So I've been playing Forza 2 for most of the week. Not enough to unlock every single car and every single event and draw up some Sistine Chapel-esque masterpiece in the paint room, but...I've done a fair bit. Enough to come to grips with it and pass on my thoughts. If you fear reading anything that runs longer than a paragraph, know this: Forza 2 is fantastic.

I had earlier fears that this game was for the hardcore, the gearhead purists among you, but after sitting down with the final build, that's just not the case. The best way I can think of to sum Forza 2 up is that it's what Gran Turismo would be like if it nurtured your progression through the difficulty curve, lovingly, rather than beating you mercilessly with a bamboo cane like Polyphony delight in.

Rubbish at driving? Turn on all the driving aids, dumb down the AI and let the game tell you when to brake and when to accelerate. At the other end of the spectrum you can turn everything off and, unless you actually drive these things for a living, just spin endlessly into walls while being lapped. Point is, you can customise the difficulty as much as you like, your only "punishment" being a smaller paycheck at the chequered flag sould you dumb things down a little.

Driving at my sweetspot (which was a touch over the "normal" settings), the handling was nice and realistic. If you're in a FWD and your rear-end starts to slide, somehow through the rumble and camera positioning you can feel it. Same goes for corners, spins, crashes and trips to the concrete barrier, all feel as they should (or at least I reckon they should).

So the driving is great, regardless of how good you are. Good fun. But you won't spend much time on the track. You'll spend most of it in the paint room, whacking stickers of big-tittied anime characters or Nintendo logos all over your little white Honda. And this is a blast. I got the game on Tuesday and spent the first two hours painting my little VW Golf until it was pretty enough to take out on the track. Then drove it for about twenty minutes and spent another two hours painting it. Because it wasn't pretty enough.

Only beef is that the whole thing's a little...bland. Unlockables and rewards lack context, the courses and events seem random and disconnected and the whole thing just feels...cold. GT always feels like a kid's toybox, and PGR3 had that billionaire-playboy thing going on with its garages. Forza 2 just has a lot of cars and tracks and tuning options, but nothing really tying it all together.

Still. Minor, minor beef! This is a great game. Doesn't matter where you're coming at it from: novice, hardcore driving freak nutcase, creepy anime fan, it's got you covered. Nice one, Turn 10. Luke Plunkett

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