With Forza 3 Turn 10 have focused on two things, community and polish. Let’s start with the latter of those. Forza 3 is a tremendously polished game. From it’s sleek ‘car brochure’ inspired menu system to the way all the modes seamlessly integrate with one another. Once you get into a race you see all of the more than 400 cars perfectly modelled and everything runs at a rock solid 60fps.

The driving model is probably the most accurate ever seen on a console. Each car feels completely different to the last and changes in the tuning setups each affect cars as you would expect them to. The tracks themselves have received a noticeable upgrade in visual fidelity and some of the new fantasy tracks are beautiful to look at.

In terms of numbers Forza 3 has over 100 tracks (though many of these are alternate circuits of different racing environments), 405 cars and a staggeringly huge career mode with over 200 different events.

The career mode has also undertaken a nice evolution. There is still the massive event list which you can go into at any time and pick whichever you want, but Turn 10 have included the new ‘Season Play’ mode which gives newcomers a little more direction and stops them being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content available.

When playing season mode you are given the choice of three events to play. Each is picked by the game from the event list but you can choose whether you want to race with your current car, whether you want to race in a new car or if you want to see new tracks. This is just one of the features that streamlines the whole experience for the newcomer.

Also included is the ‘auto upgrade’ which will automatically upgrade your car to be competitive in the current event. Purists can still upgrade any component manually of course with over 50% more options than Forza 2.

In terms of the driving, two main features have been added to help casual racing fans adjust the realism Forza 3 offers. The first is auto-brake which does exactly as it says, allowing you essentially to just hold the accelerator and turn. The second (and the more controversial) is the addition of gameplay rewind.

Gameplay rewind allows you to rewind back through the race to any point at any time and with no limits. For certain aspects this is a great feature. Rookie drivers won’t get frustrated at having to constantly restart races and experienced drivers can repeat section of the course over more easily to perfect them.

However, with the no limits approach and in particular the no consequence philosophy, the single player mode of Forza 3 has virtually no tension when racing. There is no price to be paid for making mistakes and this results in even the most challenging becoming far too easy i’d rather play video poker. I repeatedly found myself not paying much attention in the endurance races as if I made a mistake I’d just rewind five seconds an continue. The solution for Turn 10 is extremely obvious, they could have either made rewind an optional assist with a credit bonus at the end of each race, or they could have awarded a ‘platinum medal’ (you recieve a gold medal for winning) for winning an event without using rewind.

Multiplayer has no such problems as rewinding is not allowed. Gone are the player hosted rooms of Forza 2 (you can still setup custom games with your friends though) and are replaced with a playlist system. You pick a style of racing (circuit, drag etc.) and a car class and it matches you with other players. This makes it extremely fast and easy to find a game and with the trueskill system, you should automatically avoid racing with people far beyond your skill level like in previoud Forza games.

Community was a big aspect of Forza 2 with people producing miracles with the livery editor. This time Turn 10 has gone all out to support this community with some brilliant features. The biggest is the new storefront system. This allows you to browse through and purchase everyone’s designs, tuning setups, decals, replays and photos. It is both intuitive and extremely useful with the best stuff rising to the top and easy to spot.

For the designers, the improved livery editor will allow even more stunning designs to be made. You will still need massive amounts of skill to turn the shapes you are given into a work of art but it’s easy enough for anyone to add racing stripes or make a simple pattern. The vinyl shapes editor allows you to create designs on a grid without a car. These can then be sols seperately and buyers can paint them on there own cars. There are already massive amounts of logos and videogame characters for you to buy and it will be great to see how the storefront evolves.

Forza Motorsport 3 is an extremely polished game. Almost all it’s new features enhance the experience and the way it all centers around the community is a great achievement. The racing itself is probably the most accurate ever seen on a console and there is enough content and enough additional features to keep you playing this for a long, long time. And the cars make you wish you’ve won in several us online casinos just to have one of them.

Score: 9.5/10

Forza 3 featurss a whopping 400 cars from 50 different car makers, you can customise and tune each car aswell.

The full list an be found here

The huge size of Forza 3 cannot simply be put on one DVD disc so Turn 10 have decided to put the game onto two discs.

The first disc contains the whole career mode with the second disc contaning extra content.

“The game comes on two discs, but you can play through the whole career on disc 1. Disc 2 is just additional content, ie extra cars and tracks,”

The first disc is the full game, which features most of the tracks and about 300 cars, the second disc you’ll need to install the onto the hard dive or memory card to get the remaining 104 cars and 29 tracks.

When you insert the first disc, the game will ask if you want to install the second disc, which takes up 1.9 GB of space. However, if you don’t have that much space on your hard dive, you can choose pieces of disc two to install – in which it’s broken up into four packs.

After that, the game reads it and adds in the content seamlessly to the game. If you don’t have them stored onto your hard dive or memory card, you won’t see the content offline or online.

Source

The demo comes in at a reasonable 1.25GB go grab it now.