Forza Motorsport 3

Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game’s About
When it comes to the world of simulation racing, the Gran Turismo name rules. The originator of the simulation racing genre as we know it still owns the hearts and minds of die-hard racing sim fans and casual gearheads alike, and despite a few lackluster outings of late, it’s going to take a powerful challenger to usurp the brand’s position. Enter Forza Motorsport.

Over the course of two games, Microsoft’s upstart has managed to match Gran Turismo spec-for-spec in the garage, surpass it on the race-track with superior sense of speed and damage modeling, and out-maneuver it with innovations like the online auction house. Forza Motorsport 3 continues the franchise’s strong performance by introducing a host of community-building and accessibility-enhancing features to bring car lovers of all types together in a celebration of speed, style and car porn. It’s a daring maneuver to attempt with one of the most prohibitive and intimidating genres in gaming, but the gamble has paid off. If Gran Turismo, with its obsessive presentation values and fawning replays, is the epitome of automotive fetishism then Forza Motorsport is the embodiment of car culture and the new leader of the sim racing pack.

What’s Hot
Simulation racers have always excelled as far as car selection, tuning options and the like are concerned, but the actual racing has never been particularly exciting. The interaction between man and machine that makes driving what it is, that essential stream of feedback from the car that lets the driver “feel” the road through it, has been largely absent. Without it, what should be thrilling has felt dry, detached and slow. Not anymore. Forza Motorsport 3 amazes on the track, channeling God knows what kind of physics modeling and black magic into recreating that intangible connection to the car. You can feel the weight of the car shift as you push through a corner and the tires starting to lose their grip as car starts begging to over-steer. The presentation values enhance the connection, with flawless sound design and an impressive sense of speed that make it easier to gauge just how fast you’re going or how hard you’re braking. Suddenly, you stop spending your time eyeballing the track and trying to calculate when to start braking and just start to know when and how much you need to slow down. Now you can start thinking about the things that make racing fun, like setting up that next pass or carving that perfect line to shave a few fractions of a second off your time.

Feeling so connected to the car doesn’t just enhance immersion and excitement, it actually makes the game feel a little bit more comfortable out of the gate. Not everyone drives around race-tracks at 200mph, but most of us do drive, and for the first time that familiar skill-set actually feels like it applies. Obviously a racing wheel helps tremendously, but even with a controller in my hands, I felt more at home in the Audi R8 that Forza 3 drops you into than any of the D-class vehicles that other games use to get players acclimatized. Building on this natural boost in accessibility afforded by the physics modeling, developer Turn10 has put together a suite of options to help sim racing novices learn the nuances of the genre. Standard stuff like traction control, stability control and anti-lock brakes are complemented by more intrusive aids like the dynamic driving-line, auto-tuning and auto-braking, which basically plays the game for you. You can use any combination of the assists and adjust them any time so you can tailor the amount of help you want to your skill level or the car you’re driving. I usually turn off the driving aids but leave traction-control and stability control on when I get behind the wheel of something crazy like a Pagoni Zonda. Purists may scoff at me; they can rest easy in the knowledge that their no-assist lap times will always earn them more money and higher position on the leaderboard than me.

The problem I usually have with assists like these is that there’s no easy way to wean yourself off of them. Turning off the driving-line and traction control in Forza Motorsport 2 was a frustrating experience in trial-and-error as I careened into one wall after another until I finally picked up a rhythm. Forza Motorsport 3 addresses that issue by “borrowing” the rewind feature from Codemasters’ GRID. They’ve loosened it up in the process, allowing the player to rewind over a mistake as many times as they want instead of earning a finite number of them. Again I hear the purists scoffing, but to them I say this: Don’t use it. Nobody has a gun to your head and as with the assists, multiplayer doesn’t allow it and using the rewind feature will lower a player’s prize money and leaderboard standing. While they ignore it, less experienced players can use the rewind feature to ease themselves out of relying on assists. If you turned off the driving line and careen into a wall, rewind and try again. It’s still you behind the wheel of the car on the second go-round, so your success or failure is still in your own hands and the immediacy of retry helps you learn from your mistakes. Of course, there’s no law that says you ever have to give up the driving aids, but if you’re crushing the competition in every race and the game is starting to feel boring, chances are it’s time to lose one of your assists.

