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To put it succinctly, Forza 6 is the exact game that Forza 5 could have, and should have been. Forza 6 makes Forza 5 seem like it was never there. It offers all the same content that Forza 5 had, and then builds on it massively. The night racing, and weather effects, keeping split-screen AND keeping a locked 60FPS @ 1080p is a huge technological achievement. The cars (as usual for the Forza series) sound amazing and blow the sound effects of almost every other racing sim out of the water. Having 450+ fulling explorable cars is amazing, and the focus on dedicated racing cars like in Forza 2 is wonderful. It's really nice to have lots of racing cars again as compared to tuned street cars. The new mods system is really fun and challenging, and the prize spins gleaned from Forza Horizon 2 are awesome. The graphics are amazing as usual, and can compete with almost any other racing game out there. The best and most important feature of Forza 6 is the new driving physics. The physics are bar none, the best in the business against any other racing game. It's always been fairly well agreed on point that the driving physics in the Forza series have always been somewhat more "arcadey" than Gran Turismo's more realistic approach, but with Forza 6, I'd say that just doesn't apply anymore. Cars don't feel like they're on rails in the least (looking at you, Project Cars), the tires feel like they are really gripping and doing work, unlike in Forza 5 when it was incredibly easy to lose traction even in a very low end 200hp car. Now, due to the grippier and more realistic tires, rear wheel drive vehicles are much more of a threat to the reigning king, all wheel drive. The tires are hugely improved in that it feels like they have a limit, and it's fairly easy to know when the tires are about to give out because of the sound and because of the glorious Xbox One impulse triggers. The physics in Forza 6 allow a cautious driver to put far more faith in the tires to not slip than in Forza 5. It feels as though if the driver meets the car half-way, the car will do the same. The physics also punish an undisciplined driver, and just like in real life, if you make stupid moves, you will spin out or go into a wall. Of course everything changes when it starts to rain. Rain physics are absolutely grueling, and if the rewind feature is turned off in the assists menu, you're gonna have a bad time. Braking distances are massively increased, and having ABS off also makes things far more difficult. You can no longer floor it out of corners since you'll risk spinning out, and then there's always the puddles. The puddles are one of the most exciting things that have been added to the game. Hitting a puddle with one side of the car drags the car in that direction, and if a tire slips off the track onto the wet grass, it's game over. Puddles completely change the racing lines **** track. Corners that you might have nailed perfectly in every previous game now have a puddle, and everything changes. They're infuriating, terrifying, and amusing at the same time. The night racing is amazing as well. Hurtling down the Mulsanne straight at 260MPH has never felt so scary until you can't see anything past 200ft in front of you. That's really the most of the new features. The music score is still pretty bad, and appears to be another orchestral score like in Forza 5. It's still not as fun as all the funky and/or terrible music in Forza 2, but it's a step in the right direction, and it's a way better soundtrack than Forza 5. I suppose a review should list the cons as well. Forza 6 doesn't appear have any new visual customization parts for returning cars (although thankfully the paint and decal system is still amazing) and the really ugly "Forza" spoiler and front bumper that create the most downforce (even though it feels like the effect always has, and always will be basically non-existent) are incredibly ugly as usual. The new spoiler than arrived in Forza 5 that doesn't remotely look like a racing spoiler is still there, and the front splitter and canard combo that have been in the Forza series forever still looks digusting on 80% of the cars in game. None of this is to say that the customization in Forza 6 is bad, but it hasn't evolved along with everything else in the game from Forza 5. The drivatar system hasn't really improved too much since Forza 5. It's easy to get to 4th place but the top 3 cars are insanely hard to catch, especially 1st place. It feels like the max difficulty unbeatable drivatar setting is too hard, but 1 step down to pro level and it's too easy. Drivatars also **** at racing in the rain now. Online play also hasn't improved, and really dirty drivers have a distinct advantage. The 20$ VIP double race cash bonus with 5 awesome cars locked behind a paywall is terrible, although the car pass is okay. Overall this is probably the best Forza game yet, and the biggest upgrade to the Motorsport series since Forza 4. 9/10.

