My religion has a first name; it's F – O – R – Z – A!

I picked up Forza 4 this weekend, and some other stuff happened. The other stuff may have been important before, but not now. That's cause I opened the game and played through the demo race bitching and moaning the whole time about the assisted driving. As soon as I got out of the Bernese Alps demo with the tragically wasted "fun drive" I shifted the game up to hard, shutting off the auto-braking, rewind and other features for "casual fans". Perhaps this will sound ironic coming from me, but that shit is for pussies who don't know how to handle a car and are unwilling to spend five minutes learning how to drive right.

Anywho, after setting up the game right for me, I'm not really clear on where the vast majority of my days have gone. I mean, I know I did other stuff between the races. But everything in between is somehow less important now. All that matters is the next race, and which car I'm going to pick after I level up again.

Before I review the game in full TL;DR glory, I need to give a rundown of my top driving speeds and the vehicles I was booking in. My first car was a 1979 BMW 325i, the first year that fuel injection was available. I was at the time a victim of five car crashes with my step-dad as the driver, a man who claimed to be a race car driver and yet never met a car he couldn't crash. This is why I had a phobia of speed, and at the time, the fastest I could go was 85 MPH. However, I took that Beemer to a park that had posted limits of 35 for the winding gravel roads, and I drove my car all night at 55-75 to get used to the way it felt to lose control, and then fight to regain it.

After I was rear-ended by another BMW (what are the odds?) I upgraded to a Fiero GT. In this lovely little black 6 cylinder, I was commuting from San Antonio to Austin at gusts of 120-135 MPH for a night-shift tech job. So every drive home was on an empty straight ribbon full of invitations to be bad. I'm amazed I never got a ticket. Amusingly, I broke that car driving twenty miles an hour. The rear brakes froze, but I hadn't noticed I was only using my front brakes. So I punked the plastic bumper of another car and barely kissed my paint job off. Thereafter, the car…it just dropped dead. Three mechanics tried to revive it, but that one tiny bump at 20 MPH was enough to wimp out my poor Fiero. It will always be missed, though. A really fun car, the best I've ever had.

And finally, my top speed record came in a Lincoln Continental, which I wrapped up to 185 MPH in the trip from SA to Austin, an impressive feat made even more impressive because I got stopped by a cop…for having one headlight out. Long story short, I fixed a computer problem for him and walked away with a citation. Good times.

Ah, so yeah, I've driven a few cars, at fast, fast speeds, and I know what cars feel like when the road is talking through the steering wheel. I know what it feels like to watch a 3 lane highway thin into a ribbon that feels way too claustrophobic. So….does Forza capture this feeling? Oh HELL YES. The vibrations in the controller aren't just nonsensical buzzing, like I've dealt with in older versions of Need For Speed and Driver. (Can't say anything about the new versions, cause I haven't played them yet) What you get is a real sense of feedback from the wheels meeting road. When you're running clean and without tire damage, there's just the faintest tremor that tell you you're still in contact with the road, and when the controller goes still, it means the car is floating and it's time to back off the gas, or slow down and then brake if you're floating and nearing a turn. If your tires start to wear down (A feature you turn on by moving to the expert skill level) you will feel it either as a harsher buzzing when you try to accelerate, or if you've slicked the treads, as a dreadfully smooth ride that inspires greatly diminished confidence in turns. At higher skill level, tires wear more realistically, so if you jump big in your first lap, you'll fade your acceleration away in later laps due to unevenly worn tires.

After the HORRID first race is ruined by the computer trying to do all the driving for you, the game puts you in a Golf or a similar F-class car, but I think this is a good training model, and a great way of letting each new driver coming into the game to train with a number of smaller, slower cars. Almost all of the special class cars are so insanely fast that even minor course corrections can result in spectacular crashes if you haven't ramped your way up to that elite class of cars. I twice made the mistake of jumping out of the order of races to try bigger cars before I was ready for them, and it…it was humbling, to say the least.

