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Windows 10 puts the pedal to the metal with Forza Motorsport 6: Apex
Sun, 3rd Jul 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is a great looking racing game that controls well and has tons of car customisation and tuning options, a wide range of car types, and a range of different challenge types throughout the career mode; race, drifting, and so on…

The game handles very well and you can adjust the difficulty at any time if you're new, or maybe you're looking for a challenge. Putting it on the lower difficulties will enable things like steering assist and braking assist, to help you nail those critical corners, whereas setting to higher difficulties will disable the various assists and enable more realistic effects when driving.

Interior

Another thing I noticed about Forza 6 Apex is that some of the graphical effects were very well done, like rain droplets on the windshield. Overall, the game looks gorgeous, and the level of detail implemented for the small things, like the aforementioned rain droplets, the car interior, etc. add up to make the game look realistic, and the game was optimised and balanced well enough that it didn't suffer any performance hits as a result.

Onto the gameplay; I solely played the career/tour mode in the beta, as I'm not very good at racing games and just wanted to sit down by myself and get a feel for the controls and the game in general. The career mode has various challenge types sprinkled throughout the tour mode. You start off with some standard races, and then it gives you a break and you do a drifting challenge, then you go back to standard races again. There seemed to only be one drifting challenge mixed in with all the standard races in the beta, but I'm guessing there will be a lot more content in the full game.

American metal

Each stage of the tour mode progresses through the different eras and generations of cars, starting from Pony cars, through to the Italian Greats, onto 2013 Ariel, and then some more. As you can see, there's a large variety of cars from different generations, and each car you unlock is fully customisable with different colours and colour styles, and can even be tuned to an extent. You can adjust the Tires, Gearing, Alignment, Anti-Roll Bars, Springs, Damping, Aero, Brake, and Differential. After adjusting these fine-tunes, the panel on the left-hand side will show you the benchmarks with the acceleration, including top speed, braking distance, and lateral G's. As you can see, there is plenty of fine-tuning available for each car you own so that you can create the ultimate racing machine.

There is also ‘Free Play' mode, where you can choose a track and car, change the rules and conditions, and just have fun racing in any way you like.

Night driver

Back at the main menu, there is also the ‘Driver Record' section, where you can view your rating, replays, Drivatar, change your badge, change your driver, view all of your saved photos, view your statistics, and change your homespace. However, I think one of the coolest features is the ‘Forzavista', where you can learn about all the different cars, and with some cars, you can even ‘explode' them to see the internal design.

Forza Motorsport 6: Apexis a great looking game that controls well, with tons of customisation and play styles, as well as some small little features to make it stand out just that extra mile. You can currently download and play the beta from the Windows Store on Windows 10. The full game is set to be released somewhere around the middle of this year, so likely in the next few months.

  • Controls well
  • Great graphics
  • Variety of challenge types throughout career mode
  • Lots of car customisation and tuning
  • Huge range of cars and car types

Verdict: 8/10