Forza 3 is the most complete racing game on the market.
If there is one thing to be said about Turn 10's third installment in its popular racing game series is that just about anybody can grab a controller and start driving, no matter their skill level or knowledge of the racing genre. Once you fire it up, a well-spoken gentlemen with a slight British accent will introduce you to the game and invite you to take part in a race to determine your aptitude while driving a virtual car. Once the race is finished, the game sets a difficulty level for you from what you just did on the track and will determine which assists you might want to consider using. Obviously, you'll be able to keep these settings or change them at your leisure. However, difficulty and assists will influence how much experience (or XP) and credits you'll get at the end of each race. In other words, if you're playing on easy with all assists turned on, you won't be getting as much cash and XP as someone who's playing on hard with most of the assists turned off. Nonetheless, you'll still feel gratified after a race, as you'll get rewarded no matter how skillful you are.
Once you've completed your first race, you'll be able to decide what you want to do next. Forza 3 offers a very interesting and well conceived Season mode, where you'll take part in over 200 events such as circuit, oval, drag and drift races spread out over a couple of years. Each year is longer than the previous one, and no event calendar is the same from year to year, which is a definite plus. As I mentioned earlier, at the end of each race, you'll receive experience points and credits depending on which position you finished the race in, how much damage your car took, and the difficulty level you were racing on. While credits go into buying new cars and fine tuning them, experience points are spread out between yourself as a driver and the car you are driving. Naturally, a car with a level 5 rating will perform better than one with a level 2 rating. Additionally, the more experienced you become as a driver, and the further along you get in Season mode, the tougher the races and opponents are.
Even though you'll receive many cars as gifts for leveling up and winning races, you can also purchase them with the credits you earn. There are over 400 fully customizable cars to choose from here, and each one is a picture perfect representation of its real-life counterpart. In fact, the cars look so good that I often found myself just looking at them for several minutes before snapping back to reality. If you're looking for something a bit more original, you can always head on over to the Auction House and see what people have created. The Auction House works pretty much exactly like it did in Forza 2.
Speaking of created content, while Forza 3 still gives aspiring designers the tools to create designs and logos, the tool has been greatly improved since the last Forza installment. Instead of creating them directly on the body of a car, you'll have a spreadsheet to work on, which makes it much easier to create your masterpieces. Aspiring Picassos can then take their creations and sell them via the newly redesigned storefront. Finding content is now easier than ever, as you can browse using keywords and by select categories, such as vinyls, photos, videos and so on. If you like what a certain user has to offer, you can go directly to their storefront and browse through it. The seller can decide how many of a certain design they want to sell, and at what price they want to sell it. There are even leaderboards for designers in the game, based upon ratings given by the community. It might sound a bit complicated, but in all actuality, it's not. Everything from the design tools to the storefront is very easy to comprehend and use.
Sadly, no game is perfect. While most of the time the AI drivers will give you a good run for your money and react to certain pressure points during a race, you'll sometimes see one of them skew right off the track for no reason at all. Although this doesn't hinder the gameplay much, it still looks really awkward during a race. Also, if you're planning on getting "the complete Forza 3 experience", as the game calls it, you're going to have to install 1.9GB of extra content directly onto your hard drive. This extra content is comprised of 104 cars and a few extra tracks and is in no way needed to run the game. Even though it would've been nice to have all of that content on one disk, the restrictions of DVD technology make that impossible. Speaking of hard disk space, even though you can install the entire game on your hard drive, which should reduce loading times, Forza 3 still has some issues with those, especially when you're racing online. It takes a good amount of time to load a race. However, the online races hardly ever have any lag, which is remarkable, especially when races are comprised of people all over the globe.
Minor glitches aside, Forza 3 is still the most complete racing game out there today. With over 400 cars by 50 different manufacturers to choose from, and over 100 tracks to race them on, it's pretty easy to see why. If you add to the equation the impressive Season mode, the flawless online racing, the improved storefront and design tools, the impressive graphics, the flawless driving controls, leaderboards for both racers and designers alike, as well as a promise of downloadable content galore from the guys at Turn 10, it will be a long time before this model gets old or runs out of style.