Review by Scott Puckett with additional commentary from Rob McCaulley

Racing games have apparently turned into the arms race of this console generation, even if it has been awfully one-sided. The Xbox 360 offered up Forza Motorsport 2 and 3, the Playstation 3 eventually answered with Gran Turismo 5, and it’s escalated once again with Forza Motorsport 4. However, when compared to Forza 3, Forza 4 doesn’t always seem like an improvement. Let’s start by looking at what Forza 4 does right.

First, and probably most noticeably, Forza 4 eliminates Forza 3’s car leveling – players now earn affinity for a manufacturer by winning races while driving that manufacturer’s cars. As long as you’re driving, say, a Ford or a Toyota, you’ll earn affinity for that manufacturer, and the results quickly speak for themselves – by the time players reach Level 4 affinity with a manufacturer, that manufacturer’s parts are free. While some players may miss the variety of after-market parts available in previous games, this is a significantly greater reward than a 25% discount on certain parts from a specific manufacturer after reaching level 5 on a single car. As an added bonus, manufacturers will also reward players with credits for reaching new affinity levels; in short, if you’re driving for Honda and winning, Honda is happy that you’re doing it, giving you parts to help you do it more and giving you money to buy more Honda cars. This is a very good thing, and a very smart change.

Another significant change benefits people who spent hours creating vinyl groups in Forza 3. Forza 4 allows players to import their Forza 3 profile, giving them access to some of the cars that had and preserving their hard work by allowing them to import all of their groups.

There are other changes which feel more incremental, changes consistent with annual updates to sports titles. Forza 4 offers a couple of new race types – Auto Cross (slaloming through cones on a track) and TopGear challenges like driving through bowling pins with your car, as well as a new race type in which the objective is to pass as many cars as possible in a given amount of time. It offers a few new tracks –the TopGear test track and Indianapolis Motor Speedway among them – along with tracks returning from Forza 2 and Forza 3.

And then there’s the maddening changes which simply seem to get in the way of racing. There’s no way to skip past videos, whether you want to listen to an announcer or not. Another obvious example is an animated map which appears between events in career mode. An announcer talks about the next event while the map moves to the track where the event takes place and then more load screens appear. I was so positive that this took longer than Forza 3 that I measured the time between one race ending and the next beginning with a stopwatch. To Forza 4’s credit, it takes 5-10 seconds less to get from one race to the next than Forza 3 did, but it still feels longer.

Ultimately, Forza 4, despite some frustrating elements, is an improvement over Forza 3, but not as much of an improvement as Forza 3 was over Forza 2. Forza 3 felt like the shift from one console generation to the next. Forza 4 feels more like a well-polished iteration which doesn’t make many radical changes but provides some nice updates.

With that said, let’s move on to accessibility.



Accessibility Issues / Concerns

Forza 4 offers 13 controller layouts, one of which uses the left trigger for gas, making it the best option for gamers who have use of their left hand, since the left stick controls steering. None of the layouts offers an option to use the right stick for steering instead of free look. Customization is limited to options like switching the clutch and handbrake controls.

Like Forza 3, players can rewind portions of a race if they run into trouble (or another car, or retaining wall, or guardrail, or … you get the idea). Forza 4 continues to offer assisted braking, assisted steering to correct over or understeering and so on. Forza 4 rewards drivers for selecting greater difficulty levels; if you choose to play with assists turned off, you’ll earn more credits, but Forza 4 doesn’t penalize people who need or want a more accessible racing experience and play with assistive modes enabled in career play. Selecting races from the Event List offers a few more assistive options, including disabling upgrades in opponents’ cars, and enabling those assistive settings will reduce the credits a player earns.

The AI in career mode races seems noticeably more competitive; even with assists enabled, some races in career mode will be extremely difficult (as one example, I restarted one race at least 10 times and probably more than 15). Likewise, AI-controlled drivers seem vastly more likely to try to pass the player (and often succeed) than they did in Forza 3, meaning that the right stick (which allows the player to look around the car) is now a more important control since it lets players know where to steer to prevent an opponent from passing.

