Forza Motorsport 8 - First Impressions

What's up bees?
Recently Microsoft has released its new entry into the Forza Motorsport series on Gamepass (4 days ago) and I decided to check it out.

I'm playing the game on a Series S (with its limited SSD, which made me have to uninstall Forza Horizon 4 lol) at quality mode, which is locked 30FPS but with prettier graphics and at 1440p instead of 1080p.
I honestly don't mind 30FPS on racing games, so this is just fine by me.

• The Menus

Everything looks a lot more stylish this time, way better than the Metro inspired UI of Forza Motorsport 7. It's very slick and filled with transparent "widgets."
It's quite nice.

The first option on the menu is the "Welcome Center", it just tells you about new things to do and I can see it being pretty useful as the game gets updates.

Before checking out races, I'd like to check out cars.

And honestly... It feels like there's less this time around. I don't know if I'm right or not. But it just feels like there are less cars than Forza Motorsport 7 or the Horizon games.
Well, knowing Turn 10 I know this will be remedied on future updates, but the launch feels a little bit lackluster.

And we still don't have Dacia cars such as the Sandero or the Duster ;-; not even as rebadged Renaults.

I absolutely love this car

This is my current collection, not a whole lot but the game gave me a Porsche 911 GT2 RS, probably for being a "loyal fan."

Talking about loyal fans, this is the pilot customization screen on the main menu;
As you can see I got the loyal fan outfit for having played the previous games. Most outfits are free but some are paid.
There's not a whole lot here, the "body" section lets you pick between male or female body types (which just means boobies).

I wish we could pick separate helmets.

Now, onto the game.

These are the game modes you get:
Career - The standard career mode, but with less variety.
Featured Multiplayer - Exactly as it says
Free Game - You can choose where and how you race.
Rivals - Racing against ghosts.
Private Multiplayer - Exactly as it says, you can race with friends.

Onto to the career mode. There's a lot on offer here already, lots of events to play, but there's a notable lack of "fun" events, like the ones sponsored by Top Gear on earlier entries... Even if Top Gear kinda sucks now with the new presenters, their events were still fun - but now there's no mention of Top Gear in the game.

Well, maybe having The Grand Tour would be better, I wanna see Clarkson in a Forza game again... Hmm, that's just a pipedream.
Anyway, onto the race! Practical Performance event.

Going from the menu to the race takes at most 5 seconds, it's really really fast on the Series' SSD. I imagine that on my PC it would take a tad little bit longer because my SSDs are SATA.

After loading in, you can choose to go straight to the OBLIGATORY training, or change settings about the event, car, difficulty, game settings or leave.

The training being obligatory kinda pisses me off. I don't really need training, I've been playing on these tracks for years now - and even if I wasn't, the option to skip would be nice. I'll be checking if this is a difficulty setting later or maybe it's just for the first few events.

Anyway, look at those graphics!
Besides the fact that the game looks little bit too saturated, it does look very nice. It's not a huge improvement over 7, but it's good still.

The cockpit view looks really nice and very well detailed.

Anyway, after training's done...

You have to pick what starting position you want. It's not like actual races where your performance on the track decides that.
If you pick lower positions, you get more prize money (and xp, I think).

24 car races are really fun

After the race is done, you get your XP points, credits and the new addition to this game: Car XP points.
Now every car has its own progress bar and as you level up, you can upgrade you cars.

As you can see, my Megane is level 9, which means I can change quite a few things about it to make it faster, or handle better. The menu looks really nice and it's very intuitive to make changes.

You can also press X to have the game do all the upgrades for you in a manner that'll make you get the most balanced car possible.
But if you want to make something ridiculous that's on you, the game will only help you make a balanced well rounded car lol.

Well, that's it about the new Forza game and my first impressions, I really really like it and will keep playing because the driving mechanics feel quite good.
It's a really good game, and if you have Gamepass it won't hurt to check it out!

Thanks for reading!