In four days, I've played the game all the way through to the Masters-class division, and have just now started the Elite-class races. This gives me three classes left, but I feel confident enough on the content of those that I can give a review without feeling I've missed anything except for the community and the "unicorn cars," or exotic supercars so rare that I don't even have good odds of owning them in the game world either. I've played the Autovista challenge to unlock a few exotic cars, and it's a single-lap flat run to be the first to finish. Win and you get to open up the car for a proper tour of its features. You also come to one of the major disappointments of the game, Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear, who tries to bring pithy humor to the car monologues but mostly takes the pith…damn, that lisp came out of nowhere.

Setting aside the frustrating faux pax of a faulty fop for flummoxing narration, the Autovista tours of the cars are fun, they gave me a chance to move into the interiors of cars that I otherwise will never see in any other way. But the interior tours inevitably lead to starting the engine, leading you back to the same single race challenge. This isn't a complaint, mind you. Even after unlocking the Ferrari 458 Italia and Lamborghini Reventon, I kept going back through the same two races on the same track because damn it, those are sweet, sweet rides.

I also tried the Lamborghini Sesto Senso in free racing, and that is officially too much car for me just yet. I spent less time driving on the road and much more time screaming in panic as I shot the car off the track and narrowly avoided walls on every single turn. Essentially, it's like driving a JATO rocket, but with the ability to turn off the rocket during turns. Problem is, going that fast, brakes sometimes feel…too subtle. Which they shouldn't be while I'm on the edge of my seat screaming "OH GOD NO! PLEASE STOOOOOOOOP!" No, for a car this fast, you almost need forward-mounted rockets to slow down.

That's assuming your opponents will let you slow down. Go head, try it and see what happens. Heh.

So in addition to those two quick modes of play, there's also the ubiquitous racing game trope of collecting new cars as you earn your ranks in the world tour. Half the fun of any racing game is trying to pick which cars you're going to put in your personal garage out of the many fine selections offered each round. Gaining experience with each brand of car also earns you affiliate discounts for parts, up to free parts and payments for winning races while driving their brand.

My current love is the Lamborghini Gallardo, which handles like a dream and has the sweetest steering of any Lamborghini I've ever played in any game. Several times, I would be mesmerized by some pretty clouds, a mountain vista, or a placid roadside lake and go, "Oooh, that's just so prett—D'OH GOD, TURN!" And when you're traveling at 225 MPH, turns are often life or death. Er, well they can kill your car pretty effectively, anyway. BUT, the Gallardo's steering is so incredible that even when I would have lost control with a lesser car, the Lambo just slid through the turn like I'd meant to do it all along. I didn't even bark the tires. Brilliant. (Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention that there's a fun painting and decals area, which allowed me to make a hot pink Gallardo with a black racing stripe. It sounds silly, but it looks gorgeous and stands out among all the obvious choices of red, yellow and black cars.)

I'm obviously a Lambo fan, but I've been amazed by the selections of other vehicles, from older classics like Pontiac GTO, Mustang Boss, and a sweet 1985 Countach 5000 to some refined modern offerings from companies I'd never seen before, like Holden, Rossion, and TVR. Every car looks great, but some are visual traps, looking great while handling like a pig in shit, which is to say very sloppy. I was delighted to finally get to drive the 2008 Lambo Miura concept because it looked so prettiful and shiny, but then I actually had to try and compete with it and ended up moaning "I hate this car" with every turn. If not for the stunning performance the Reventons and Gallardos I would have sworn the game makers just hated Lambos. (Not really, but they sure don't like the Miura, and the Countach's cornering is sadly accurate, a real problem on tracks with low-speed turns.)

And let's talk about the cars that look good and handle even better. I've upgraded my Mustang Boss and Pontiac Judge to A and B-class cars because they're just so rock solid on the track that I was loathe to let them go until I could find one of my precious Lambos. (Have I mentioned I'm a Lambo fan?) Then there's some surprising cars, like the Holden HSV w427, which looks like a white brick on wheels but flat out-accelerated everything else on the track and gave me such an incredible lead that it almost felt like cheating. Other sweet rides from complete unknowns (unknown to me, that is) have included a Bertone Mantide, a De Tomaso Pantera, and a TVR Sagaris. And I've barely scratched the surface of the game's full library of cars. Car fans, start your drooling.

