You either play racing games or you don’t. It’s that simple. You’re either one of those people who live to shave 0.001 seconds off your best lap time around Nürburgring by tweaking the gears ratio and putting on soft tyres, or you pass by those games with cars plastered on their cover to reach for that one with the blood, the Locusts and the chainsaws. There is no in between. There is no halfhearted commitment. You either play racing games or you don’t. Like we say, it’s that simple.

If you don’t play racing games, you’re probably reading this out of sheer boredom or because your toilet break is taking longer than you expected. Some bad news – your bowels are broken! Some good news – your forced curiosity in this review could lead to a changing of your racing-game hating ways! That’s because Forza Motorsport 2, whether by accident or by design, could well end up bridging that elusive gap between those who play racing games and those who don’t.

Its intention was to throw option after option after option at the hardcore players until they drown in an ecstasy of options, crying their last breath about how the anti-roll bars can be tweaked while losing themselves to Forza’s addictive charm. That’s what Forza Motorsport 2 does. That is its thing. Options. It has options coming out of its exhaust pipe and every other car-based orifice as well as more customisation tweaks than you’ll know what to do with. Mini-Schumachers are well catered for and they could feasibly spend an entire evening doing nothing but tweaking their car, test-driving it, tweaking some more, test-driving it again, tweaking some more, notice the sun is starting to come up, wonder if it’s worth getting a few hours’ sleep, decide it’s not, then tweaking some more.

The side effect of all of this is that you don’t have to be a racing pro to feel as though you’re making progress. Even racing noobs who careen around the track with the grace of an Essex joyrider with steering wheel in one hand and can of Special Brew in the other will be treated to a slow drip-feed of in-game credits (known as CR), which can be spent upgrading cars. Forza Motorsport 2 does a good job of patting you on the back at every opportunity, even when you finish in last having been lapped three times by the race winner.

“Congratulations, you have won 0 CR,” it informs you without a trace of irony or humour. You giggle to yourself, then hit Restart and try again, just for that tiny inch of progression that Forza Motorsport 2 allows you. They might not be the biggest of carrots dangled in front of you each time but damn, they sure are tasty. With the promise of further tweaking and upgrading that your CR affords you, you keep going. There’s no such thing as too small a victory in Forza 2. Everything counts towards a bigger picture.

The handling? Depends on your settings. As previously explained, Forza Motorsport 2 is a game of options. Not the most exhilarating statement but one that roughly translates into Exciting Game Speak™ like this. Do you see cars as mere obstacles to be overcome in your pursuit of a flawless lap clocking in at under two minutes? Then go right ahead and play. You’ll find the handling weighty, the margin of error slight and you’ll also find tailspinning rather hard to pull off, so you won’t get frustrated with careless opponents online or offline. Have fun!

As for the rest of you, do you see cars as things to bounce off to take corners at full speed? Then perhaps you’d like to turn the driving assistance, such as ABS and traction on, turn damage off and have a braking line thread you through each corner so you don’t get into too much trouble. You can violently stab at the brakes, slam on the accelerator and you won’t be punished with a steady, inevitable, depressing spinout. Instead, you can ping pong around the tracks like Lewis Hamilton and punch the air at feeling as though you’ve genuinely accomplished something, despite Forza Motorsport 2 quietly propping you up from the sidelines. Have fun! And as for the rest of you who didn’t pick either option… what kind of games do you like anyway? The ones with blood, Locusts and chainsaws, you say? Scram. Stop causing trouble in our reviews.

Yet the reason that the minor upgrades to the cars offer such a strong sense of progression, is that they genuinely affect the handling. Whether it’s the larger gear ratios giving you a narrow advantage on tracks with long straights or softer suspension affecting each corner, every slight adjustment to the sliders can be felt on the track. Great news for the pros who want to get mucky with Forza Motorsport 2’s interiors and also something for the noobs to play around with, their curiosity proving too much as they kick all the settings out of whack and ended up racing with no gears, flat tyres and a missing wheel. It’s all good, clean fun whatever your level of dedication is.

There’s brilliant Live support for Forza Motorsport 2 and it’s evident that there’s also awareness from the developers of how big the car tweaking side of it can be. Cars can be bought from other players (with the original owner’s GamerTag listed among the stats), traded or even given away as presents. It’s testament to the customisation side that the Live support has had to expand to accommodate this. There’s even a slider for each car showing its overall rarity rating, depending on its look, upgrades and tweaking. It’s an absolute certainty that Forza Motorsport 2 will benefit from a huge playing community, which will mean there are loads of cars to choose from on a virtual marketplace where everyone who has a copy of the game and a broadband connection becomes an online Del Boy, flogging cars to every Tom, Dick and Schumacher who is interested. The Forza Motorsport 2 community will be massive and, let’s face it, popularity has never hurt a game’s appeal, has it? Well, apart from FIFA maybe. And film licence videogames. Quick! Let’s move on before we accidentally undermine the point that we’re trying to make!