You can custom-tailor the single-player campaign as easily as you can your driving experience. The career mode guides you through several racing seasons, with championship events every few weeks. The races that occur between these championships are directly and indirectly determined by the player. Upon completion of any event, the game presents a choice of three events to tackle next, with each of the options based on the cars the player has been driving and the tracks they’ve played on. This system ensures that you’re never forced to race on a track you’re bored of or complete a race that’s been frustrating you. Even better, if at any time you’re in the mood for a specific type of event you can simply call up the full list of 200+ events and choose freely from there for a completely customized and unguided experience. It’s a fantastic setup because it prevents the single-player from feeling overwhelming or completely directionless, but provides enough freedom for players to get the kind of experience they want, when they want it. The strong notion of choice extends to the multiplayer as well, where players have the option to use a Halo-esque match-making system to join up with their buddies and customize a game to their specifications, jump into a quick match without specifying any preconditions, or search for a specific type of event.

The online multiplayer is as thrilling and social engaging as you would imagine, and executing flawless passes is always more fun against humans than computer AI. But in the spirit of car culture, the online component of Forza Motorsport 3 is so much more than just racing. The heart of the online experience lies on forzamotorsport.net and the My Forza profile, which basically does for Forza what Bungie.net does for Halo. The community HUB and profile page give you access to the latest news feeds, the status of any tournaments you’ve entered, as well as your personal racing stats. It seems like the kind of thing that would only be desirable to the most hardcore of players, but like Bungie.net, the size and enthusiasm of the community make visiting the site, checking our your friends’ stats and updating your profile surprisingly addictive. This is also where you can upload any photos or video clips you’ve taken via the game’s impressive replay mode and share them among your friends. There’s already a community of hardcore directors who are uploading videoclips to the site so they can download them and edit them with their editing software of choice.

The livery system is still the crown jewel of the Forza community though. The toolset is only slightly improved over the last game but the delivery system has been given an overhaul. Now instead of being forced to sell specific vehicles, players can save and sell custom set-ups and decals that can be applied to any cars (or only specific makes and models if the creator wishes). So if you were dying for a Lamborghini with a Mario decal last time around but could only find one on the hood of a Suzuki, now you can just buy the decal and apply it to any car you want. The design tools are deep enough that right-brain creative types can go nuts with them, and designing and selling decal packages is a great way to make a lot of in-game money fast and gain notoriety within the Forza 3 community. That’s really the beauty of Forza Motorsport’s feature-set; car lovers can celebrate their common passion in whatever way suits them best.

What’s Not
Outside of petty nit-picking, there really isn’t anything to complain about in Forza Motorsport 3. So in the interest of finishing up and letting you play the damn game already, I’ll keep this short.

Load times before races are longer than I would like, but nothing outrageous.

The visual presentation is great, but it’s not a huge jump over Forza Motorsport 2. Let’s just say some of the pre-release promotional shots may have been a tad misleading as it relates to texture resolution and lighting. There are some jagged edges on the cars, and reflections and shadows still have the odd habit of jittering across the bodywork. The damage modeling is particularly convincing. Slam into a wall at 200mph with the damage set to realistic and you’ll get some damage to the front end when in actuality, your entire car should have crumpled like a tin can. All of these issues are hard to notice when you’re taking in the sight of a meticulously detailed exotic against a backdrop of rolling hills while traveling at a silky-smooth 60 frames-per-second though.

The AI is challenging but not what I’d consider convincing. They don’t all travel in single-file like some other sim racers; they definitely battle with you for overtakes and the perfect line through the corners, but at times they feel borderline schizophrenic. You’ll see computer-controlled opponents carve a perfect line through one turn and then commit an act of brazen stupidity like hammering the throttle in a hair-pin and spin off the track. And sometimes you’ll see the same driver make the same idiotic mistake on the exact same turn on every single lap. Don’t get me wrong, fallibility can make for convincing AI, nobody is perfect after all, but nobody swings from excellence to incompetence that quickly or frequently. Of course, the incompetence disappears as you approach the later stages of the final seasons, leaving you with a track full of cyborgs that never make a mistake and make the game unnecessarily difficult. If you want fallibility, make some drivers consistently less impressive than others, so there’s a range of skill on the track.

That’s all I got.

Final Word
Forza Motorsport 3 is the best racing simulation ever made and as close to a flawless game as I’ve ever played. It gives players of all kinds the opportunity to shape, enjoy and share the experience of hurtling down straights at insane speeds, battling for position through the corners, and tinkering with their toys in the garage. As the ultimate platform for car lovers to explore and share their common passion, Forza Motorsport 3 is arguably itself, the ultimate demonstration of automotive worship. Between this and Burnout Paradise over in the arcade racing space, we may have hit the peak of the racing genre.