Synopsis:
Race through the ultimate street racing scene at dizzying speed! Have fun winning the racing car collection of your dreams. Pick an event, choose a lineup of cars from your collection, and start racing for infamy in the first Forza game for mobile.

Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Reviewed on: iOS (iPhone 11 Pro)
Also available for: Android

Developer: Turn 10 Studios
Creative Director: Dan Greenawalt
Production Director: Michel Bastien
Engineering Director: Daniel Adent

The Forza series is fast, flashy and fun. Forza Street is, flashy. It’s neither fun or particularly fast. In fact, it’s not really Forza either. The free-to-play mobile game feels more like an NFS: Underground attempt or a bad Fast and Furious film. It’s not a fun video game and I’m disappointed it has the Forza name attached to it.

I spent a week playing Forza Street and slowly but surely made my way through the first chapter of three in the a-typical street-racer story. Honestly, I wanted to stop earlier than the end of chapter one, but I was committed to seeing if there was new tracks or types of races to come down the line. There wasn’t. And here lies to the major problem with Forza Street. It’s simply too repetitive. 

Each race looks and sounds fantastic. This is undeniable. With the engine roars from a variety of vehicles including muscle and sports cars to the flashy neon lights in night time races, this is one of the best mobile racing games I’ve played from a technical point-of-view. However, the racing itself grows very tiresome. 

On the right side of your mobile screen, there will be a pedal. You hold the pedal to accelerate. When you come to a corner you release in the green zone and press down again in the perfect spot as you exit the corner. Other than deciding when to use your NOS to boost yourself (which is always on the straights and not into the corners, it’s pretty simple) the rest of the race is controlled automatically for you. Each track has two corners and although they may be placed in different lengths of the track, they all quickly meld together.

With each race lasting less than a minute, the design is simple and obviously made in mind for the on-the-go racing experience. But where there could have been a mix of simple and short races with longer and more complicated ones, there’s only the basic one-v-one race and a handful of tracks.

Online races are slightly more exciting although the bland gameplay remains the same and again, it’s only you playing against one other person on the same handful of tracks.

As you race, you unlock new cars and, of course, ways to tune and upgrade the ones already on your garage. There’s plenty of microtransactions that speed up this process although I never felt it was necessary. I did spend $5 on a few car tokens to spin a few wheels and see what cars I could unlock however and left just racing the same thing I already had.