Forza has always been a series that rejoiced in the intoxicating mix of beauty and power; oil and paint. Gear ratios, camber and suspension stiffening cross paths seamlessly with decals, vinyl groups and paint mixing. Can Forza Motorsport 5 bring that balance to a new generation?

The driving in Forza games has always been a little more forgiving than we might expect from a pure simulation. It’s always been easier to handle with the small range of control that an analogue stick offers, compared to the large range of motion you might get from a steering wheel. That’s a good thing, of course, because there’s only one wheel that currently works with the Xbox One (we didn’t test it) and that’s a pricey TX Ferrari 458 Italia Edition which costs just a penny under £350.

So, the cars tend to be relatively easy to get sideways and just as easy to correct back to the racing line. You probably don’t spin as often as you should do and the zones of sensitivity on the sticks are just about perfect for replicating a fun, broadly forgiving, driving experience.

That driving experience in Forza 5 is made so much better by the new Xbox One controller and its added trigger vibrations, but it might be difficult to comprehend just how much of a difference this makes to your driving without experiencing it first hand. The controller gives you varying degrees of feedback to the left and right triggers which let you know if you’re too hard on the brakes or accelerator, so you can now feel when your wheels are losing traction and make the tiny adjustments needed to correct the problem.

Driving one of the new open wheel IndyCars around Spa, via the on-console video capture system.

The other big step forward for this next generation Forza game is the Drivatar AI system. Instead of traditional racing game AI, this system tracks how you drive and uploads it to the cloud, where it’s downloaded by all your friends and used to inform the AI of their opponents on the track. You’ll even see real friend’s names and Gamertags over the cars the Drivatars are controlling while you race.

Essentially this takes the offline experience and makes it much more like online multiplayer. That’s a blessing and a curse. The benefit of this is that each race is now much more varied and dynamic because there’s a much greater range of driving styles and decisions being made.

The problem is that human racers are much less predictable, prone to erratic behaviour and more aggressive. So every race now features drivers that slam their brakes on halfway down a short straight for no good reason. Every race has drivers who veer sideways, off the racing line, to ram into you as you try to draft past them. Every race has drivers who nudge you going into corners and disappear into the distance as you reverse out of the wall you’re buried in. There’s no way to turn it off, either; you can make the drivers easier to get around but they won’t stop driving like idiots.

The career races are all organised into championships based on car types and classes. There’s no longer the possibility of, say, taking an upgraded and tuned hatchback into a series and blowing away the factory forecourt opposition. You’re all limited by class in every race. So this means that, for example, a Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX can only race in the Sport Compact Early Championship if you don’t fit a better fuel system to it. This keeps things on a level playing field, but it also means that each series usually has a particular car that you should have picked and if you’re not in it then you’ll spend the entire series struggling to keep up with no way to give yourself a boost in the garage.

The onus on finishing first is gone though, probably as a measure to balance the aggressive Drivatars. Now you’ll generally achieve gold for finishing in the top three. Not that there’s much incentive – the prize cars for winning series are gone, as are the bonus cars for reaching driver levels and affinity levels with certain manufacturers. This might be a necessary reaction to the fact that there are far fewer cars in Forza 5 than its predecessor (fewer tracks, too) so giving them away would leave fewer temptations in the virtual showroom. The only way to get any new cars is to save up the credits and buy them.

Except, that’s not the only way – you could use Tokens to buy cars or to speed up your XP earning rate. These tokens – the game starts you off with 100 for free to give you a taste – can be purchased from the store for real money. Every car or upgrade can be purchased using either in-game credits you earn or tokens that you paid for. The most expensive car in the game – the Lotus E21 – costs six million in game credits or ten thousand tokens. You can get eight thousand tokens for £40 or a “Best Value” bundle of twenty thousand tokens for £65. That means that the cheapest cash price for the Lotus E21 is £32.50. For one car.

You can, of course, just ignore all the freemium-without-the-free rubbish. Dismiss it as the folly of greedy publishers catering to rich fools and move on. The only problem is, a five or six minute race in the early championships earns you roughly three to five thousand credits for every gold you earn. That’s a lot of races to afford the more expensive cars; a lot of grinding if you happen to have made a poor choice of car to take into a series.

And that’s really the place where Turn 10’s latest racer falls down. It’s still a great driving experience – even if you’re mostly driving around the same, more limited selection of tracks – but it feels like you’re having to work harder for less reward and that means it can feel less fun.

Forza Motorsport 5 is a great game, but it comes with some quite significant problems. It has fewer tracks and cars than its predecessor, prices have been hitched up several notches on its in-game cars and the excellent, ever-building, system of rewards has disappeared. Multiplayer is a little anaemic and Free Play mode has been pared back too.

If you’re looking for a track racer at launch, this is your only option and it’s not a bad one to have, it’s just unfortunate that it feels a little more rushed and incomplete than the series’ pedigree deserves.

Score: 7/10