Forza Motorsport games, being ultra-realistic simulators, have not been known to attract wider range of audience. But all that changes with the arrival of Forza Motorsport 3. Its still a great simulator to its core but it just manages to find a right balance to be accessible to a wider audience which may be is much into arcade racing. Forza Motorsport 3 in many ways sets a bar for how these kind of racing games should play.

Just like the previous title, Forza 3 offers a variety of assists to help keep your car on the track which include stability control, traction, anti-lock brakes etc. These assists make it more accessible but as you play through the career you earn enough experience to gradually turn these assists off one by one thus making it more challenging for yourself and more fun.

Another new feature making an entry to the series is the well known Flashback Feature from GRID. You can rewind the game at any time and as many times as you want. So unlike in Forza 2, if you wreck up your car badly on a corner, you can rewind it and give it another shot thus making the whole experience less frustrating. But this does take away that little sense of achievement that you would have felt in Forza 2 with all those pin perfect laps and ultimately winning the event.

Great variety of cars is on offer here

Career mode offers multiple seasons each with different group of races designed for different cars and classes. There are 200 different series in the game, and if you have the appropriate car and experience, you can enter in any race at any time. Leveling up in the career mode is also very satisfying since it allows to race in more events plus awards you different cars, each time you level up. Forza 3 offers 400 cars in total from 53 manufactures, ranging from Ferrari and McLaren to Toyota and Honda. All of them are upgradable to a great deal either manually or automatically.

But Forza 3 doesn’t only offer racing; it goes beyond it with all those astonishing customizing tools at hand. With all those vinyls and decals available you can virtually make any design, given you spend some serious time on it. And then you can simply put your cars, designs or tune settings on storefront where other players can see your stuff and buy it. It’s a good way of stacking some great deal of in game credit. Browsing through other’s designs and cars is a great inspiration for coming up with better designs of your own.

The online component of the game is another area where Forza 3 shines. You can play with up to 7 other players. Usual matchmaking options are there allowing you to pick specific race types. After getting into a lobby, you can select your own customized cars or the default ones. When playing with friends, you have a great deal of options to chose from like car restrictions, tracks, penalties, scoring types etc.

Car models are fantastic!

Forza looks and sounds awesome. Car models are beautifully detailed and frame rate is constant throughout. Menus are slick and accessible. Audio is again top notch with great sound effects and licensed soundtrack is also amazing. Forza Motorsport 3 offers a mind blowing package overall which sure raises the bar high for racing genre in general. Simulation fan or not, this game is a must for each and every racing fan.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.