In the looks department (just down the hall past the sound department but before you reach gameplay), Forza Motorsport 2 isn’t all that, drifting around the passable ‘some of that’ category instead. The graphics whore in us all is always the first to say what’s on its mind and so, X360 was swamped with blanket opinions from those who wandered over to see where the distant sounds of throaty engine roars was coming from. “It doesn’t look that good,” most of them said, nonchalantly sipping a cup of tea. Some of them then tilted their head at a slight angle, reassessing their snapshot opinion immediately afterwards, then sighed. “Forza 2, right?” Right. Another tilt of the head and a pause. “Nah, doesn’t look that good,” they say, with their backs already turned as they walk off.

It’s an understandable reaction. The graphics are the only real disappointment with Forza Motorsport 2. Throw it against the Ridge Racers and Need For Speeds of this world and it comes up roses, smirking and thumbing its nose at an easy victory. Throw it against Project Gotham Racing 3 and it tries to talk its way out of a clean fight, knowing it’s in over its head and that sometimes, even David realises he can’t always beat Goliath. There’s a clinical attention to detail, true, yet it seems almost too clinical, highlighting the blemishes and warts alongside the fancies and flourishes. While tracks and cars are adorned with obsessive detail that make the most cynical of gamers flutter their eyelids in approval, some textures are truly hideous, soiling the overall look. It’s as though Turn 10 grabbed some textures from the original Xbox title when everyone’s back was turned. Well, we’re looking Turn 10’s way again, and something just doesn’t look right. PGR 3 might have smeared over its graphical cracks with a heavy-handed blur effect fit for a late night Channel Five flick, but nobody cared about the visual short cuts taken. Graphic whore approved, therefore the player approved. That’s the one single equation Forza Motorsport 2 fails to recognise.

It’s not about the graphics though! No, Forza Motorsport 2 is about the gameplay. So apart from the Time Trial and Free Run modes, where it’s little more than man versus track, you’ll be spending most of your time diving into Career mode. Here, you have to accrue enough winnings to level up. Levelling up means new tracks, new tracks means new cars, new cars means more winnings, more winnings means more levelling up. Sandwich some customisation and tweaking between that meaty car sandwich and you have yourself a Career mode. One that lacks real personality, true, but how many racing games can you think of with a Career mode with personality? Those with cut-scenes and a storyline, and we all know how much those suck. Forza Motorsport 2 is fine. It’s a pure hit of racing goodness with no fluff or paraphernalia to obscure its vision. In other words – you get your head down and you race.

Eventually, looking after your cars takes precedence over actual racing. You unlock extra cars and sometimes win them on the track too, so a minifleet of cars is soon built up. Cars that need to be upgraded to bring out their full potential. You can even look at them as blank canvases for you to throw ugly vinyls, horrifying paint jobs and nauseating decals at, so you can race them online and have Americans tell you why pink is a poor choice of colour in a way that only they can. There’s only a limited sense of pride in doing this offline. After all, when your audience is limited to you and perhaps an uninterested other half, what’s the point? You need Xbox Live to show your creations off to the world. That’s when you take an unmatched sense of pride in tinkering with your vehicles and browsing what everyone else has come up with.

Minor grumbles? Some of the tracks have carried over from the original Forza Motorsport, a move that will see fans cross their arms in a child-like huff, especially when those tracks go through the usual hey-let’s-reverse-them-andcount- it-as-an-extra-track treatment. The original pick Europe/North America/Asia means you’re locked out from two territories at the start, a feature that was annoying in the predecessor and is still annoying now. And the graphics. We’ve already moaned about them but they are a real letdown.

That’s it for minor grumbles though, as it’s nearly all major joy making up Forza Motorsport 2. It doesn’t matter what your stance on racing games might be. You might be one of those who soaks up every minor detail of customisation and tweaks the springs on his Audi GT to push its horsepower into the B-Class category or you might be one of those who just wants to throw a few high-end cars around tarmac corners. Whatever your stance, whatever your opinion, whatever your level of expertise, Forza Motorsport 2 will make you very happy. And when all is said and done, isn’t being very happy what you really want?