Forza Motorsport (Xbox Series X)

I like how this game made practicing a track meaningful. Track practice is something I'm usually reluctant to do, because it's less fun than the race itself, but this game adds just enough gamification that it feels interesting:
- You level up your car XP, which steadily unlocks upgrade parts, much like how you level up your gun in certain Call of Duty games.
- You constantly get feedback about your performance in subsections of the track. These both help with upcoming races, but also keeps a steady flow of progress. Very nice.

I'm intrigued by how extremely configurable the challenge is in this game. Like other games such as Dirt Rally, you can set the opponent difficulty freely, along with the assists. But even better, you can also set your starting position in the field. All of these tweaks affect prize money in a reasonable way, so you're pushed to try to up the difficulty, disable the assists, and start further back in the field to get more money for cars. Very interesting design choices, and it allowed me to set my favorite type of challenge: Very dumb and slow opponents, no assists, and start a bit back in the field to have some fun fighting to get to first.

I love how tense the battles are when you're trying to get through the field. The other racers are not letting me through without a fight, and I can't just smash into them, because I'll get penalized, so I have to very carefully pick my openings.

I played some races with different headphone settings, Stereo, Windows Sonic, and Dolby Atmos. For the best audio experience, I recommend playing in cockpit with Dolby Atmos, which gives me the clearest localization of the other cars. I feel like playing this way is almost too intense for me, I feel exhausted after a few races.