My favorite “next-gen” experience with Forza Motorsport 5 came nearly a week into my time with the sim-racing game. Over that span, while I blew through gorgeous worldwide racecourses in lavishly rendered sports cars, Microsoft unlocked many of the Xbox One's various system features on my pre-release hardware, piece by piece. An app here, a downloadable game there, a last-minute tweak over there.

On my final day of play, before sitting down to type my review, I saw that Netflix had unlocked on my console. I had a lengthy “league” series of challenges to race through in FM5, so I spoke aloud, “Xbox, snap Netflix,” which brought the video app to my TV's sidebar. I picked a TV series and began marathoning it.

Until that point, FM5 had conjured a lot of not-so-bad adjectives in my mind: solid, lengthy, stunning, robust, realistic. But here I was, playing through yet another incredibly long, badly paced league series, and the thing that staved off my boredom—the feeling that I have played this exact game before, only in a less-polished form—wasn't adjusting FM5's challenge sliders, pulling up more difficult “Drivatar” adversaries, or even hopping into more of the game's nearly 200 automobiles.

It was watching Glenn Close raise hell in the series Damages in the top-right corner of my screen, without the slightest effect on the frame rate, detail, or high speed of my races. For this game, at least, that's the Xbox One difference that lingers.

A visual stunner

The good news, for car freaks at least, is that Turn 10 Studios has smothered its tried-and-true Forza series with as much visual sparkle and glitter as could be expected from a 2013 console. Start with the cars (duh), because here, the lowly Mini Cooper and the top-end Mercedes-Benz SLR receive equal levels of love. It's not just the high polygon models that impress, nor the fact that you'll never spot old annoyances like blurry textures. To be sure, both of those boons are crucial for rendering every curl on a car's body, every chrome grill, and every headlight smothered in layers of glass that reflect off of each other.

But FM5's spit-shine is perhaps even better appreciated in the interiors, where you'll spend most of your racing time, anyway (unless you change the camera angle to trail behind the car like a goof). Beyond every car enjoying spot-on translations of steering wheels, logo divots, door handles, gear shifts, and even stereo consoles, there's also the matter of FM5's reflections, which bounce the image of cars' interiors, and racers' hands, onto the windshield. This ignites the intangible feeling of a sunny, speedy drive; couple that with real-time interior shadows, blocked out by the car's structure, and the combined trick never really gets old.

In some ways, FM5 is as guilty as other racing games for sticking its best racetrack details in far-off distances; it's hard to appreciate some of the looming structures and over-there forests until you load a race's replay. But Turn 10 deserves credit for putting cool structures and effects in racers' direct field of view as well, like the reflections off windows on Le Mans' viewing platforms or the quaint, antique homes that line the roads of Spa, Belgium. The game's few false visual notes, like the crowds made of 2D sprites and the flat-looking foliage on trees, stand out even more among the rest of the pristine content.

Realistic simulation, real annoying AI

Under the hood, FM5 can still claim dibs on the sim-racing crown. The game runs at a crisp 60 frames a second without noticeably degrading car details even when the track is full of vehicles. Just like the Xbox 360's Forza entries, the visual accuracy is matched by equally precise vehicle simulations; as ever, those drifts and fishtails reflect as much on the car you choose as your ability to drive it. Thank the stars, FM5 still includes a variety of optional driving assists to help lousy players feel a little less lousy. If I turn off some of the braking and traction stability assists rather than all of them, it's like I'm a real racecar driver, right?

But really, none of that realistic, high-speed handling—spread across a giant car roster—differs noticeably from 2011's Forza Motorsport 4, which itself maintained just as smooth a 60 frames-per-second engine and delivered an equally impressive sense of speed. This go-round, once the visual trickery fades, what else adds to the franchise?

Drivatar is Turn 10's loudest answer to that question, which is best described as AI by way of the cloud. FM5 keeps tabs on how you race—how quickly you lead into sharp turns, how often you take off-road shortcuts, etc.—and uploads your stats to other players. Uploading your exact gameplay as ghost data wouldn't work, because drivatars enter other players' races as full-on competitors, able to collide, jam up lanes and, well, mess up royally.

