In a bizarre move, 2023’s Big New Forza Game is a minimalist release, presenting a version of a game typically jam-packed with infinitely-repeatable career mode races and a plethora of photorealistic locales with what I imagine to be the bare minimum amount of content the developer could put out without somehow infringing on the very concept of a new Forza game. The photorealistic locales and the wide selection of cars is still here, the very basic aspects of the Forza game work just fine, but the structure of a single-player game is totally missing, with career mode races abstracted almost completely from any kind of tangible infrastructure of progression or even from any wider context at all. This is a game of menus, of tuning cars to ever so slightly alter their numbers in your favor, and of loading into practice races that lead immediately into identical, full-fledged races. This appears to be the entirety of the content in this game, exactly that, with nothing else attached.

Forza Motorsport is one degree of remove from, like, job training software. It’s the most basic possible version of a AAA racing game, one which technically contains everything you’d expect from the genre but totally without what makes a racing sim engaging on a human level. It’s the most a Forza game has ever felt like raw content – of all the games I’ve ever played in my life, Forza Motorsport is the single biggest example I can think of, in history, of a game having been developed for no other reason than a release calendar demanding it. The game is a visual showcase for the Series X, no doubt, but that’s all it is. This is the game you play after you’ve just bought a new Xbox and want to see the shiny photorealistic graphics.