I’ve liked racing games since I played Pole Position for the Atari 5200 (wow, I guess I’m really dating myself with that reference). I spent many hours a couple of years ago playing Need for Speed: Prostreet, which was a very fun game and got me back into the idea of racing games after many years of hiatus. NFS: PS was a good, solid game in many ways, but certain things annoyed me about it — such as the fact that you could win every race by so much that you had lapped all of your opponents, and still not have earned enough “points” to win the “race day.”
At any rate, when I got my Xbox 360 and looked over the game reviews, a few games came to the fore by their reputation and the interest they held for me, and Forza Motorsport 3 was right at the top. Among the features that I found attractive were a reportedly long, deep “career” mode, and a very flexible vinyl designer that would let people design whatever they wanted in in terms of the car’s look/feel.
I got the game for Christmas, and have been playing it ever since. Just tonight I finished year 6 of “career” mode, which I thought was the final one, but the game moved me into “year 7,” so apparently there is even more to do in the game. Overall I think it is a solid game, and has a lot of good features, although it does have some (minor) weaknesses. I wouldn’t let any of the negatives put you off buying the game — if you like racing games, Forza 3 is a great one. But don’t expect perfection, because you won’t quite get it.
Visuals/Graphics – 10/10
Forza 3 is a beautiful looking game. The cars all look realistic and are rendered and modeled near-perfectly. The terrain, the race tracks, the environments, all look fantastic. The details are incredible. Use the “hood” view, so that you are placed at about the front window (but can’t see the cockpit), using a car with a dark hood. Now take the car onto any track and drive it, and look down at the hood. You will see the terrain, bent and warped to the shape of the hood, reflected there, moving as you drive by it. The details are incredible. The environments look realistic and are highly detailed. Go to Amalfi Coast and you will feel like you are really driving through Italy. In all the hours I have played the game I’ve not yet seen any artifacts or graphics issues. Shadows, lighting, rendering, are all out of this world.
Sound – 10/10
The sounds in the game are excellent. Different street surfaces sound different under your tires. Each car has its own unique-sounding engine. You can hear the roar of the crowd as you pass them by. The tires squeal satisfyingly when you stop short. Everything is realistic and the quality of the sound is first-rate. I have no complaints about this either.
Gameplay – 8/10
Overall, the gamaplay in Forza 3 is solid. The controls are easy to learn, and the game does an excellent job of providing “training” wheels. Rather than just having modes like “easy” or “hard”, it has a variety of settings and you can tweak these as you see fit. You can turn on or off features like ABS brakes, traction control, auto-braking, manual transmission, clutch use, and the like. You can have the computer paint an “ideal line” on the track to help you figure out the best place to drive, or turn that feature off. These things are common to racing games now, so I’m glad Forza 3 has them.
The actual races are a blast. Cars range from the “F” rated class, i.e. the slowest, poorest-handling cars, to the R1 class, which are like Formula race cars. Each car handles differently and you can definitely see a difference in handling, power, etc across the classes. Just today I raced the same track back-to-back (by happenstance, not intentionally) in a C class Subaru and then in an R1 class Pugeot race car. Wow were those races different!
An extremely useful feature, although one that is easy to abuse, is the “rewind” button. At any point in the race, you can hit “rewind” and the race will back up about 10 seconds and let you re-play that moment to try something different. You can keep backing it up further if you want, although there is a limit (I am not sure exactly how long but I would guess around 60 seconds max). Get distracted by something and forget to slow down, plowing into the wall and totaling your car? No worries! Now instead of having to quit out of the race and do the whole thing over again (as you’d do with most other racing games), in Forza 3 you can just hit rewind, back the game up a few seconds, and then try the turn again, this time using a lower speed now that you’ve been warned.
As I say, this feature is easy to abuse, and I used it a lot early in my game-play. But abuse aside, it is very helpful for those of us trying to learn how to play racing games well, and here’s how: It let’s you re-play your mistake spot immediately. In a normal racing game, if on the 11th out of 12 turns on the track, I crashed, and so I started over, I’d have to wait through the entire 11 turns again before having a chance to correct my move — by which point I’m liable to just make the same mistake over again since it’s been long minutes between that mistake and my next shot at the curve. But in Forza 3 I can back up and adjust immediately. I feel like this helped me learn faster, and I was eventually able to set most of the assists to the harder levels as time went on because of this.