In every race, you pick the AI's expertise, and FM5 pulls up a roster of cloud competitors as appropriate. The range of difficulties play out as advertised—easy is easy, hard is hard—but cloud-powered AI mostly stands out in annoying ways. For one, this data definitely seems to pull from real players' tendencies. At every difficulty, you're bound to get full-on rammed by other racers who prefer burning through Forza arcade-style. In higher difficulties, you'll still encounter quite a few racers who, for no apparent reason, spin out or get into wrecks. That very well could change as more players fill out FM5's cloud, but for now, the game lacks AI competitors who will pass or turn in compelling, organic ways.

It's worth noting at this point that Forza still doles out cash and experience based on what difficulty you choose when you race, but the series used to reduce points when players rammed and wrecked their cars. Not this time. Instead, FM5 is the first game to actually penalize players for using the game's "rewind" feature, meaning players are better off slamming sloppily into the competition than trying and retrying clean runs. As a result, expect those Drivatars to generally get pretty banged up.

The better difficulty tweak actually comes from a pretty bold decision on Turn 10's part. Gold, silver, and bronze awards are no longer locked to first, second, and third places respectively. Instead, you can land as low as third place and still enjoy a gold reward; seventh place keeps you in silver; tenth out of sixteen for bronze. The reason, Turn 10 says, is to encourage players to turn off assists and increase difficulties so that races are always competitive. That’s opposed to the Sim Snooze Scenario, where you quickly bolt to the lead and wind up in a time trial for the rest of a race. Now, knowing that you can sneak into third and still enjoy full rewards, you might spice your play up.

It's a genius option that more racing games should embrace, but in practice, as I ticked sliders and changed difficulties, I never found my perfect difficulty sweet spot. I either ruled the road or struggled to maintain seventh place. I imagine other players will luck out, particularly series pros, but my experience resulted in the sliders tilting things too wildly to aim for third effectively.

In league play, instead of the old calendar system that serves up new events regularly, FM5 opens every league series up immediately, so long as players can afford each category's cars. Leagues typically are made up of eight races, split between default circuits and quirky challenges. The latter are relatively welcome, with gimmicks like running into bowling pins for points, winding through cones slalom-style, or racking up as many slow-car passes as possible. They don't substantially change races, though, and players won't find higher-level stunts, drifts, or other wild ideas.

Too bad you can't cleanly quit leagues. After completing any league race, players can either pick “retry” or “continue,” and then they must wait to load the next track—usually for a significant 20 seconds or so—before having the option to quit out. Worse, after you've played through a few leagues, they start to drag and drag. The lack of compelling challenges is bad enough, but the thin racetrack selection hurts the most. FM5 counts 14 tracks, but the “test” track and the Top Gear course quite frankly shouldn't count. What remains are some solid offerings, particularly the wild and new-to-Forza Yas Marina Circuit from Abu Dhabi, but nothing served here reaches the heights of sim-racing beasts like Nürburgring. Even with wildly different suspensions, engines, and body types, each league quickly begins to feel just like the others.

The rest of the FM5 package is, really, what you would expect from Forza. Livery customization is as robust as ever, giving painters all of the tools and layer options they need to, I don't know, put Stewie Griffin's face on the hood of a Lexus. FM5 now automatically offers popular designs to players when they pick up new cars (I hoped by now Turn 10 would allow players to import images from Kinect to use in their car designs, but alas, you can’t put a photo of your junk right on the car.)

Online multiplayer lets you rack up in-game cash and experience; those races don't have any lag, but they also don't have any wow factor. Turn 10 still knows how to mic a car, as the game's roars and purrs are as impressive as ever (though you'll want to mute the atrocious Michael Bay-esque soundtrack on the double).

Thank goodness Forza 5 could build on the wonderful gameplay foundation of Forza 4. Without that, the game would have likely suffered even more from anemic challenges, bad pacing, and thin track selection so the developers could deliver the world's best-looking car sim in time for a system launch. Enjoy those wonderful reflection effects and stunning in-car shadows as much as you can, car junkies, but know that, eventually, you’ll probably find that the game is struggling to be as entertaining as a picture-in-picture feed of Netflix.

The good

1080p, 60 frames-per-second racing with tons of detail and visual effects to spare.

The best-in-class gameplay built by Forza Motorsport 4 returns.

The bad

Thin track selection and bad league-series pacing make the game feel repetitive way too quickly.

Drivatar delivers all of the annoyances of real competitors and little of the compelling, human nuance.

The ugly

If it seems like car unlocking is taking too long, just show Microsoft your good friend George Washington

Verdict: You'll want to see Forza 5 push the Xbox One to its visual limits, but this is the good-but-thin game that will make you glad Microsoft relented on its no-rental policy. Try It.