New cars come with every XP level increase, so there's usually a comfortable pattern of race, race, and then pick a new car. (Sometimes you do three races, but it's usually two for me.) Every selection forces you to pick just one and leave a LOT of very sweet cars unexplored, so I expect to go back through this a few times to try out every model. I can say that even if the super fast models are fun, I'm still dropping back to E and F class races because the Golf and Fiat Punto Evo are just too much fun not to take them around the full track every once in a while. But even when there's no familiar cars to choose from, the option are all stunning visually. Whether they're as much fun to drive is the crap shoot of the game, because you're not allowed to see the specs for the cars before you pick them. But if you do get a crap car, you just park it in the garage, go back to a car you like, and never speak of that one time you picked badly. (One time? Who am I kidding, my garage already has a hall of shame for my many poor choices.)

If I have any complaints, it's only with certain levels taking place in Britain, because they game adds variation via "races" where you have to knock down bowling pins with your car. The idea is so stupid that I intentionally fail and move on. A complete waste of my time, and a waste of what could have been an awesome track if I'd been driving against someone else. Even the similar obstacle course isn't so annoying, and there, I feel like all those slaloms and gates help to get me more in touch with my car.

Two other level types don't do much for me, but this may just be because I've yet to win either event in all these different race circuits. One is a 1-to-1 race where your rival is given a 20 yard head start, never makes any mistakes, and seems to have a CB channel to talk everyone else into easing to the shoulder for them, and then somehow become race car drivers who block me when I try the same pass. Lately, I don't even bother. I just drive down the hill, admire the pretty waterfalls, and plan for the next event where I actually have a chance of winning against someone who isn't running in God mode. Yeah, okay, I set the game's drivers to be hard, but these dudes are perfect, and that does not happen in the other races. So I find it hard to believe they can have a perfect run, every single time.

There's also been one level where I was placed on a circuit track with a bunch of slower moving traffic, and was told to pass as many cars as possible. Again, I fail this without trying because the people driving at 65 MPH still act like they need both lanes to handle all that amazing highway speed. Half the time, I'm slipping past someone and bam, they decide to change lanes for better aerodynamics, or something. I can't see much point to these levels, but I can imagine some dumb ass game designer saying "We need to break up all this monotony with something different. Let's do bowling pins!" Game designers, shut up, beat yourself in the face with a bowling pin, then beat Jeremy Clarkson in the face with the same pin, and you stop thinking that a racing game needs diversions from its main purpose. You're like the rat bastards who killed MTV because someone thought we ought to break up the monotonous music with games shows and documentaries.

If I'm not clear, Forza people, in Forza 5, please drop the stupid bowling pins. This is a car racing game. I came to race. I did not come to bowl, or two play a round of Grand Theft Auto by dodging slow moving traffic. If I wanted GTA, I'd buy GTA, yo. And if I wanted to bowl with my car, I'd check myself into an asylum, because that's not just stupid. It's crazy-stupid.

Setting aside those complaints, the rest of the game is a racing fan's dream come true. The tracks are all gorgeous, some dangerously so, and while some were intimately familiar to me after years of watching car races or playing them in other games, several others were breathtaking new experiences. In future games, I may even have to drive slow and ignore the competition to admire the game instead of racing through it. But I think that's part of the devious fun of the tracks in Spain and Italy. They're just so pretty that your eyes are drawn away from the cars, away from the road, and most importantly, away from any indication that you are traveling at lethal speeds. The distant mountain ranges are eye candy traps as surely as the lakes and forests, and there really aren't any ugly levels. Even the gritty Indianapolis Motor Speedway looks beautiful under a high afternoon sun.

And there's something incredible about a morning race at Maple Valley, and you come around a turn and find the sun low on the horizon. It's gorgeous, and the effect of the sun washing out the road is amazingly realistic. So about half the time, the threat to me isn't other drivers. It's the pretty shininess of the tracks. It's my eye catching a perfect detail and marveling at it instead of thinking about the next turn coming up in 1.2 seconds. And no, this is totally not a complaint. No, this is glowing praise. And you know, if you do slow down long enough to notice the spectators in the stands, you'll note; they're moving, cheering, and making real noise. That's a nice touch, and it amazes me what my console is capable of. If this is what the current hardware does, then I can't wait to see Forza 5 on the Xbox 720, where we might get races of 20-34 cars. DROOL!

