewind, and switch cars, it becomes a mess. Switching cars results in a very brief black loading screen (maybe a second or two at most). I imagine this is to load the data for that particular car that's on the screen. This ties into rewinding and fast forwarding. You simply hit a button, and it will jump forward or back in time, again with the 1-2 second black loading screen. It seems like the more you hit the button in succession, the farther back it will go. You have no control have far in time it will go, which sucks. In addition to this, if you have the race paused at a particular spot, and you want to view from another car's perspective, when you switch to another car, it automatically starts playing at full speed again. And you can't get over to the stop button in enough time without the race time proceeding a few seconds. Then, if you start to try and rewind to get back there, it resets your cursor back to the beginning of the line of VCR-functions, and chances are that you'll pass that moment again, resulting in frustration.
All in all, the replay feature was completely borked, IMO. The black loading screen takes away from it, and the lack of real-time, user-controlled rewind/fast-forward fuction blows. And last, but not least, has anyone else figured out how to exit the damn replay? After I was done being pissed off trying to get to certain parts of the race, I could not figure out how to get out of it. I hit every button on the controller. After that, I just didn't care to use their crappy fast-forward to get to the end of the replay, which would've taken probably 30 seconds given their crappy system.
So, can you tell that the replay pisses me off?
My opinions are as follows:
- Graphics look good, and I think they'll shine more with tracks with better surroundings. Car models looks good, basically on par, if not a touch better than PGR3. Damage looks good for what it is, and is a welcome addition.
- Sound is alright, but I've never been big into cars sounding like they should.
- Control feels spot-on.
- Replay system sucks.....hard.
- Menus are fast, and loading times weren't bad at all. Car selection was pretty fast as well, with hardly no time to load the car models while browsing through them (2 seconds tops).
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