Forza Customs

Microsoft has run out of imagination. The only real novelty that Forza Horizon 5 contained was a new environment, based on a real environment, which in other words required zero innovation, zero imagination. Forza Motorsport was heavily marketed as a new start for the game series but was and is basically Forza Motorsport 7 with a Pokémon-like single player setup where cars should be collected rather than competed with. Imagination is really at a low.

Further evidence of this is their venture into the mobile market. Last year's Forza Street was not a Forza game, basically. Turn 10 bought the already existing racing game Miami Street and renamed it, as is the case with the new Forza Customs. This is not a Forza game even if the Forza logo will tell you otherwise. It has nothing to do with Forza, doesn't share the same DNA, and never feels like a Forza game. Instead, it's basically a title called Custom Car Works from Hutch Games that rolled out in June (Android), was then taken down, and has now reappeared with a new logo and name, but the exact same game.

Forza Customs is a weird, weird, weird mix between two games that have nothing in common. Basically, it's an outright copy (a shameless plagiarism) of the puzzle classic Bejeweled (which Sweden's King then copied when developing Candy Crush) where you are asked to puzzle by moving coloured little icons. Three or more are required to create a row, after which the row disappears and new icons fall from the top. If you put together combos with four or maybe five colourful icons, you get a power-up, which in this case consists of petrol barrels and nitrous oxide tubes. The barrels make adjacent blocks explode too, while the nitrous oxide allows you to clear a whole row. There are always a limited number of moves you can make before the Game Over sign appears and a certain amount of strategy is required in the basic design.

The thing about the puzzle element of this title is that it feels completely brain-dead simple and thus incredibly flat and boring. Even after three hours of play, the puzzles are childishly simple and if you haven't chosen your icon to move within two seconds, the game points to the most optimal icon you can move, which makes the whole idea fail and the set-up feels hopelessly self-playing. The Forza Customs name itself derives from the fact that you use the money you earn from completing hundreds of meaningless mini-puzzles to build race cars. You get a car assigned to you and a "style" that you must follow in your build and then it's a matter of accumulating around 5000 points/money to pay for your modifications. It costs to remove the front fenders. It costs to add other front fenders. It costs to lift the car onto pallet jacks. It costs to lift it down, again. It also costs to choose the hood, rear wing, side mirrors, roof, brake calipers, brake caliper colour, rims, rim colour, tyres, tyre pressure, steering wheel, steering wheel colour and everything in between. Forza Customs often gets too detailed in the wrong way and thus drags on in a way that often makes car building feel hopelessly frustrating.

Of course this is done on purpose to get at your real wallet and unsurprisingly there are chests of in-game currency in this game. You can, of course, complete your chests without having to complete 141 pointless mini-puzzles which in itself makes Customs a miniature version of the tuning/styling from Forza Horizon 5, or Forza Motorsport.

Added to this is the fact that Hutch Games has forced a really bad story mode here, which involves a number of characters (who appear as AI-generated still images) commenting on everything you do to your car with the most predictably obvious platitudes imaginable. If you change rims, they often say "Good looking rims my man" and if you paint your car pink, they always say "Love pink, dude, great choice" and you have to manually tick all these boxes. At every moment. All the time.

Forza Customs is not something you should spend time on. I like puzzle games and I like tuning and styling cars in various racing games, but considering that this was just thrown together to make a lot of money from forced microtransactions and has nothing to do with Forza, the rating is and has to be really low. It's hard for me to understand why anyone would want to tarnish their own beloved brand with this kind of crap. But as I said... What to do when all imagination has clearly run out?