I also want to take a moment to talk about the AI. The AI in this game is very good. The AI racers act like human beings, to the point where certain ones annoy me and I think of them as my “arch rivals” — even though they are just computerized “NPCs.”
Finally, one thing I really appreciate is the “storefront” and the fact that you can buy and sell tuning setups for the various cars in the game. I’ve tried to manually tune cars but I never really seem to be able to get them to handle the way I want. Other players are much better and this. And truth be told, I want to race, not spend hours in the tuning setup menus. It’s nice that I can use a few thousand in-game credits and buy a highly rated “grip tune” or “drift tune” and get a car that is set up way better than the computer would set it up for me, and better than I could set it up after hours of tweaking… and is all ready to go in one shot. I definitely appreciate that, since spending hours tuning takes away from time racing, which is what I bought the game to do in the first place.
I only have two real quibbles with the game. The first is that the leap between easy and medium artificial drivers is a bit too steep. I went early on from being unable to lose against easy AI to being unable to win against medium. In recent weeks I’ve managed to turn that around with all but the R1 class of cars, winning more than I lose on medium (now). Still, I think levels in between medium and easy, and in between hard and medium, are really needed here, so I couldn’t give them a 10 in this category.
My second quibble with them is that the season play mode, which lasts 6 seasons for the main game and then continues into a 7th season (which I have not started yet) starts to drag after season 5. It seems like they haven’t got something done right here, because they have “driver levels” (which as far as I can tell are basically meaningless except as a numerical representation of how many races you’ve been in), and driver level maxes out at 50. I was at max level around the time season 6 started… so through season 6, there was nothing to gain. Indeed, other than the fact that the Xbox 360 Achievement list includes a 50-pointer for finishing season 6, I’d probably not have bothered to finish. Season 6 is extremely long, with 13 main R1-level races and dozens of “smaller” events in between, and this is just a little too long for my taste. It got to the point where, after about race 8 of the R1 event, I was ready to be done, but I still had 5 more of those plus some 40 or 50 other races to do in between, before I could finish. It’s just a little too much.
I realize it sounds almost like I am saying that the game has “too much content,” but I’m really not. By the end of season 3 or 4 you have seen every track in the game unless you’re going to download some of the DLC tracks, and there are only a few of those. So you’re racing for well over 100 races on tracks you’ve seen, against artificial drivers you’ve faced already, in situations that will become very “deja vu” for you. I don’t mind too much doing, say, one version of each track with each car class, but they make you do the same track many, many more times than that, and that is where it gets old.
Perhaps some of this could be solved by additional DLC tracks, but I think even with those, the main issue with the game is that the latter parts of it become a test of endurance and stick-to-it-iveness, rather than pure fun. Of course you don’t have to go for all the achievements, and just play till you get bored and the game will be fine… but my feeling is that this could have been balanced a little better. In particular I see no reason why you should cap your level dozens of races before the game ends — especially since level is just a number and otherwise basically meaningless. It’s not like an RPG where you’re getting “stat bonuses” or anything like that.
User Interface – 9/10
The UI for Forza 3 is excellent for the racing, and good although somewhat clunky for the design editor (see below for more details). Inside a race, the layout of the controls on the controller is quite usable, and the UI elements on screen are easy to understand and navigate. You can bring up all sorts of data on your car, like how the different parts of each tire are wearing, how much damage you’ve taken (if any), etc. I particularly like, since you really can’t pay a lot of attention to this during a race (without crashing into a wall thanks to the distraction) you can re-watch any race after it’s over as an “instant re-play” and you can watch the telemetry during the re-play. This allows you to see what the parts of your car are doing and, if you’re really into tuning, can help you figure out how to tune your car.
