FORZA MOTORSPORT 3 OFFICIAL GSA REVIEW

Anybody that knows me will be only too aware that I love my racing games! So when I received this game from Microsoft last week, I was very excited to get started on what has turned out to be a wonderful and exciting passage of discovery. To say that doing this review has been a labour of love would be an understatement.

OK, OK, enough gushing from me for now, lets get down to the nuts and bolts of it.
This is the follow up game to 2007's smash hit game of the year Forza Motorsport 2.
A game that was close to all our hearts here at GSA, as it was one of the first games that brought us all together as a community and many many race nights followed.

So let me start by telling you what's new and on offer this time around. Quite simply the game has been improved upon and tweaked in every single area. There are over 400 cars and more than 100 real world track and exotic road courses from around the world. Quite simply the level of depth this time around is staggering!

Included for the first time is a new level of options and driving assists to cater for everyone from the nervous novice driver right through to the uber expert petrol-head.
Basically there is a new facility called auto-break which means that if you are new to racing sims then all you have to do is steer around the curves of the track following the racing line as best you can and the AI will do the rest for you. Still in from the last series is the ability to hire a driver for the more tricky courses or if you don't have the stones for a 40 lap hour long Le Mans style epic sesh!

The career is now a split over 6 seasons spanning 6 years. Each year another month is added to the race calendar and another couple of laps are added to the distance. For example when I was racing in year 2 the race trophy events were made up of 3 races spread over 3 days, with each race about 5 laps long. Then when I moved onto to year 3 it was 4 races over 4 days and each race was upto 8 laps long. So as you can see there is plenty to keep you busy and the new setup feels like much more fun and much less of a grind than Forza 2. Although one of the last achievements you will ever get from this title will no doubt be winning gold in all 220 of the events on the calendar! There are also cheevys for levelling up all the way to driver level 50 and these are handed out regularly along the way, so plenty of ping to be had for your driving buck.

The game includes cars from over 50 of the world's best manufacturers and there is even an achievement for owning one from each of them. Now onto the tracks, including Suzuka, Nürburgring Nordschleife and the Sebring International Raceway from previous versions. Plus jaw droppingly beautiful road tracks like the gorgeous mountainous Montserrat region in Spain, the rugged Amalfi Coast in Italy and the American Southwest. The graphics in this game are truly special and take things to a level not achieved by any other racer to date. There are 10 times the amount of polygons used in Forza Motorsport 2 and the difference makes you believe you really are racing some top end beasts and pushing them to there physical limits and beyond.

Time for abit more detail about the gameplay, the handling model is the best in any racer yet. It just feels perfect, this is the game all others will now have to aspire too.
Included for the first time is the ability to rewind your race if things go wrong, but its not done in a over the top in your face way. The facility is there for you to use if you need too and does actually mean you can afford to take more risks and push things to the limits more. I actually play through the career on hard difficulty this time around whereas with Forza 2 I had to stick to medium to be sure of winning all the events.
So in many ways it allows you to challenge yourself more and the AI cars can stay with you and offer a far greater challenge. Because if you do slide off the track or get bumped by a rival on lap 19 of 20, then you can just hit the back button and pretend like it never happened at all or even have a pop at knocking your rival off and seeing how much he likes it! *-)

The time trials and hot laps and there are also the new drag and drift modes to add to the melting pots of race options. Also included is the point to point, one on one races that can be really tense over 3 rounds or more. I am not a huge fan of drifting, but its handled very well and only 2 of the 50 achievements are for this mode. Drag racing can be very tense but is of course over very quickly and you will need to tune your nuts and bolts off to compete at a high level.

Still a huge part of Forza 3 is the tuning, painting and pimping your ride to the max to either sell on the new store front or to impress your mates over xbox live with. But a change this time around includes the option to auto-upgrade your car. I really tested this to the max and it does as good a job as I could do myself, yet saves many minutes working through menus and in and out of various options etc. It will even remove some parts for you to get you just under the allowed level to qualify for a lower class. They have even added a couple of extra car classes, now going all the way down to F class and up through to S and R1 to R3.

Now onto the multiplayer, this has been improved beyond belief! There are now so many options that it will take you a long time to work through them all. Eliminator events are now included along with Tag events, so cat and mouse will surely be uber popular for a lighter more fun race with mates. You can even specify staggered starts for every competitor, leaving the start line at 2 second intervals for example and racing for a set period of time, with the winner being the one who travelled furthest in the allotted time slot. Like I said I could write a small book describing in detail the plethora of new online modes!

I must mention the one thing in the whole game that I would change.....................
There are no online achievements this time around! As someone who got the full 1000 on Forza 2 I am disappointed as they could easily have included just one to make sure we all kept striving for more online credits for months to come. Having said that any credits earned online do help you work towards your driver level and this may well carry more kudos in the long run anyway.

Quite simply this is the best racing game I have ever played on any system ever. Its the nearest thing to perfection yet and I am going award it the Gamerscore Addicts special seal of approval. A Hairpin bendingly huge 9.5 out of 10

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Well done mate a very in depth and informative review, looking forward to finally getting my hands on this tomorrow.

grrr to many AAA games coming out and I can't get them. Not happy. It's either this or COD 6. I've preordered COD so I'll have to wait to get Forza.

Great review Kent, i'm drooling at the prospect of this arriving today.

Thanks for the good feedback guys

This game is my personal game of the year!

Its a 100% must buy.

If you don't enjoy this then you just hate racing and driving and are probably a fish related organism.

great review mate. what an awesome game. its just a shame about the online achievements.

You do still up your driver level when playing online and can win lots of credits.
Plus there are many new multiplayer only modes to play with

Excellent review mate looking forward to picking this up later on and trying it out for myself!

Been playing this for the last couple of hours!

All i can say is WOW.....

First few races were a bit painful, with the incredibly slow 1st cars. But once you've won a couple of new motors it really starts to shine.

And i'm loving the fact that i'm hearing that little achievement ping after nearly every race so far lol!!!

have you got the steering wheel for this or joypad which is the best?

Useful site if anyone wants to have a go at tuning: http://diy-racetuning.net/

Firstly, a fantastic review and very helpful. I think FM3 is one of the most enjoyable racing games I have ever played and I think I have played the majority of them. It has a very good learning curve, easing you steadily into the workings of the game. It is also the only racing game that I have ever played where I felt that I was really in control of the car when using the steering wheel! The default settings seem to be perfectly set up for me. I am do not fully understand the technicalities of the advanced MS steering wheel settings - so knowing that the default settings work so well this is a great relief for me.

However, on the subject of the the steering wheel - this is where my only gripe about FM3 comes in, and any advice to solve it would be most helpful. I used my steering wheel for the first time last night with the game and discovered when using the replay mode the steering wheel develops a life of its own and seems to retrace and reverse the steering movements wheel during the car reversing. Has anyone else encountered this? If so, do they know if there is a way to stop this from happening? Any advice would be gratefully received.

However, I am not going to end my post about FM3 on a negative, because there really is no negative about such a great game. I can say I am well and truly hooked and the actual game answers those critics who said that the marketplace demo was pretty dull and lifeless! The actual game is anything but. I can see many joyful hours spent with my XBox and my MS steering wheel (I love the fact that Turn 10 have actually included a clutch button on the steering wheel now).

I hope those of you out there who have just received your copies of FM3 are having as much fun and enjoyment with it as I am. Thank you Turn 10 - I think you have just given my wife grounds to divorce me!.

Take care everybody and happy motoring.