Review: Forza Motorsport 3
Game: Forza Motorsport 3
Platform: XBox 360
Developer: Turn 10
Developer: Microsoft Games Studios
Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo, the two heavyweights of the racing genre seem to be gearing up to a big old brawl. With Gran Turismo set for a an early 2010 release Microsoft have their own hardcore racing sim to go and compete directly with it and it’s much bigger than ever before. According to Turn 10 the game features over 400 cars, 50 manufacturers and over 100 tracks, which I feel I should point out how they count those tracks, for example Nurburgring has 5 tracks as each stage is counted as a separate track alongside the full circuit. However this still does create a very sizable package.
Microsoft have spent a lot of time positioning Forza Motorsport as a hardcore racing sim and that is very much the focus of this title, however this doesn’t mean that more casual racing fans will not find enjoy this. Turn 10 have really gone out of their way to make it a much more accessible game than the previous games in the franchise. There are a lot of difficulty options to allow the game to suit a lot of different skill levels, for example you can have a racing line which shows you where to start turning and when to brake as well as having traction control and anti-lock brakes to make the car easier to handle.This allow people to easily get into the game and given that the higher the difficulty the greater your rewards it is balanced well by the game to get you to really push yourself. Also some of the other features have been refined to make them more accessible, if you are not really into tuning your cars and you don’t really know what all the upgrades do you can use the quick upgrade feature which optimises your car automatically given you have enough credits to do so.
One of the main new features that has been added to make the game easier is the rollback feature, if you mess up a corner you can press one button to rewind time and so have another go at the corner. This is a strange feature to add to what is very much a hardcore focus game but there are legitimate reasons for using it, for example in a 2 hour endurance race you could be 1hr 55mins into the race an then get knocked off the track by the AI and completely waste the last 2 hours of your life, now you can rewind the game and give it another go.
The main game is a beast, pure and simple, there is a huge amount of events laid before you and you can choose to take on whichever you desire or you can follow the season mode, which counts virtual years and suggests events for you to take based upon the cars you own. Given the huge amount of content and the way the game drip feeds you rewards and given how it changes based upon how you personalise your car it means that each person will have a very different career mode compared to other people. There is a good progression and whenever you finish an event you are asked to choose your next event given what content you want to see. The three choices, which are dependant upon the car you are currently in and gives you the option to either stick with your current car, see new tracks or see completely diffent cars. If however, you really don’t want to dive into the deep end of the extensive career mode there is a free play option which simply allows you to pick a car and pick a track and just drive and there is certainly a full games worth of content just doing that, so you can easily get plenty of hours of gameplay without ever touching the career.
In fact you don’t need to spend the entire time racing, there is loads to do on the side for any car enthusiast. The upgrading and customization are so in depth and coupled with the online storefront you can make plenty of in-game money and spend a lot of time just selling designs and tuning setups online. I guess the main thing I’m trying to put across is the sheer amount of content so if you have even a passing interest in cars you will be able to find something you enjoy about this game, and there is plenty to do for all the people who are really into cars as well and the game does well to give players who want to ultimate control over every aspect of their car whilst at the same time allowing the people who don’t want to go in that deep plenty of options and features to allow them to compete of a fairly level playing field.
I can’t stress enough how good this game is, it looks fantastic it’s smooth as hell, the cars all look accurate and very nice. It also has a huge amount of online features, as well as multiplayer racing there is a storefront feature which allows players to upload their designs, photos or videos online so other people can download them or view them. At any point during racing you can pause it to take a photo which is a nice option, as a point to how well this works, every screenshot used in this review was taken by me in game on the photo option. I can’t recommend this game enough, there is so much to do no matter what skill level you are or how much you are into cars.
GRAPHICS: 5/5 – The game is so beautiful everything is well detailed and looks great running at both high speeds and low speeds, all the environments and cars look right and look fantastic, you can just enjoy driving about looking at the scenery.
SOUND: 5/5 – All the sounds are very clear, they took their time to make all the cars sound like the real life versions and any upgrades you apply to the car do also change the sound in a way you’d expect. I do feel like there needs to be a few more songs on the background music but that is fixed by using custom soundtracks.
GAMEPLAY: 5/5 – It controls perfectly and you can configure the difficulty much further than easy, medium and hard to optimise it for you and your playing style.
LONGEVITY: 5/5 – OK, I’m going to say it up front, THIS GAME IS ON 2 DISCS! That’s how much content this game has, I have played for somewhere between 30 and 4o hours and I’m about at 15% career completion. That plus multiplayer is a whole load of time.
OVERALL 5/5 – Thinking I need to rename this review ‘A love letter to Turn 10′ I love this game and I will be playing it probably for the rest of time. If you have even a passing interest in cars then you will love this game.
[starreview tpl=16]
Brilliant review. Not a big fan of racing games admittedly although I loved Burnout Revenge. Worth a look anyway?
It has lots of features so I’m sure you’ll find something you like in there, however don’t expect to go knocking other cars out of your way as that will most likely cause you to spin out and lose as well. If you’re not to familiar with this type of game you can tailor the difficulty to suit you by turning on assists so it’s not so frustrating