There is also a “garage” interface, if I can call it that, where you can use the various menus to tune and upgrade your car, and that works quite well. Most of the navigation is intuitive and self-explanatory, and I have an easy time selecting upgrade options for my cars, generally.
Finally there is an interface for the designer, which allows you to place vinyls on your car in lots of shapes and sizes, tweak them, color them, and so forth. This is generally a good interface but it is the one weakness in the game’s UI. My main complaint is that it’s very easy to click into the wrong editing mode, and apply a skew instead of a spin to a shape. Because that’s so easy to do, I really wish they had created an “undo” feature, to just undo the last, and only the last, transformation to a layer. They do have a “global undo” where you can back out of your whole edit of a shape, but if you’ve just spun, moved, stretched, and then accidentally skewed, a one-step undo would be much more helpful than having to cancel it all and re-start it. If they’d had just an undo button here, I’d give them a full 10/10 for the interface, but as it is the lack of a one-step undo feature has frustrated me enough times that I felt I had to dock them a point for it.
Editor/Designer – 8/10
Speaking of the editor, where you can design your own shapes, I like it a lot. You can design shapes directly onto a car, which can be helpful getting the layout of the shapes right on the car body, but you can also design shapes in a special “editing” space where you have a flat look directly at the shape and a grid to help you position things. I use both, depending on what I am doing, and they are a lot of fun. You can really flex your creative style, and I have had a blast making cars in the editor dedicated to things like my old Alma Mater, Rutgers University.
I do have a few complaints about the design editor. The first is that they only allow 1,000 layers on a car. If you pain the way I do, as in the two images in this post, then that’s not a huge limitation. But some of the fantastic images I have downloaded to put onto my car will fill up the entire 1,000 layers, which doesn’t allow me to add my own touches to the car. It wouldn’t be so bad if this hadn’t been exactly the same limitation as in Forza 2. I’m not sure why the limitation exists at all, since I am sure the game isn’t computing 1,000 layers at a time during a race — but they could have upped this to 2,000 for the new game release.
A larger issue for me is that they have hundreds of great manufacturer’s logos (excellent — makes cars look more realistic to have them) but they don’t let you re-color any of them. The only solution is to make, or download, player-created reproductions of existing logos, some of them with very complex lettering, so that you can color them however you want. The two pictures I have here show how it can be done — they’re all my own versions of logos so they could be re-colored. I didn’t mind making a “Rutgers” logo, since you can’t expect that to be in the game. But when a red-and-yellow “Pirelli” (tire company) logo already exists, why can’t I color it white, or red, or green?
Finally, there seems to be a bit of an issue painting cars that come from the manufacturer in two colors, like the Bugatti Veyron. The paint editor seems like it is trying to let you pick a pair of colors, but only one of the colors ever changes on the car. So you can have a black/red color combo, and switch to white/blue. The /red will change to /blue, but you’e end up with black/blue, because the white/ color doesn’t seem to “take.” Perhaps there is some option I am missing to get this to work, but if so, it is undocumented and completely unintuitive, which is just as bad in its own way.
Overall the editor and designer are good, but they are not perfect. The game could use a little work in this area. I’d think some of this could even be fixed in a relatively trivial patch.
Fun – 9/10
In the end, as I always say, a game is about fun, and in the fun department Forza 3 absolutely delivers. I have had tons of fun on tracks from around the world, racing some of the coolest cars ever made, like the Bugatti Veyron and the Porsche 911. The game provides a fun, interesting challenge, and the individual tracks are variable enough that you’re always facing a slightly different situation. Designing cars can be a frustrating challenge at time but getting that design right can be satisfying, and there is a great little community on the Forza boards that centers around some truly great designs. In the end the game is quite fun, except for the “endurance” parts of it, but those are minor and you can just not do those.
Overall – 9.0/10
Overall, Forza 3 is an excellent game. If you like racing, I highly recommend it. The game has great lasting appeal, and although, after completing season 6, I don’t see myself re-doing the entire career mode any time soon, I absolutely see myself playing it on and off for many months to come. It’s the best racing game I’ve played so far.
Enigmatic Diversions 