I’ll fess up; I came across Forza Motorsport 3 by chance. It wasn’t a game I was intending to review, but once I tried it I was hooked. The graphics are phenomenal, the controls are excellent, and the game is so much fun I couldn’t wait to get back to playing it each day.
Forza 3 is, obviously, the third in the Forza series, and it shows from the polish. I can’t think of single thing in this game that isn’t tweaked nigh to perfection. The game looks outstanding, with pixel-perfect recreations of over 400 cars (if you use the included Install Disk, which installs almost 2 GBs of extra content to your hard drive). Once you acquire a car, you can paint it however you want, and either save it locally or upload it to Forza’s Marketplace for other people to play with. I toyed with my starting car and made the e-AAGH.net-mobile, pictured here. It took about half an hour, so imagine what you could do if you took your time and really put some effort into your design. Some people are flat-out amazing, let me tell you.
There are two features that allow less-adept gamers to compete in this game: the amazing driver assist and the rewind feature. About the rewind feature, think of Madden’s replay. If you screw up, you hit the back button and rewind the race to try again. In single-player mode, there’s no limit and no penalty for using it, and use it you will. The driver assists will help you drive your car when your starting out, and you can slowly disable them as you get a feel for the game. These make anyone feel like they can jump in and have fun. With maximum driver assists on, all you really have to do is hold down the gas and steer, but with all of them off the game feels much more authentic.
The sounds are very, very good, with a non-obtrusive and pleasing narrator and solid music. I can’t think of a bad thing to say about the audio. If I had to call one thing out, I’d pick on the fact that you have to start with a soccer-mom ride instead of a real racer, which kind of feels clunky. Other then that, this is racing gold. Alphasim out.
Score Overall 
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