Far Cry 4, overall, was a bit of a disappointment. Like so many others making these reviews, I feel like Far Cry 4 feels way too similar to Far Cry 3. A different setting does NOT, a different game make. Far Cry 4 has both it's high points and low points. Overall, the game plays pretty well, but as you really inspect it, the uglier details start to pop out. Far Cry 3 developed the glorious, butter smooth combat that makes all of the combat feel like you're starring in a movie. Far Cry 4 only developed it further with the new vehicular gun-play and take downs. The core Far Cry combat experience is all there and then some, which makes the combat even more fun than in Far Cry 3, but it's the things that occur outside of combat that are lacking. There's a couple different points that make Far Cry 4 a weaker title. First of all, the graphics are lacking. Even though the Himalayas and their surroundings look gorgeous in the game, the graphics still don't look any better than Far Cry 3. It seems as though the sense of graphical progression stopped. Far Cry 2 looked light-years better than the original Far Cry, and Far Cry 3 looked noticeably better than Far Cry 2, but Far Cry 4 looks exactly the same as 3. Why? I realize that there is a point when graphics can't really get better, and modern games are on the cusp of that. This means that game companies will have to find other ways of making a game great, like the story, which leads me into the next point. Far Cry 4's story didn't capture me in the least. Ubisoft failed to make me, and apparently a lot of other people, feel in tune with the character, Ajay. In Far Cry 3, you follow a sheltered white teen and watch him become a tribal killing machine. It's fascinating because for the whole game, you're watching your character progress turn from a totally normal 20-something into this moral-less bloodthirsty jungle BEAST. It's believable, and you, the player, help facilitate that. Far Cry 4 does NOT have that sense of character progression. It's made clear that Ajay doesn't really change in mind or body, but instead it's the leaders of the Golden Path, Amita and Sabal, who undergo this huge moral change. Unfortunately, they aren't the main protagonist, Ajay is, so what they do is not only irrelevant to the player, but they only each appear in maybe 10 cutscenes. For 99.9% of the game, you have absolutely no idea what they're doing. You don't feel that sense of character progression and empathy if you almost never see them. They also don't make the gigantic moral decisions, you, the player do, so it doesn't make a lot of sense that they undergo this huge moral change when they aren't making any of the big decisions. It's really annoying that the player is forced to pick sides in the game as well. You either eventually side with Sabal or Amita. No exceptions. That's total crap. We're talking about Ajay Ghale, a man who takes down impenetrable battle fortresses by himself with nothing but a KNIFE, who rides elephants into battle, hunts tigers with a bow, who eats bullets and craps C4 explosive. You'd think that Ajay would have the power to make a different choice, a third choice, something better than the cards the game deals you, but no. That's not what Ubisoft wants. Another huge point is that the game never explains who exactly Ajay is. It gives very little background information. It never explains how Ajay became a seasoned killer, nor does the game attempt to tell the player how Ajay feels mowing down hundreds of people. In Far Cry 3, Jason Brody first hates killing people, then revels in it, then hates the fact that he revels in it. Every step of the way, you knew what Jason was feeling. In Far Cry 4, Ajay is basically nothing more than a silent protagonist. Everything he says maintains this neutral moral ground to it, to the point that you don't know what he's feeling, and you don't care. To end things on a higher note, all of the new things that were implemented, like the driving gun-play, gyrocopters, co-op, and grappling hook, all feel especially polished. Pagan Min is also the most fascinating antagonist in any game I've ever played, and I applaud the people who thought him up. TL;DR Far Cry 4 is a game with amazing gameplay, and decent graphics that is massively hampered by a VERY limited and uninteresting story.

