Michael-5

User Score
9.8

Presentation - 9.5
Gameplay - 9.9
Value - 10

Forza Motorsport 3 is an exclusive 360 racing game. Lets get that out of the way. However it's also the best racing game of the generation. It outdoes Forza Motorsport 2, Project Gotham Racing, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, and Need for Speed easily. Why?? It's realistic, fun, and accessable.

I'm not going to compare Forza to Gran Turismo 5 too much, but I must point out one flaw of the Gran Tuismo franchise. In Gran Turismo the amount of cars you play in are very limited. You can play the game for twenty hours or more and still not be able to afford a Ferrari. Nor will you play with multiple various vehicles. A lot of the time you play in really terrible cars like a Toyota Vitz, for the first 40 hours. Who even knows what car I am refering too?? Nobody wants to play a game that forces you to play like that.

In Forza, you play your first race in an Audi R8 V10, then one race in a Honda Fit type car, and then you start buying civics. Every race you have a new car to race in, and you can still race in older cars you own. Within the first hour I bought a Ferrari, and a few other exotics like a 911 Porsche.

It's a well built single player game that rewards you as you level up from racing, and encourages you to drive almost any car imaginable.

One of Turn 10's ads quoted "Drive your Dream Car" and that is exactly what this game allows you to do.

Anybody can start playing with very customizable difficulty settings, and even people who know nothing at all about cars can easily win some pretty slick cars to race with.

Graphics are insane, the best I have seen yet. I wish they included an in cockpit rear view camera like in GT5, but other then that, it's gorgeous. The cars in many online pictures or videos just don't give the game any glory. You need to put the game in your 360, and play it in HD. Watch as the light reflects off your car, and then see your front bumper rip off as you smack you opponents.

The gameplay is spot on, tires will deform in real time as cars of different mass hit the smallest most insignificant bumps on the track aty different speeds. Turn 10 really tried to make the gameplay in this racer excel, and it shows.

When you plug in the 360 steering wheel and play this game, it feels so like real life, the only thing off is the G-Force from doing a turn, and the fact that your sitting on a couch.

What really makes this game enjoyable is that the cars drive like they would in real life. I have driven many of the moderatly priced sports cars in the game, and it feels right. A Mustang will not corner as well as a Nissan 370Z, but it will go fast in the straights as long as you manage the power well. However their in game car performance index doesn't make much sence. A $80,000 Lotus Evora is placed lower then a $40,000 Nissan 370Z (Canadian Prices sorry), but when I see the cars on Top Gear, or race them in Forza 3 itself, I always see the Evora being the faster car. Same with the Pagani Zonda, it's under-rated.

Damage really helps the game too. Although the cars to not physically crumple like cars in Burnout do, the attention to detail is astonishing. If your bumper gets knocked loose it will be a road hazzard, and if it manages to stay attached, it will spark as it touches the ground, and bounce, and just be right.

As for Value, you will get hundreds of hours in this game, with a variety of cars. It will probably take 300 hours to beat the entire game, and well...thats a lot. Much more then any other racer I've played.

So to summarize:

It is the best racing game ever made to date. It has the best graphics, the most realistic physics, and the structure of the game allows you to race all your dream cars. I mean all of them. It's fun to play weather your renting it for 5 hours, or planning to do the entire 300 hours. With over 450 cars now, and over 100 tracks, this game has among the most cars in any racing game, and i beleive the most tracks ever, at least in a simulation racer.

However in reviewing the game I give Presentation only a 9.5/10. There are a few hickups in the game. For one, when it was released it didn't feel like it was finished. The gameplay was spot on, but when you shifted gears, the AI in the cockpit did nothing at first. A patch fixed that, but he always looks like he is shifting gears the exact same way. PGR4 has a better cockpit AI. Also about half the car interiors, especially race cars, does not seem super detailed. The important dream cars are amazing, but not every car is like that. Also the performance index is off.

However this game does a lot of things right. It delivers the best racing games in terms of gameplay, graphics, and accessability. It allows you to race ALL your dream cars.

My only real complaint is that I cannot choose my opponent AI race cars when I just do a free race. I really wanted to see how some of my favorite cars compete against each other, so I want to have AI race in the cars I CHOOSE, and watch, maybe even participate. I would also like seeing AI race in my custom cars.

Forza 3 is a great game, but it feels like it was rushed. A lot more cars could have been added with some more car interior detail, and just the little things could easily have been removed. Overall I give this game 9.8/10. Just a few hic-ups, in an otherwise flawless racing title.