Forza Motorsport 3: [Single-player]

Forza Motorsport 3: [Single-player]

Techtree Test Labs, Jan 16, 2010 1000 hrs IST

This one won't disappoint you

Variety of cars; opponent AI apart, game is pretty well balanced; great customization options; regular DLC updates

Loading time on the higher side, can take up lots of hard disk space

Expert Rating :

Expert Review

It's hard to say how long the Season Mode is, as even after completing over a hundred races my career progress is pegged at only nine percent complete. In a way this is a good thing as it adds to the game's shelf-life; plus, the mode is well paced and there is a fair bit of variety with the types of events on offer.

Races can be a very different experience depending on how you set them up. The variety of tweaks available for driving assist, AI difficulty and car physics means that you can have a simulated racing experience or drive like a maniac and still have a chance to finish the race. Other pre-race activities include car tuning and upgrading. If you know what you are doing, you can really get down to the nitty-gritty of eking out the last bit of performance from your car and customize it for that particular track.

On the other hand, upgrades will have a much more significant impact on a cars performance, to the extent of raising or lowering the car's performance class. Even though the upgrade system does an admirable job of explaining itself, the experience can be a bit harrowing for the uninitiated. Thankfully, there is an option to auto-upgrade you car, wherein the game will select parts to optimize your car within a race's restrictions.

Unless you are a racing nut, a couple of hours of racing in Forza 3 can get a bit dreary. Break taken from racing can be spent dressing up your rides with paint jobs and vinyl arts. The game comes with a built-in vinyl designer with comprehensive collection of shapes, editing options and a full palette of colours. One can easily spend a few hours messing around with the editor, and someone with the right knowledge can come up with very impressive designs. If you think your designs are worthy, you can sell them using the games Storefront feature. However, this feature is only available to those with a Gold membership with XBL. There are other trading options available like putting one of your cars out for auction or bidding on some other player's car.

One thing that may really put you off about this game is the time it takes to load a race. The only way to improve this is to install the game to the hard drive, which I did. Even though this did improve the load time as expected, it still feels like a long wait before a race. Installing the content of the bonus disc, collector's edition content, free DLC, and installing files from the main disc takes over nine gigabytes.

So keeping all of this content on the hard drive for long may not be a viable option for everyone. Besides this, I also feel that Turn 10 could have done better with the game's AI. Even at medium difficulty, it is fairly common to completely dominate a race from the first lap. I found the increase in challenge with the next level of difficulty a bit extreme and beyond my skills.

Overall, Turn 10 has not disappointed us and what they have on offer is a pretty tight game with potential to kill a lot of time. If you have the disk space to spare, Forza Motorsport 3 delivers bang for the buck, even more so if you regularly get wet dreams about heaps of metal on four wheels.