Forza Motorsport 3 [Xbox 360 Review]

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again if you just stumbled upon this page using a dodgy Google search query; I’m not big on racing games. The main reason that I find most realistic racers boring and difficult to master as I like a real steering wheel, and a peripheral doesn’t cut it for me.

Generally, I play arcade style racing games such as Mario Kart and Ridge Racer. Every now and then I spot a racing game that takes my eye one way or another that is realistic and is causing so much hype that I think, maybe I should try it. So here I am ready to review Forza Motorsport 3; does drift to the point that it tears me away from other racers and games in general, or does it crash in a blaze of burning tires?

Taking the Starting Line

Forza 3 is all about being a professional lone racer, your not a part of any team per-say but a dude who’s doing all the handy work and managing their cars by themselves. You start by being given a car to test your skills with to compare with the difficulty setting you chose. Once you finish that race you are given a choice of cars that will set your career off.

No specifics on story, just pick an event and race. Nice and simple. But the games approach would lead you into thinking that a possible story could be in place. As any car nut will know, having useless attachments to a car will slow it down despite it looking nice, you just want raw power to make a good racing car… or game in this game. Froza 3 delivers that perfectly.

See, once you picked your car you can then race it in an event. Each event are spread across 3-4 different races over a course of 2 weeks in the game during the weekdays (though I wouldn’t worry about weeks too much to be honest) with a class race at the end of the two weeks to compete in on Sunday.

This is pretty much how the game progesses with time stretching over a few years. Each event you are posed have their unique factor such as car type, maker, size and so forth. So not just any cars can get into a race forcing you to stick to the rules and build up a large number of cars and tweaking them in such a way is still within the rules for the race.

You can also earn experience points (XP) as a driver and for each car, which is a nice twist. RPG fans may get confused by this but it doesn’t add to any stats to improve your driving or car but rather what people think of you. So as your drivers XP goes up, you get offered new cars from dealers and new opportunities. Your cars XP goes towards respect from car and parts dealers offering discounts on new stuff. It’s interesting as money flow isn’t so easy so you need to weigh up using a certain car to gain discounts for new parts to get more money in the higher races.

Don’t Race, Don’t Worry

I suppose there are a lot of people in one of three or four camps when it comes to cars and/or racing games.

1. You are a car enthusaist and love modding cars but can’t race them

2. You love racing cars but don’t know a clutch to a gear

3. You know none of the above

4. You know how to race and mod cars

Well, if you are 4 this game is perfect for you.

If you are 1 or 2 then this game is also good for you.

If you are 3 on the other hand, this game will work for you!

Forza Motorsport 3 takes a lot into account to a point where I don’t think a realistic racing game has done this much. It’s impressive that any sort of gamer coming to Froza 3 can pick up and play without worry of feeling in-over their head.

The driving gameplay in Forza 3 is very accurate, meaning that there is lots to take into account when cornering and overtaking to the point that you do need to know the racing line. If you are confident then you can drive with all these factors in place… but if you are at the other end of the scale where you need a lot of help then you can set it all up so that all you need do is steer and accelerate and the game will do all the breaking, ABS and TOS to best follow the racing line. Oh, and what’s the racing line? Well, the game will show you a racing line on the track with indication to show if you should be accelerating, slowing down or breaking.

Good thing in addition to all this is rather than setting it all as levels of difficulty you do get the option to tweak them. So you do have your Easy, Medium, Hard and Real, but you also have the ability to say “I want easy, but no auto-breaking, only a partial racing line and medium difficult on opponent cars”. Honestly, this makes the game so nice to progress and it allows you to customize the learning curve of the game.

That all being said, the cars handle like you’d expect them to in real life if you want them to so there is no shortage of realism here, but that is depending on how you want them to handle. Gameplay is what you make of it here, although not to a very arcade style, you are going to choose the level of realism you want rather than choosing a style of play. But if you challenge yourself then you are able to grab more points at the end of the race to go towards your XP.

It’s all made even easier (if you want) by providing a rewind feature that allows you to go back a few seconds in the race and re-do a corner. For the length of the race, you can rewind as much as you want to strive for pole position. This isn’t limited in any way so what ever setting you play on, you have an infinite rewind ability. This can be very tempting to use and even hardcore players will find that they may want to tap the rewind button to shave a few seconds off that corner. As good as this sounds, it can cheapen race times by not having a realistic impression on what sort of time people get as you can easily turn the clock back.

