Review: Forza Motorsport 3 for Xbox 360

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Forza Motorsport 3: The quintessential racing simulator

There's enough depth, variation and substance in Forza Motorsport 3 to keep every gearhead, tuner, painter, speed demon and online race nut busy and happy for a long, long while.

Packed with so much content that it's a two-disc affair, Forza Motorsport 3 (FM3) squeezes 10 times the polygons that the previous version offered. This means more itty-bitty shapes making up the shape of a car to go from car-shaped representation to photo realistic replica. The attention to detail and texture is evident everywhere, even as the game zooms along at 60 frames per second. When watching playback videos of races, you'll easily confuse them for race footage on your favorite sports channel.

You begin your FM3 career by racing cute but annoyingly underpowered subcompacts then grind through a series of races to earn money ("credits") in order to buy better cars or upgrade and tune the ones you already own. This Season Play mode starts out with a small selection of lap-based circuits and a few of point-to-point races, with more and more coming available as you earn your stripes. Though that may sound tedious, like work, it's also an essential method for honing the basic skills required. There's also a number of "dumb it down" options that will automate persnickety driving tasks such as, oh, braking. At any rate, it also slowly introduces you to better cars that require yet better driving chops for all the freakish speed they deliver.

Screenshot taken from an actual Forza Motorsport 3 race.
Ultimately, you'll want to have the best possible cars and the skills to steer them before going online to challenge other racers, anyway. Online is its own world, of course, but neatly delineated so you can play with only like-minded or like-skilled racers if you want to.

As with previous versions, the depth and variety of car selections in FM3 is staggering. Everything from unremarkable Hyundai's to million-dollar supercars such as the Lamborghini Reventon and the Bugatti Veyron are available, all from the get-go save for the credits required to buy them.

However, knowing there are 400 such cars sitting there idle, just waiting for a rip, FM3 also allows you to just jump right in and drive every single one of them in Quick Race mode, even if you can't afford them (or had them bequeathed as a prize). Not surprisingly, you earn no cash or experience points this way, but instant gratification is a beautiful thing - and a teaser for things to come if you take the plunge and earn your stripes in a full on Forza career.

FM3 also boasts improved damage physics with the likes of tire deformation and the ability to flip cars over. This means that you can live out a fantasy and drive like a maniac, as always, but there are exceedingly realistic consequences to such cathartic/maniacal behavior, like causing multi-car pile-ups or simply getting caught up in one, or maybe lose your entire front end after an impromptu rendezvous with an in immovable object, like a wall.

So it follows that a new and welcome addition to Forza series is 3's "rewind" feature which, when invoked at any moment of your choosing, allows you to go back a few seconds to the moment before a collision, spinout or merely a bad line and try again. Unlimited Mulligan's on-the-fly, so to speak.

This 1973 Porsche 914 is one of 400 cars available to race on any number of tracks.

Also new to Forza 3 is an in-car view option that shows the actual dashboard and all of its unnervingly accurate dials and gauges doing their dialing and gauging thing. It can be distracting and the view does limit your vision, but it's certainly faithful to the real deal.

When not racing, you cool your thumbs by customizing, tuning, upgrading or painting your cars. You can get lost in this as FM3 offers more cosmetic and mechanical modifications than you'll know what to do with (provided you can pay for them), a "shop" simulation unto itself.

With all that content and graphical goodness, FM3's pre-race load time can be agonizing. Granted, there's a lot of road and car data to push, but one to two minutes spent before every race reading repetitive motoring trivia and listening to soothing trance music can be a bit much.

You deal with it, because Forza Motorsport 3 is a gorgeous, engaging and deep, deep racer that conveys all the excitement and danger of high-speed racing in the safety of your living room.