As Ars Technica's resident petrol head, it's no secret that I've been eagerly anticipating getting my hands on Forza Motorsport 4, the latest installment of Microsoft's marquee racing game for the Xbox 360. Ever since Sony finally shipped Gran Turismo 5, console racing fans have been waiting to see how Turn 10, Forza's developers, would respond. From where I'm sitting, it's clear that there really is a new king in town.

Look, Listen, Feel

The first thing you'll notice is a big improvement in the graphics. GT5's premium cars may still (just) have the edge, but unlike in that game, Forza doesn't have two different levels of detail—every car has a fully rendered interior and none have been dragged kicking and screaming from 2006. The Forza tracks are simply stunning, and a huge improvement on Forza Motorsport 3, where certain settings suffered from looking washed out. Particle effects like tire smoke and dust look great, hanging in the air realistically without causing frame rates to falter below a constant 60 fps.

In the run up to the launch I spoke with Dan Greenawalt, Lead Game Developer at Turn 10, who told me that this focus on ensuring a high frame rate was the reason Forza 4 doesn't feature dynamic weather or races that transition from day to night. The team made the right decision; it's this sort of attention to getting the fundamentals spot-on that shines through the game.

Some of the tracks are available to race on at different times of day: Hockenheimring, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Infineon Raceway (all of which make their series debut) can be raced at sunrise or during the day; Camino Viejo and Suzuka both have mid-day and sunset versions; and the Top Gear Test Track comes in normal and overcast flavors. These do a good job of simulating the difficulty of seeing where you're going with the sun blinding you, and are used to good effect in career mode when you have to complete multiple heats at the same circuit over the course of a day.

Greenawalt told us that the audio has also had a makeover, and your cars' sonic character changes as you build up their engines with new exhausts, valves, pistons, and so on. In the audio settings, you can also tweak the sound effect focus between engine noise or the sound of your tires, which can be handy depending on what sort of feedback you like when driving.

Forza 4 also features an entirely new physics model with completely new tire modeling courtesy of Pirelli.

Bluntly, you'll not get a more realistic driving game on any console. Bearing in mind that Turn 10 always aims to appeal across the gaming spectrum, from kids several years away from their driver's licenses to hardcore racers, the result is accessible and accurate. Depending on your skill level, you can tweak the difficulty to provide steering and braking assistance on top of the usual ABS, traction control, and so on. The rewind feature returns, as does the suggested racing line, but all of these can be turned off.

You can have a great time playing with the Xbox controller, but the game truly comes alive with a steering wheel. The boffins at Fanatec have produced an official Forza Motorsport 4 wheel, which I'll discuss in a bit more depth later in the review. With the steering set to "simulation," the game really is a great approximation of having a real car on track. You get a nice sense of weight transfer and how much grip you have, with the steering going light if you turn too hard as the front wheels lose adhesion and begin to spin, just as you would in a real car.

Start me up, Buttercup

If you've played Forza 3 and have a saved game on your Xbox, when you first start playing Forza 4 the game will detect your old save and you'll be gifted up to 10 cars depending on how far you progressed. The game also gifts you a number of other special cars if you've owned them in Forza 3, so gamers loyal to the franchise can hit the ground running.

You'll also want to install the content from the second disc. Load times are not particularly annoying; they're shorter than GT5, and menu navigation is significantly less frustrating.

In single player, the car count has gone up from eight to 12, but despite the greater AI workload for the CPU, framerate remains a steady 60 fps. Most events are good old races to the finish line, but mixed in with these are autocross challenges similar to those seen in Projects Gotham; Track Days where you have to beat another car to the end while dodging traffic comprised of slower cars; and mixed class races where you're competing against some cars of the same class but sharing the track with other, faster (or slower) cars having their own race. The Top Gear test track challenges are much less infuriating than those found in GT5, and you're tasked with knocking down bowling pins to rack up a high score.

Career mode has undergone some tweaks in this installment, presumably to keep players interested. As before, you can choose between World Tour, which sends you from track to track across the course of racing seasons, or pick from the event list. There's now an incentive to stay in World Tour; different races will offer you extra credits, or boosts to your driver experience points (XP) or to your car's Affinity (which gets you cheap car upgrades) on top of the normal rewards. However, you can't control the AI difficulty level in World Tour, and the AI scales as your XP increases. If your goal is to amass as many credits as possible, World Tour is where you'll want to spend your time.

On the other hand, if just completing every race is your priority, you have more control over your opponents by picking from the event list. Not only can you choose how smart the AI cars are, but you can limit the upgrades to the cars they drive. This does come with a penalty, though; the easier you make races, the less you earn.

Each time you reach a new driver XP level up to level 50, you'll be offered a choice of reward cars instead of just being awarded one, which I think is a pretty neat touch. In Forza 3, players maxed out at level 50, but now the game goes up to 150, with large credit bonuses from Level 51 onwards, so players with a compulsion to complete the game will find it takes significantly longer.

All of this means you don't really need to spend much time building up a stable of cars unless you particularly want to. Should you have your heart set on one of the more expensive cars in the game (I'm still nearly 2 million credits shy of a McLaren F1) you can even skip the grind by spending Microsoft points to buy car tokens. One token will cost you 80 points, or $1, with price breaks for six (400 points) and 13 (800 points). Even the most expensive car will only cost you three tokens. Sadly at the time of writing, it's not yet possible to purchase tokens, so right now it's a race to see if I get to 3 million credits before October 11.

Overall, Career mode offers a rich gameplay experience that should keep you busy for a while. According to my stats, I've spend just over four and a half hours driving time (don't worry, I've spent much longer with game in total) across 62 races. Despite reaching level 26, I've only completed 2.8 percent of the game. As you can see, I've got some way to go!