“Listen To Her Purr”

When it comes to tuning cars, this is where I really struggle as I’m not sure what improves or makes the car worse and whether or not I need a certain thing for one race type or another for this type. But luckily Forza 3 has you covered using simple techniques that anybody can be a master modder using.

Each car is given a class from F to A and beyond into the pro-racing classes. To mark what class a car is, it’s given a score based on all the parts the car is using. As you improve the car parts by adding a more powerful engine or making it lighter, better tyre grip and all that, the car gets more points and can move up a class. Pretty simple stuff; basically, you look at the cost of the part and the more points it assigns your car the better you know the car is getting.

There is also smaller factors that the Froza 3 shows you that deals with specifics of your car such as speed, acceleration, breaking and such like that will go either red or green when you look at a part showing that it decreases a certain function (goes red) or improves (green). Really simple stuff, but if that even blows your mind you can opt to do an auto-tune where it will tune up your car to the top of the chosen class without you worrying about what’s the combo of stuff. To the polar oppoiste of this, you can fine tune your car to the point of tyre pressure, suspension and all that other stuff that worries me on my real car.

Really, this game is a racing game for any level of gamer, it’s unreal how easy or difficult this game can be depending on what you want.

Keeping Track

The graphics in Forza Motorsport 3 are fantastic, and really shows off a lot of the Xbox 360’s power fluidity display high resolutions. The cars really do look real and the tracks and environment are fantastic. Though, on this note, the less said about the crowd the better as they do look bad when you get up-close to them on a crash… makes you wonder if there really is a need for people waving on the side lines?

Some of the tracks are based on real ones such as Silverstone, Le Mans, New York and Nürburgring with a few extras thrown in like Maple Valley. As far as I can tell, these tracks are realistically copied in the sense the bends and turns are what you’ll find on the real tracks. Either way, there is enough versatility in the track listing to keep you entertained, from your hippodromes, straight flat-outs to the more curvaceous tracks where that racing-line indicator really comes in handy.

You can tell the devs are happy with the graphics though when you notice the camera option of taking photos at any point during a race and upload them to the Forza Motorsport website for the whole web to see or even to the in-game “online” store. It’s like having your own in-game dSLR as you can pause the game at the moment you want to take a picture, enter the camera mode and start selecting options such as aperture, colour, satin, shutter speed, etc. If that’s not enough, there is even an option to edit a movie of a particular race and upload those as well as showing off your skills.

Amid  all this, there is also the ability to customize your car that’s a pretty standard feature in racing games now, especially using decals that you can download from within the game. But Forza 3 takes a new stab at it by offering a whole set of tools and templates to create your own decals. Already I made a pac-man decal but people have gone into some intricate art that mostly copies popular icons such as The Simpsons, Family Guy and other cult cartoons. But this shows what the tool set is capable of.

There’s a Real World Out There

So with this as also the option to save car tune ups that, if you are advance enough to know a good tune setup, or customized car, you can sell them in the game to other real world gamers.

This adds the extra level of earning credits in the game. So you made a decal and want to sell it, set your price and how many units that are allowed to be sold, and away you go! If you got something good that’s worth noticing then people will start downloading and paying you credits.

Multiplayer-wise, Froza 3 takes a different stance in that rather than using your outfit of cars, it goes straight for the arcade style of select what car you want to race in a particular race type depending on the class limitations. You still get all your settings on how realistic you want the driving, but hard-work on building up a car in the main game are gone to waste here.

It seems as if a big hit was missed in the multiplayer to allow their career to also be representative on Xbox Live as well as in races. It’s a shame really as there is very little out there in the way of a racer MMO and Forza 3 had a shot at possibly being the first to hit on this, but has rather taken the easier option of “select any car you want within rules and earn bragging-right points”. Granted a minor point some may say, but with a service like Xbox Live, people love to make the most out of it and this doesn’t quite cut it.

The Checkered Flag

Forza Motorsport 3 is something that Xbox 360 racing fans have wanted for some time now, and it delivers almost perfectly in its execution, but the multiplayer and rewind feature let it down a tiny bit in being more of an after thought on the game and too easy even for hardcore gamers, respectively. But it’s fun, addictive, and adaptive to your play style so if you want to get into racers or know all there is about them then Forza Motorsport 3 will work for you!

Related posts:

1. Fuel [Xbox 360 Review]
2. Colin McRae: Dirt 2 [Xbox 360 Review]
3. Fuel [Xbox 360 First Impression]
4. Overlord II [Xbox 360 Review]
5. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen [Xbox 360 Review]