I feel like this game really had a lot of promise. I definitely noticed that the game plays a lot more like the original Race Driver GRID. GRID 1 was far and away the best game in the series, and I feel like Autosport has taken a few cues from that. Autosport both built on some aspects, and faltered in others. The in-car cam is back and yet it's a blurry mess that the game would frankly be better off without. Sure it's a lot of development time to create detailed **** and in the bigger picture it isn't that important but dammit it's the LITTLE THINGS that add up. It's one of those INSIGNIFICANT reasons that GRID 1 is ranked SIGNIFICANTLY higher on Metacritic. It's the little things, and it's fairly obvious that Codemasters just doesn't care that much anymore. They brought teammates back, which is a massive, awesome throwback to the first game, and yet you can't actually choose your teammate. Better teams deliver better teammates but nothing really tells you how good they'll be until you're both out on track and at that point, it's to late to change things. All customization is gone. In both GRID 1 and 2 you could customize your car, especially in 2, and yet now everything is chosen for you. You can't how your car looks, who you will drive with, or even what you'll drive in the first place. I think the single, worst thing about Autosport is the fact that you can't even choose your car anymore, at least in singleplayer. It's just horrible. I mean, come on! How BASIC of a feature is it in the racing genre that the player can pick the car they want to drive? That's just the most basic feature of a racing game I can think of, and it's one that's been around for DECADES. It's almost insulting that they'd take that away now. GRID 1 was about freedom. You'd be forced to do a couple races for teams until you earned a bit of cash and then you could strike out on your own, and make a name for yourself. Develop your team, and conquer the racing world. GRID 2 did that as well, although it was still a step down from GRID 1. In Autosport, that sense of freedom and independence is gone. No longer are you pushing your team to be better than Ravenwest, now you're striving to be a part of Ravenwest. That ****. Now that dream is to become the world's fastest wallflower. How could you stand out in a team of dudes who are surgical with a steering wheel? Autosport, despite it's numerous faults, does some things right. The driving physics are much better than GRID 2, much closer to GRID 1, the graphics are beautiful and the cars are incredible. They sound the best that they ever have in the series, and that hurtling sense of speed has returned. It moved a bit further away from arcade, and returned to the semi-sim roots that GRID formed from. Really it's the physics that make this a bearable game. GRID 2 had HORRIBLE physics. Anything that could hit 200mph was insanely hard to control. To stay competitive you HAD to drift and if you didn't do a drift JUST RIGHT, into the wall you go. There's a reason that Codemasters slapped in the rewind system. Sure a lot of modern racing games have it but an arcade-ish game shouldn't need it. Actually braking and taking a turn at full grip is much more repeatable and less dangerous than having to hit hairpins at 180mph just to stay competitive. Autosport isn't like that anymore. Sure a car still kicks the back end out but don't expect that to keep you on the road. Braking is a necessary feature again. Speaking of driving physics, GRID Autosport has, hands down, the BEST drifting physics I've seen in a racing game since Need For Speed Underground 2. So many games these days make you feel like you're drifting a slot car (NFS ProStreet had that REALLY bad). Drifting in GRID 2 isn't particularly fast like real drifiting, but it's CONTROLLABLE. It gives you the sense that you know what the car is doing, and where it is going at any given time. It's smoky, challenging, and fun. Overall, GRID Autosport is okay, and it's tried to incorporate a lot of features that made the first game incredible, however it seems to have faltered massively in incorporating those features. It feels more like a proper sequel to the original GRID than GRID 2 is, and yet just falls short in so many ways. Not enough was added to make up for what was lost. Maybe GRID 3 will be the GRID 1 HD remake that would just sell out everywhere. If Codemasters had just spent a bit more time, and slowed down, and carefully added in the new stuff, Autosport would have been the best game in the series by a mile. But they didn't. "Would have's" and "If only's" mean nothing once the game drops. And it has. And here we are.