Rob points out that the Hire A Driver feature returns, offering gamers a way to effectively skip past especially problematic races or tracks but Forza 4 adds a wrinkle by disabling this mode for certain race types. Autocross and Top Gear bowling races may cause problems for some gamers with precision problems since the timed Autocross event requires players to street between cones, often making sharp turns, while the Top Gear bowling races require players to run over enough bowling pins in a single lap to reach a specific score. Although players can use rewind in both, neither race type allows players to hire a driver and both race types appear in the career mode, meaning that players have to play through them to complete their career.

Likewise, Forza 4 adds another race type in which the objective is to pass a given number of cars in a set number of laps and a race type in which the objective is to catch up to an AI-controlled opponent while racing through traffic. The latter race type can be exceptionally difficult, even with all assists enabled, because your opponent not only has a head start, but the traffic will actively get in the way, like an Autocross slalom with moving targets. Both of these race types appear in career mode and both disable the Hire A Driver feature, adding yet another layer of difficulty and problems for gamers with precision concerns.

Generally speaking, these changes and additions make Forza 4 less accessible than Forza 3. It is still possible to play Forza using only an acceleration control and the left stick for steering, but the game is more difficult and requires more precision than its predecessor due to the AI changes and new race types. At the same time, Forza 4 offers fewer options to bypass especially troublesome events and effectively requires players to complete them. Rewind mitigates – but does not eliminate – these concerns.

Forza 4 presents the same challenges for color blindness that Forza 2 and Forza 3 did – the suggested line still uses green to indicate when to accelerate and red to indicate when to brake, and the upgrade shop still uses red and green to show whether a part diminishes or improves a car’s performance. In terms of color blindness, Forza 4 offers no improvement.

(ROB: I must not be able to see the reds and greens used – I thought everything was just white in the upgrade shop, but since they use the little up/down arrows to indicate whether the weight’s increasing or decreasing, I don’t really find that to be a big deal. As far as the racing line goes, I can see the red to indicate breaking, but not the green as far as color goes. My issue with the driving line is that at certain tracks, it gets lost in the glare on the track or among the paint. I’m with you on the no improvements part.)

Rob is correct in that the suggested line can get lost in glare at times (typically afternoon races when the player is driving in a westerly direction), but this is true for all gamers, not just gamers with low vision. On certain tracks, the driving surface in some places doesn’t offer sufficient contrast to make the suggested line stand out and while this may be more problematic for gamers with low vision, it still affects all players. Likewise, arrows also show improvements or reductions in horsepower, torque and the like.

Forza 4 autosaves after races and purchasing cars, but players need to manually save their progress when painting cars, creating vinyl groups and so on. This is also carried over from Forza 3.

(ROB: They could have definitely done something about that, though I can see why they didn’t – who really wants their car being saved when cycling through every shade of paint in the game. Not I. What does bother me though, is with my color discrepancy issues and not being able to tell some shades of blue from green is that they aren’t labeled green or blue or so on. It’s not so much an accessibility issue so much as I’d just like to know that I’m painting my car “electric orange” and not “metallic flamingo”. Maybe it is an issue of accessibility.)

Once again, subtitling remains Forza Motorsport’s biggest flaw because, again, subtitles really don’t exist in the game. It’s actually worse in Forza 4 than it was in Forza 3, because Forza 3 occasionally provided paraphrased text summarizing what the announcer was saying. In Forza 4’s career mode, the announcer will talk about the next event on the map screen, but no subtitles appear. Likewise, in the Auto Vista mode, a new Forza 4 feature which allows players to virtually tour cars, there is extensive voice-over narration with no subtitles at all.

I will note that the lack of subtitles should not affect deaf gamers’ ability to play Forza 4. There is no narration during racing and that is the core component of the game. There is no narration in designing how a car looks or upgrading parts and that’s another core component.

However, Turn 10 felt the narration was important enough to include in the game – that meant writing the script, hiring voice talent (including Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson), recording the narration and so on. It meant spending money to put it in the game. If it’s so important that it warrants that attention, why doesn’t the game feature subtitles on the world map in career mode, and especially in the new Auto Vista mode which seems to be one of the innovations that Turn 10 created for Forza 4? The Auto Vista mode is inaccessible to deaf gamers because of this omission. Does that mean deaf gamers can’t play Forza 4? Not at all. It just means one of Forza 4’s brand new features is wholly unavailable to them.