I still have three ranking classes to complete, but the races now are much harder because the top speeds of my cars exceed anything I've ever driven in the real world. In short, I'm racing out of my league, and it's starting to show in my flagging standings. In early races, I could whip out a first place finish every time. But in the Masters-class, I've run across drivers that smoke my ass and beat me to the punch for acceleration every other race. Note, I'm not saying, "That dirty rotten fink cheated!" I'm being out-classed, and I'm loving it because the races aren't so assured just because I've got a fast car. Everybody does, and some of these artificial drivers know how to use them. So when I pull past that wily bastard and then cling to my lead with scant seconds, it doesn't feel like a walk in the park, unless that park was Jurassic Park and I was wearing Lady Gaga's steak dress and carrying a keg of beer over one shoulder.

I have not tried the community, nor will I. Why? Well I accidentally hit the wrong button and ended up in the races list, and all I could hear was guys talking in German. Everyone in the room was level 29-60, and I was level 6. I also had no suitable cars to race with them at the time (All had S or R3 listed, and I had only E through C), so I just backed out of the menu and went back to my world tour races. About 3 minutes later, I get a message from one of the drivers: "Goodbye, asshole." So, nice to see that German males speak fluent douchebag. And no, I didn't hear a single other female driver in the "online party." I'd rather not play with those dudes, thanks. So if you want a review of what online play is like, you'll want to read someone else's review.

Okay, I think I covered everything except for the replay system, which works as advertised and makes some pretty highlight reels when I can avoid banging up my paint job too badly. (This is a lot harder than it sounds in theory.) As a final verdict, is Forza the perfect driving game? No. It's marred by lousy events meant to break up the monotony and instead serve to irritate me and distract from what I really want to do, which is drive fast against 8-12 other cars to see who comes out on top. But since those are only a few levels out of a lot of tracks that I love to drive, and I have the chance to drive cars that I could never touch a body panel, much less grip the steering wheel. For this ability, I consider it totally worth the full price of 50 euros. I love the game play whether I ride inside the cockpits or pull the camera up to "fly" behind the car. (There are other POV options, but I never use them.)

Oh, right, Kinect. You'll have to ask someone else about the Kinect. (And this is coming from someone who loves her Kinect dancing and fitness games.) The box claims the games will work "better with Kinect," with the system deciding when to give the car gas. It can also handle the braking, but you can stick you foot out to hald braking, and you wave your fists like a four-year-old imitating daddy driving.

Screw that shit. No seriously, I couldn't even make it through the menus without being annoyed by the UI, so I went on YouTube to watch someone else play it, and they said, "It's not about running your fastest lap. It's a bout having fun." Which translates as, "This game performs WORSE with Kinect." It may be interesting for a casual fan to wiggle their hands and avoid using two confusing trigger buttons and a steering wheel at the same time, but as a hardcore fan of racing, and of racing games, I prefer having the controller to take advantage of feeling the road through my hands.

If you think I'm overstating this point about how realistic those vibrations feel, I'm not and you likely won't believe me until you've tried it for yourself. But even if you've only driven a pickup for an extended road trip, you know what I mean about the road talking through a sterring wheel. know it's bold claim, but the game makes me feel like I have a real steering wheel in my hands, and I can feel the road in the same way that I did back in the day when I was risking fiery death with every midnight drive home. That sense of realness adds such an incredible amount of urgency to every race that I've often come off the edge of my seat and stayed in a half crouch, hunkered over in tension for the last blistering seconds before I crossed the finish line with my opponent's engine somewhere just behind me.

That's addicting stuff for a speed freak like me. In fact, last night, I was so hooked that I played until my eyes got blurry. Then I got up this morning and started driving BEFORE my tea. It's really that good. So I give Forza 4 four stars, and I recommend it to any racing fan looking for a realistic driving experience. This isn't perfect, but it will give you everything you desire in a racing game, and then some.