Review – Forza Motorsport 3 (X360)

But this is Forza 3, the game that tries to be everything to everyone.  So what about those people who’re not all that interested in racing, but still have a passion for cars?  As it turns out, Forza 3 has more than a little something for them as well.  There’s the car auction house that can be used to buy and sell cars with other players in real time.  It works pretty well, and it can sometimes be a place to pick up a good deal, especially on a vehicle that’s been nicely broken in and upgraded.  But what about those sorts who love making art cars, or spending hours upgrading and tweaking the perfect drifter?  Previously, all their efforts would go into one car, that would then be gone.  This is not the case anymore.  Forza 3 adds the Storefront, and it’s here that the whole Forza community really gets a chance to shine.  If I spend hours making a perfect tuning setup for my favourite car, I can put it up on my Storefront.  Same with a design for that car, or even a standalone vinyl group.  I can assign a price to them, and a number of downloads.  That item is then available for anyone to download and apply to that car, presuming they own it.  This system extends to photos and replays as well, with leaderboards specific to each one.  Great designers and tuners can finally get the recognition they deserve.  I’m not aware of any other game that does something like this, but the community features are the way things are going.

Collecting all of these cars is only part of the fun to be had.  Each vehicle can be upgraded and tuned to some degree.  For instance, a Class F 1987 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am can be upgraded all the way to Class S.  A few vehicles can even make the jump from production class to racing class.  I’ve always enjoyed the upgrading process, although I’m kind of clueless.  Thankfully, Turn 10 has made it easy for me to understand what I’m doing with numbers that are helpfully coloured green when good stuff’s happening.  New with this release is a Quick Upgrade option, which allows the software to automagically choose upgrades to apply.  It won’t tweak or tune, and it doesn’t always make the best choices, but it will always result in a vehicle that’s at least somewhat competitive at the chosen class.  Certain upgrades will change the look of the vehicle, both inside and out, which is a nice touch.

For those who want to get into the nitty-gritty, there’s the tuning system.  There are hundreds of different parts linked to dozens of sliders and gauges, test tracks to be driven around, and benchmarks to run.  It’s an incredibly involved process, but for those in the know, or who want to spend some time fiddling, it can net vast improvements in performance.  And what can you do with this improvement?  Package it all up into a tuning kit and sell it in the Storefront!  I’m not good with tuning, but I love that I can reward someone who is – both with leaderboard rank and credits – for their hard work.

Having a vehicle that runs great is no good if it looks like a rust-bucket around the track.  Forza 3 offers a seemingly simple design system based around a number of vinyl parts that can be resized, coloured, adjusted for opacity, and placed anywhere on the vehicle.  Up to one thousand of these vinyl shapes can be applied.  So I put some racing stripes on one of my rides, and thought it looked pretty sweet.  Then I took a look on the Storefront to see what the top designers were pumping out.  Creations that are just absolutely jaw-dropping fill the top design slots.  I am absolutely and completely humbled by the efforts and skills these people have. To be able to take a system I thought was pretty simple and use it to make legitimate works of art is impressive.  Again, they can put these designs up for anyone to purchase – either linked to a certain vehicle or assembled in a group that can be applied to whatever vehicle the purchaser wishes.

There are the leaderboards that have ghost replays, but apart from that, Forza has the ability to not only save replays from any race, but take clips of those replays, encode them as movie files and upload them directly to forzamotorsport.net.  Replays can be put up on the Storefront as well.  There’s not a huge number of them available at the moment, but once the machima crowd gets going with the game, they’ll probably be churning out some pretty insane stuff.

It should be pretty clear that I absolutely love and am totally overwhelmed by this game.  I have gripes, and I have complaints: I wish there were more tracks, and I hated that “definitive racing” line that kept popping up during the E3 presentation.  But Forza Motorsport 3, right now, is the racing game to get.  I played it nonstop for days and will continue to play it for weeks or months to come.  If the community takes off and gets the support it needs, this will be the place to be, not only for racing fans, but for gamers and designers.  So, is it the definitive racing game of this generation?  Yes it is.

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