Review: Forza Motorsport 5

Jake Dubusker ’15
I’ve been having a difficult time deciding what to review lately; I’m not rich enough to be able to afford a next-gen console before any good games come out which leaves me with just PC releases, and aside from beating the dead horse that is the new Thief remake I’m left with very few options. Instead, I’ve decided to review the car racing game Forza Motorsport 5, which released for the Xbox One last year. I’ve never before extensively played a racing game, so reviewing this game proved to be difficult lacking the proper perspective for racing games, even more so since I still have not played the game. You might think that I would need to actually play the game to write a review, but I didn’t get to where I am by following rules, so let’s give it a try.
But first, has anyone played Torchlight 2? It’s a dungeon crawler game much like the Diablo series. I bought it after I couldn’t afford or even run Diablo 3 on my computer. You set off on the quest to defeat some evil demons who are trying to steal Christmas or something, it’s not important, you’re good they’re bad. It has that dungeon crawler quality where your reward for completing quests and clearing dungeons seems to be an endless supply of inferior pants. Leveling up and getting stronger has an addicting quality for a while but I got bored after a while, since I was basically doing the exact same routine but in a slightly different setting and the pants everything dropped were slightly stronger. It’s hardly worth the $20 full price; I’d recommend it only on sale for around $5.
Back on topic, Forza Motorsport 5 is a game about cars, and in that respect it’s very similar to Driver: San Francisco, an open world game about doing many crazy things with cars. It puts a new spin on driving games in that your character has the power to project his ghost over the world and possess any car on the road. It adds new life to the usual driving game missions when a mission to win a street race no longer means “drive faster and more skillfully than your competition” but instead means “possess oncoming traffic and crash them all head-on with your competition until they’re all KO’d.” The game keeps a light tone by making sure that nobody dies even with the player’s daredevil stunts, pedestrians all jump out of the way of your car last second and nobody dies in car crashes. Cars have a tendency to spin out rather easily, but like all things you’ll get better at handling it with practice and the possession mechanic means that with 2 quick button presses you’ll be back on the road.
Sorry, I just can’t seem to stay on topic, back to the game I’m reviewing. Black Knight Sword is a retro-style side-scroller game made by Suda51, since I haven’t praised him enough in my previous reviews. The plot is actually fairly simple, a man tries to commit suicide, but instead of dying he becomes a powerful black knight whose goal is to kill the kingdom’s evil princess who keeps making everyone’s lives miserable. The game feels like it was written, voiced, and developed by Monty Python. You collect pots of Cat Head Grass that are hidden throughout levels, and you buy upgrades for the knight from a giant floating eyeball with a dozen mouths, who speaks with a cartoonishly silly high pitched “woman” voice. Everything in the game is played for absurdity and laughs, but it’s also more than a bit difficult. If you lose all your lives you start the level over with none of the upgrades that you’ve spent all the previous levels buying, and even easy mode has its troublesome moments. For all its flabbiness though, it’s only $10 on PSN or Xbox Live Arcade, so it’s worth a try. Wait, I’m still supposed to be talking about Forza, how many words do I have left in