Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is Microsoft and developer Turn 10's series introduction on PC, albeit in a free-to-play format that culls Xbox One's Forza 6 into something more bite-sized than fans or the franchise deserves. The game is in open beta at the moment, and I tried it, which led me to question if this is really what Forza is all about.
Apex features 12 Tour races where you earn medals based not just on how well you do, but if you knock out certain objectives. So you may have an absolute hot rod in your stable, but if you can't race it without the racing line, for instance, you're going to miss out on that extra medal. Earning and showing off your medals to your friends is what Apex is all about. Since it doesn't have traditional multiplayer – only asynchronous multiplayer – the best you can do is make sure you have more medals and better times than anyone else. It's not just a curious choice, it's a downright bad one that doesn't represent Forza nor give anyone playing Apex any joy.
While the racing experience itself feels up to snuff with the console experience – and I highly suggest you pair your PC with the Xbox One controller to feel its trigger rumble – overall the beta feels bare and sterile. Spotlight races are unlocked after you finish the tour, and here you'll find more races for the cars you've earned (on this front the game is generous), but with few standout features (and no livery editor, either) Apex feels like a demo of a larger title that may never come.
This is the beta, but it's not hiding a larger, more fully featured title. Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10 says that "performance optimizations" and wheel support will occur within the beta window, and that when Apex comes out of beta (when, we don't know) Greenawalt says, "we might do further performance optimizations." Thus, Apex is not going to suddenly blossom into a different experience once out of beta. Regarding multiplayer and the livery editor specifically, Greenawalt says, "...these features will be coming to the Windows platform in our next major release of the Forza franchise." He adds, "We have a long-term tech roadmap for how and when we will bring Forza's broader feature set to Windows."
Perhaps in some ways Apex is more like Forza 6 on Xbox One than I'd care to admit. Similar to Apex, that game presented its career in a linear fashion and you often have more cars than you could use – decisions which I felt hampered players freedom and sense of excitement. You can select any car in Apex for free-ride mode, but I don't consider that as a feature which makes me more likely to utilize those vehicles.
Apex has 63 cars and 20 tracks but that's where its potential starts and pretty much ends. The Forza franchise has tried to make itself more than another sim-racing series, but Apex brings it back down to being a very by-the-numbers affair. Pick a car and race it, but don't expect a reason to come back for more.
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