I have more hours on this than my Steam play time suggests as of this review because I've been playing it via PC Game Pass for the last couple months before deciding to buy the Steam version on Weekend Deal.
While I am counting this as a "recommended" review, I am honestly just barely putting it in that territory because yes, this game is FAR from perfect.
Just to get the Elephant in the Room out of the way, yes. The claims from Turn10 and Microslop that this reboot to the Forza Motorsport series was "built from the ground up" are pretty much a lie. While there is SOME truth to it when it comes to the tracks (many of the returning ones do look significantly better than they did in Motorsport 7), the cars are all quite clearly still using the same models from past entries. Some apparently going as far back as the OG Xbox.
But that wasn't the reason I was hesitant to play this at first...
As a long time fan of the Forza series (both Motorsport and Horizon), I was very disappointed when I found out about the many issues this game launched with. Only after renewing my PC Game Pass subscription to play Horizon 6 did I finally decide to give this game a shot despite it now being "dead" thanks to Microsoft downsizing Turn 10 into nothing more than a tech support studio for the Horizon series. Ironically, I think this game's actually in a better spot now in its "abandoned" state than it was when it was actually active!
The main thing that turned me off of this game when it first came out was the fact that Microsoft tried to make it a Live Service title (no doubt trying to follow Sony's lead on trying to hop on that bandwagon...) and they did so by not only requiring you to be online to play the career mode events but making all the career mode events limited time!
Thankfully, with the game being "abandoned", Turn 10 decided to throw players a bone by making all career mode events that have ever been held in this game accessible. The always-online requirement to access said career events unfortunately still remains for some baffling reason... But I now find it oddly tolerable compared to, say, Gran Turismo Sport (and by extension, GT7) because while you are unfortunately limited to free play mode when offline like in that game, you have access to far more cars and tracks (almost every one in the game, in fact) than you do in GT Sport/7's arcade mode.
All in all, I would say this is a decent title to check out on sale if you're into sim racing. It really is, for better or worse, pretty much the closest you're ever gonna get to a game like Gran Turismo on PC outside of the legally grey world of emulation.
