The AI isn’t anything special either unlike the reports I have heard about Forza 2’s predecessor. Forza 2’s AI gives you nothing new and has standard AI that you’d expect in any race sim, for the most part the AI sticks to the racing line and adjusts itself accordingly should you attempt to outbreak them into a corner, or force yourself into a better position. There’s very little new here, but it is at least good to see the AI making mistakes. While I’ve been wrestling my way through the middle of a pack during many races, I’ve often passed clouds of smoke on the trackside where cars ahead of me have spun off, or had collisions. So at least the AI makes mistakes, which is a welcome relief.
One feature I always hoped PGR 3 would implement was the ability to upload screenshots onto the Internet. Well Forza 2 does this easily. At the end of a race during a replay, or simply whilst in your garage you can take photos of your car and add special effects to your snapshot before uploading it to the Forza 2 website, where you can view it in all its glory. You can also see various ranking stats as well as any active auctions you have running or have bids on.
Visuals/Audio
The graphics on Forza 2 are a double edged sword. The demo didn’t help either with its graphics, which seemed to feature jaggies all over the place making gamers question as to weather Turn 10 had implemented Anti Aliasing. Luckily this full game is nowhere near that bad, but jaggies are still there, to a lesser extent. Whether you see them seems to depend on the track and its lighting conditions from my observations.
The tracks aren’t detailed like I was expecting and if you get close to various trackside objects you will see them looking rather bland. Having said that, you’re meant to be racing, not staring at the crowd or examining roadside objects! If you want to criticise them, you’re in the wrong game. Scenery sacrifices for speed are a prominent feature in almost every racing title so I knew I was expecting too much, when I was hoping for realistic looking environments. Forza 2 runs at a consistently silky smooth 60 frames per second without a single hiccup in sight. It looks and feels amazing, yet somewhat too smooth for me. I struggled with the demo for 3 days solid at first. This fast frame rate, combined with the higher end race cars can mean that high speed races on tracks like the Nissan Speedway can be an exhilarating affair, and one twitch of the steering wheel, can send you horribly into the trackside wall sending car parts flying in all directions.
The cars themselves look incredible and so detailed, yet not as good as PGR 3’s car models, although PGR 3 cars have no realistic damage. Reflections accurately reflect off your car as you drive around, and brake discs glow wildly as you brake hard around corners. It just looks like poetry in motion when you see replays. Some cars look photo realistic in places, and if you manage to take a photograph at the right moment you can get a stunningly good photo shots that look so real. Turn 10 have stated that Forza 2 runs at 2xAA in-game, and 4xAA in the replays yet even the replays show slight jaggies in places, so it makes me wonder if they haven’t got their lighting system or something else upto par because it certainly doesn’t look like 4xAA to me, not that I actually care about these things to be honest.
So the track venues themselves are nothing special visually, and the cars are superb lookers but it doesn’t end there oh no! Forza 2’s best feature isn’t the ability to own your dream car, or mod up your car, it’s the ability to customise your car with the in-game car paint editor making every car truly unique. Using this complex editor you can use pre-created shapes/symbols/fonts etc to create unlimited amounts of artwork as each car can have thousands of layers to it. This is perhaps the most outstanding feature I have seen in any racing title ever. The artists out there are producing some of the most gobsmacking high quality designs I have ever seen using a mixture of shapes/brushes and stacking countless layers to blend their designs together to form their dream designs.