Forza Motorsport 4 (2011)

I have no other explanation. It does some of the important things so right and then fucks up the others real bad. This has always been the case with the series for me - there's always a 'but' that prevents FM games from being truly special.

The good things that define the series for me, like gorgeous visuals, great technical performance, and fantastic driving experience, are all present in FM4. A 'respectable amount of racing tracks and cars' from FM3 is even more so thanks to quite a few additions. For instance, FM4 introduces Bernese Alps, one of my favorite racing tracks in the series. Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson's and James May's commentaries are a nice addition as well. The career mode has a familiar seasonal structure from FM3, but is much more fun this time around:

• races within seasons are now organized in such a way, that if you're willing to do so you can drive a different car each time, which keeps things fresh;
• well balanced race restrictions prevent you from using relatively overpowered cars;
• car bowling, autocross, overtake challenges, and head-to-head races with traffic cars involved add some nice variety;
• no more obligatory 15-20 minutes R1/R2-class races, that plagued the later seasons of FM3 (I find these cars the least fun to drive as they're too hard to control with a gamepad).

Unfortunately, a few downsides stood in the way of FM4's being my favorite entry in the series. Right off the bat I was baffled by the lack of audio configuration options, which I mentioned before. At first, I just couldn't hear the music distinctly, but soon beats in background got annoying, so I chose to turn the music off completely. No big deal, you might say, but I consider a compilation of music tracks to be a huge part of any racing game's personality. And then comes my biggest complaint - AI difficulty in the career mode. Iirc, FM4 is the only Forza game (Horizon subseries included), that has no AI difficulty setting for the career mode - instead there's some sort of a dynamic difficulty present (a dude named Randver has quoted the explanation by the developers here). Call this system as smart and advanced as you want, but it just doesn't work. The game is ridiculously easy. In the absolute most of the races I took the lead on the first lap. To be fair, with the new career structure I changed cars after almost every race, so I wasn't really bored with driving, but to find any kind of challenge I had to either give opponents a head start or goof around, or just pick a slightly inferior car. And I'm not even that good at sim racing games, believe me.

There's another minor thing I'd like to mention. Not that it mattered that much, but I'll leave it here just in case any future racing game developer reads my rant. If you, like the FM4 creators, think that a 2-race tournament that involves a player driving the same car on the same track is fun, trust me it isn't. It's just not. However, there are quite a few of those in the course of the career. What were they thinking?

It pains me to see Forza Motorsport being so good technically and visually, but then constantly fail so hard in the career and music departments. I would love to see a truly great FM game, I still do. However, FM4 was followed by the series' lowest point to date - FM5 (maybe some day I will share my frustration here). In my opinion, FM 6 and 7 were just okay. What keeps hope in me is that after FM7 Turn 10 finally got a chance not to rush things and probably give more thinking to every aspect of the game. FM7 has been released in 2017 and the rumor is 2021 is the Horizon year, so a 2022 release, I guess? It means a 5-year development cycle. Fingers crossed.

Here's the audio settings screen from Forza Motorsport 3:

And here's how it looks in Forza Motorsport 4:

Sincerely, fuck you FM4.

The game's playlist looks decent, but I can barely hear the beats in the background, because the engine's sound is too loud and the game doesn't provide you with the means to fix it.