This game had a lot of potential but something must have gone wrong somewhere because the end product is all but unplayable. I've played this game on both Xbox 360 and PC and it really felt like the game was made more for consoles. The cars are practically uncontrollable on PC. Because on PC you only have keyboards, you're either turning the car as hard as possible, or not at all. It seems like no one tried to make the physics more compatible for keyboards. This game is really only playable with a steering wheel and is barely usable with a gamepad. Steering wheels even have massive problems, and only with a few physics mods do they work properly. If you create a racing simulator that doesn't work with a racing wheel, then there's something seriously wrong with your game. The menus are also terrible and seemingly made for gamepads. To confirm selections you have to press right shift, or F, or to cycle menus you have to use J and K. What's up with all of these obscure buttons that are awkward to press? Is there something wrong with the arrow keys? They could have also made it a little more mouse accessible. The controls for gamepads don't even show up in the UI. The game always has a little bar somewhere in the menu interface saying "press this button on the keyboard to do this!" but when you plug in a gamepad, it doesn't change to something more like "press this button on the GAMEPAD to do this!". The game always assumes that the player is using a keyboard, which means that you have to do trial and error when you plug in a gamepad. Everything about the game seems way too difficult. The AI NEVER skid in EVERY corner like the player does, and the game expects you to hit every corner dead on the apex yet you can't because the cars all oversteer terribly and skid when you try to turn in to a corner. Frankly the physics are the biggest gripe. The drag mode in the Speed Hunters/Legends DLC is also terrible. The controls are completely different than the stock game (who the hell uses the right thumbstick to shift?!?) and the drag mode controls are NOT changeable. Not to mention that the fastest car in the drag mode is a FWD scion which only accelerates so fast because the game creators made it so there's a constant force pushing the front of the car down really hard (sort of like really high downforce, but even when standing still), which makes the best DRAG car one of the best handling GRIP cars. All in all, the game wasn't very well thought out at all. It was a pretty bad port over to PC. The only upsides are that the graphics are decent, and the car customization is better than most of the later Need for Speed games. The night driving mode is a breath of fresh air but it doesn't really matter if you can't control the car in the daytime either. It was a lot better on consoles. I hear that the developers of Shift 2, Slightly Mad Studios, are creating the game Project CARS, which looks a LOT like Shift 2, and also looks a LOT better. Hopefully it will be what the Need For Speed Shift Series wasn't.

This game really is a diamond in the rough. It's hands down the best Need For Speed game since NFS Carbon, Most Wanted, and the Underground series. The graphics are pretty good even with today's standards, the car selection is okay, and the car customization is a little limited, but much, MUCH better than the newer games. It's basically NFS ProStreet, on the street, except the physics have taken a turn for the better. Instead of the really bad understeer that all of the cars in ProStreet had (even when drifting! how can you have understeer when drifting is all about oversteer?!?! ProStreet managed it somehow...), the physics of Undercover are entirely different. Now, at high speeds, all the cars in Undercover grip the road insanely well. Seemingly, the faster the car goes, the more grip it has, so if you go 240 MPH, you can practically take 90 degree turns without letting off of the gas. Humorously beneficial and just as weird as ProStreet's handling but on the opposite end of the spectrum. The only real downsides to the game are that the story line is pretty weak and the cut scenes are even lamer, the soundtrack is pretty bad (the game has just about every song you've NEVER heard of), and it's a little glitchy on the PC. I've heard many stories about people having problems getting the game to run **** only problem that has happened to me personally is that the game tends to freeze and crash when using autosculpt in the garage. I've installed and played this game on multiple computers and it happens on all of them. The bottom line is that the game has many more pros than cons and is undoubtedly the best NFS game of recent times.

This game is more "Burnout" than it is "Need For Speed". Criterion has made great games over the years but they need to stick with their "Crash N Bash" formula with Burnout and not dump it on the NFS series. This game is such a disappointment. Criterion took out all the things that made Most Wanted great and added in a bunch of things that didn't. No more manual transmission, next to no customization, no storyline other than "There's ten people who are the best racers in the city. Beat them and I'll give you a cookie". I don't think I even saw a change camera option. What the hell happened? And the so called "Find it, Drive it"? What the hell is that? What happened to doing races for money and using the cash to buy cars and parts? That's a proven formula and everyone knows that, why take it away and replace it with something as stupid as driving around looking for exotic cars that are (for whatever reason) sitting around a city? I'm glad they brought back free roam instead of "drive on a long curvy road with high-speed corners". But at such a cost! This game isn't even Need for Speed anymore. It's like Burnout Paradise City with Frostbite 2 and a different name. It's not even as great as Paradise City, it's like a hybrid that takes all the worst case scenarios EA and Criterion could made each game into (but didn't thankfully) and combines them all into one fustercluck of unrecognizable programming. If you're looking for a fun, freeroaming, street-racing game, try NFS Underground 2 or if you also want great graphics, try NFS Undercover.

This was and IS the pinnacle of the ENTIRE Need For Speed series. NONE of the other games have as much customization as this one, not even Underground 1. It was also the first Need For Speed game to feature free roam. It arguably had one of the best soundtracks as well. Whats really great about this game and its predecessor is that it was really infused with the current import tuning culture of that time. Sure no one bolts spinners or neon on their cars anymore but everyone was doing that around the time when this game came out. Maybe if EA just looked at every NFS related Youtube video ever, they'd see exactly what fans want.