With the recent release of two big racing games, here is an in depth look on which game is a green light to buy. In this two part article, we’ll examine these racers in three categories: single player, multiplayer and extra features. So strap on your seatbelt and let’s take a ride through the 360’s latest top racers.

Forza Motorsport 2 is a simulation racing game offering extremely accurate physics with extensive upgrading and tuning. In this simulation racing game, you are allowed to visually upgrade your car with body kits, an extensive unique vinyl system and performance upgrades. In FM2, developed by Turn 10 Studios, performance upgrades are stepped up from the first game allowing you to change surpassing details of the ride, including the drive train. You can modify your car by changing every little detail, like down force, camber angle, tire pressure and of course fine tuning the engine like a real street mechanic.

Since Forza is a sim racer its damage modeling is extensive, but more in the performance area then visual. Most people, including myself, are disappointed in the visual damage which has set levels of damage offering much less then advertised. On the other hand you can completely ruin your car, performance wise, breaking or damaging each part. The Physics seem to be worse than the original over-stressing the effect of driving off road and sometimes seeming to extreme or almost random. The lack of a cockpit cam is rather disappointing but perhaps understandable considering the 200 or so cars in the game.

DiRT is more of a arcade racer and has some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen on the 360 and more forgiving performance damage but better visual damage where every crack and bump affects you. This game is a much different than the previous Colin McRae game that is much more arcade like and lacks some of the things most rally games have including weather effects which is surprising, and while it has hill climbs there are no descents which would easily have been added in by reversing the climbs. DiRT offers more camera angles giving you two cockpit cameras with one allowing you to looks all around the inside which sadly is the only cam you can do that with. I had though a completely controllable camera where you can rotate 360 degrees around the car was a standard feature but apparently Codemasters doesn’t think so. I don’t know the exact number of cars in the game but its around 50 with various types of cars. There are normal rally cars, CORR Buggies, Rally raid T1 and T4 cars which are huge trucks and SUV’s.

My biggest problem with the game is the amount of tarmac tracks, it’s a rally game for goodness sake, almost 40% of the game is tarmac.

One disadvantage of DiRT’s graphics is very rare frame rate lag you’ll get and quite a bit of pop-up. The pop-up is really only a issue later on in the game when you start racing on hill climbs with the super rally cars because you are going so fast the game cant smoothly bring up the bushes or rocks fast enough and if you’re a little of the path you will sometimes go head-on with a bush at 100 mph and damage your car quite a bit.

Single Player
Forza Motorsport 2’s single player is extremely large featuring multiple types of races including endurance, series and class races. The races not also being numerous but very lengthy with races 30% in the game being 6-12 laps long and the endurance races being 50+ laps. But the problem with that is that you get multiple races on the same track which gets repetitive.

You earn cash based on race and difficulty which makes your driver level grow which unlocks more races, cars, and rewards and earns you cash which you use to buy and upgrade cars. The SP is grouped into different categories like the ones I mentioned before each containing about 15 events. You play to not only complete all the races but to get your driver level to 50. You start at level 0 and earn a varying amount of money to get to level 50 unlocking and winning cars along the way, some cars requiring you to get to level 50 to unlock (think of PGR3’s kudos system). This system makes the game interesting because instead of requiring you to place 1^st in races to advance in the career you only need money making the game easier and possible for the players not as experienced to racers. Completing the SP will take a while, id estimate a upwards of 50-75 hours depending on skill and difficulty your playing on.

DiRT’s SP is configured in a pyramid with 11 tiers starting at the bottom with each tier having less events but more races in each event. You try to earn as many points as possible by placing high in races to unlock more events. Like in Forza you also earn cash but you win a lot more money per race but the cars are generally more expensive, but unlike Forza, DiRT’s performance upgrade is limited to only tuning. But, most of these options don’t affect the cars performance. The Only visual upgrades DiRT has is changing the livery on your car with each car having 4 options. Its rare to get cars as rewards and usually they introduce new cars by forcing you to buy them because of the restrictions in the game.

The SP is relatively short only offering about 25 hours of racing before the game has been completed.

This is the end of Part 1, next week will be comparing the multiplayer and the extra features of the games.

This artical was published on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 12:23 pm and catagorized in Racingfreak92, Review, Xbox 360, Games. You can follow the comments to this entry through this XML (RSS 2.0) feed. You can continue the discussion, or trackback from your own site.