Forza Motorsport 3 Review [360] page 3

16 Oct 2009 at 11:23:32 by John Robertson
Systems used to review this title: (360)

If the whole idea of manually upgrading your vehicles sounds either boring or much too much like work, then you can opt for the ‘quick upgrade' feature. This automatically fits your car with the optimal parts, depending on how much money you have and which class you'd like to compete in (F being the lowest and S the highest, until you get to the specialised ‘R' class race cars). It's a great feature that gives those that don't know their muffler from their exhaust the ability to improve their cars without having to learn the anatomy of an automobile first.

The same layer-based decoration system for sprucing up your car's appearance returns from Forza 2. Anyone with a smidge of artistic flair can put the powerful, robust tools to good use and create some truly spectacular designs. What has really improved though, is the way you're able to share almost everything with the other users online. The 'storefront' allows you purchase, view and critique other user's car designs, photos, auctions, tuning set-ups and video replays. Whereas as before you had to purchase the whole car to get your hands on a certain paint job, you now need only buy the designs itself, at a much-reduced price. Creators set their own prices and decide how many they want to make available (from one to infinity), reaping the financial rewards if people take a liking to it. It's a fantastic system that significantly bolsters the community element, becoming the first place you check upon powering the game on each time just to have a quick look at any new arrivals.

Season play is where most players will spend the bulk of their time in single player, competing in a range of events with a range of cars. What's fantastic about season mode this time around is that high-level, high-XP reward events cover all car classes (from F to R) equally, allowing you to continue using your favourite, lower-powered cars all the way through your career - preventing stop them from becoming redundant after the first couple of hours.

The progression through events has also changed slightly. You now pick an event and it's added to your calendar (a three event race may take up a week (including rest days), for example). However, to throw a spanner in the works, mandatory World Championship races take place every other weekend, often scheduled between two races your selected event. The result is that it aids in splitting up the events, preventing you from having to race with, and against, the same cars for extended periods at a time. It's a small change that has a big effect, giving you license to buy and test new cars to your heart's content.

Forza 3 is - for now, at least - the finest, pure racing game available on any console today. The already fantastic handling model has been accompanied by an exciting collision system, much improved community features and a wealth options for personalising and improving the available army of cars. Unfortunately, due to the currently barren servers, we couldn't take multiplayer for a spin, but the true-skill ranking system returns, seemingly unchanged from Forza 2. You'll also need to make sure that you have at least 2GB of hard drive space available to carry out the ‘optional' install, if you don't fancy missing out on a huge number of the game's tracks and cars.

All in all, if you're looking for a racing game that will provide many months of entertainment, then look no further. With Gran Turismo still without a European release date, Forza 3 has staked its claim as the finest racer of this generation, and we're in no mood to argue.

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