Although I know there’s debate about this, my personal feeling on the subject is that if a developer considered something sufficiently important to justify narration and the associated expenses with including it in the game, then it is sufficiently important to warrant subtitles so that deaf gamers are not excluded from that content, regardless of whether it affects their ability to play the game. A developer will only spend money on things it values; clearly, Forza 4, in adding narration from Jeremy Clarkson along with its normal narration, shows that it values its script and its voiceovers, but that content is not available to deaf gamers.

(ROB: I agree with you 100% on the topic of subtitles.)

And isn’t that the intent behind accessibility – making sure that people aren’t excluded? And shouldn’t it be frustrating when something as simple as subtitling narration is almost completely ignored, especially when it’s a game developer operating as part of Microsoft, a company which knows a thing or two about accessibility? And shouldn’t we consider a game an accessibility failure when it omits something so simple and easy to include?

If a building omitted ramps, we wouldn’t consider it accessible. If elevator buttons don’t have Braille on them, we wouldn’t consider them accessible. And since Forza 4 omits subtitles while expanding the amount and character of narration in the game and adding a well-known narrator, it’s hard to think of it as accessible for deaf gamers, regardless of whether they can play it.

(ROB: Maybe this needs to be an article all of its own – Forza 4’s dramatic failure to include subtitles when they would have made this game a complete game to those with hearing impairments as opposed to excluding them from one of the best parts of the game, in my opinion, Auto Vista.)



Mobility: 7
Visual: 7
Hearing: 1

My original purchase price: $59.99
Recommended purchase price: $34.99

At A Glance

Precision: The Hire A Driver feature returns from Forza 2 and 3. Forza 4 includes the automatic braking feature introduced in Forza 3, enabling players to focus only on steering and holding the accelerator down. Rewind mode is present and still allows players to reverse the game for a few seconds to correct a mistake. Even with Rewind, gamers with precision concerns may find the Autocross slalom and Top Gear bowling events, as well as passing a certain number of cars and especially chasing your opponent through traffic difficult since Forza 4 does not allow players to hire a driver for those events and they must be completed in career mode. Recommend rating of 6 out of 10.

Deaf Gamers: There is narration which is not subtitled, including all narration in the new Auto Vista mode. The lack of subtitles should not prevent deaf gamers from playing Forza 4, but cannot be overlooked due to the expanded amount of narration and the lack of subtitles rendering an entire game mode inaccessible to deaf gamers. Recommend rating of 1 out of 10.

One-handed: Accessibility for gamers with use of only one hand is similar to Forza 3. AI-controlled cars can and often will pass players; being able to look around the car using the right stick can be helpful to know where to steer to block drivers from passing. One controller layout out of 13 places acceleration on the left trigger; steering is always on the left stick. Steering cannot be remapped to the right stick. Automatic braking returns, meaning players can use only an acceleration and steering control. However, the more challenging AI makes free look – and the use of the right stick – more important, resulting in a somewhat less accessible game than Forza 3. Recommend rating of 8 out of 10.

Subtitled: There are no subtitles. Recommend rating of 1 out of 10.

Color Blind: The game uses red and green in the Suggested Line assistive mode to indicate when to brake, and when to maintain speed or accelerate, respectively. The game also uses red and green to indicate whether an upgrade part represents a performance decrease or improvement. While Forza 4 also assigns numeric values which change with certain parts, some upgrades offer a nominal improvement that will not trigger a numeric change on some screens and is only displayed as a color. Gamers with vision concerns may also experience difficulties with seeing the suggested line on some tracks or in some lighting due to glare or insufficient contrast on the driving surface. Recommend rating of 7 out of 10.

Checkpoint / Save System: Forza 4 saves after the player completes a race or buys a car, vinyl group, etc. Painting cars, and creating and applying vinyl groups require manual saves. Recommend rating of 10 out of 10.