Forza 3 –(Xbox 360)

Gaming history has played host to lots of inter-platform duels – Sonic vs. Mario, Quake Vs Unreal, and Solid Snake vs. Sam Fisher spring to mind, but the latest one to play out on current consoles seems to be Gran Turismo 5 vs. Forza 3. GT5 is still in the development after many years and not expected to be released until next year, but fortunately we can take a look at Forza 3 right now.

The Forza franchise started on the original Xbox in 2005 with the release of the critically acclaimed Forza Motorsport. Developers Turn 10 wanted to get away from the arcade racing titles that tended to dominate consoles, and produce a hardcore yet accessible simulation. The resulting game included over 200 genuine licensed cars, a variety of real racing circuits, and a comprehensive set of telemetry and tuning options. Forza 2 carried on this theme two years later on the Xbox 360 with more detailed graphics and sharper physics, and left everyone wondering where the franchise would go next.

At first glance, not a lot has changed. The new interface is extremely slick and easy to use, although some options (upgrade shop) aren’t where you’d expect them to be, but most of the essentials seem to be there. A notable omission is the arcade mode, replaced instead with quick race, hot lap and split screen – this isn’t a major problem, but removes the predetermined challenges that many players enjoyed outside of the main career mode.

The career is where the game really rolls up its sleeves and gets cracking. Starting with a choice of free group F cars, the lowest group in the game, you’ll be thrown into season one with the intention of making some cash, boosting your car collection and climbing through the ranks. The Forza seasons are structured around a series of major races that take place on weekends, leaving you free to complete one tournament of your choosing between each. The tournaments on offer range from simple high speed oval races, through to one-on-one touge style races down Japanese mountain roads, and the ones you’re offered depend on which car you’re currently sat in. It’s always a good idea to keep a variety of metal in your garage to give you the most choice, but you’ll have multiple chances to take on each challenge.

Don’t worry about obtaining cars either – you’ll be given one every time your driver reaches a new rank, and these aren’t any old wrecks; around level 25 out of 50 you’ll find a nice Lamborghini Reventon landing on your doorstep. In total there are around 400 cars, but many of these are versions of the same racing car with different liveries. That said you’ll still have enough variety to keep you happy, including some brilliant retro hot hatches and unusual little beasties like the tiny Datsun 510 (which can be fitted with a Skyline engine..). To deal with all of these toys, Forza 3 comes on 2 DVDs with the option to install the second one to your hard drive at the cost of about 1.9Gb.

You’ll also notice a little trick that I think we’ll be seeing more often as developers try to control second hand sales. Turn 10 have taken the more interesting of these cars, put them into a 10 car downloadable pack and inserted a code in each box that you can redeem in order to get them. This means that a used purchase will miss out on those extras, and I can only see more content shifting from the DVD to redeemable downloads in future.

That’s the career progression in outline, but what really matters, as with all racing games, is how it feels to drive. Fortunately there’s a simple answer to this – absolutely awesome. If you have a 360 steering wheel, the sense of grip, weight transfer and road feedback that comes through the force feedback is nothing short of astonishing and the closest thing to driving a real car available at the moment. I’ve always been an advocate of the indie PC racing title Live for Speed on this matter, but I think Forza 3 has it pipped. If you’re in a small front engined car you can feel the precise moment the wheels lose traction and it slips into understeer, and you can also sense how well your attempts to get it back under control are working. Cars like the Shelby Daytona Coupe put across an amazing feeling of control weight and mechanical harshness, and powersliding a Ferrari California around the narrow cobbled streets of Amalfi is an absolute joy.

The sound is no slouch either, with a series of instantly recognisable engine notes and great spatial placement that allows you to determine which competitor is buzzing around you without resorting to using the mirrors. The deep woofly downshifts in the Porsche 911 GT2 are fantastic, as is the yowling straight-six in the tail-happy TVR Sagaris. The class F speedway events do get a bit tiresome, as listening to a tiny 4 cylinder production engine droning on at full speed for 5 minutes isn’t my idea of fun, but apart from that it scores top marks here too.

Possibly the most controversial aspect of Forza 3 revolves around the graphics, or more specifically, how they relate to the preview photos and videos. The franchise was never weak in this respect, and the press photos for the latest version showed car models with amazing levels of details and almost photorealistic interiors, but something seems to have changed along the way. The vehicles on the selection screens look lovely, but when you see them close up at the start of each race it’s clear that the complexity of the models has dropped by quite some degree in game. The game engine runs at a smooth 60fps so it might be necessary to scale back on the graphics in order to provide a slick drive, but it does raise the question of why the ‘actual gameplay’ videos seemed to use the higher quality models. The game almost admits to being sneaky here when you enter photo mode - when you stop moving the camera, the engine quickly anti-alises the vehicle models to make them look a look smoother than they do when you're racing. The developers also talked at great length about the new in-car view, but the feel of the interiors is so plastic and flat that you won't want to spend any time in there. GRID well and truly takes F3 to the cleaners in this respect.

The damage model could also do with a bit of a rethink, allowing you to drive headfirst into a wall at 100mph and only come out with very poor damage textures and a few wobbly panels. Next to the completely destructible models in GRIDand FlatOut, it’s a weak effort, and the much vaunted ability to roll the car is pointless as you have to be driving like a lunatic to even get it up on two wheels. The backgrounds are also a bit too bright and shiny for my liking, resembling the arcade gloss of Ridge Racer rather than reality. This is just moaning though – it looks good and moves very well, but you can’t help feeling it’s not really the huge step forward over Forza 2 that we were led to expect.

Fans of paint customisation (and Forza has LOTS of those..) will be pleased to hear that the same tools are back in, but maybe a bit disappointed that there aren’t any notable new features or shapes to play with. The tuning screens are also much the same as before, with a vast range of items from new valves and camshafts to more visual items like wheels and splitters, but there really wasn’t anything wrong with them so they’re best left alone.

All of this is just icing on a very hardcore cake though. Forzas strength lies with its amazing handling rather than all the shiny stuff – I don’t think there’s a more realistic driving game available, certainly not on any console. This is also its weakness in some ways because a casual arcade racer might find the whole experience a bit dry – after a while you’re driving to progress rather than to discover new things, and it lacks the visceral buzz and variety of GRID and the NFS series. If you’re looking for a thrill ride then Forza probably isn’t for you – buy GRID instead, it’s brilliant – but if you’re a petrolhead, have a wheel controller and know cars enough to appreciate how well the feel of real driving has been recreated here, then there’s no way this should pass you by.

Oh yes, the question I’d been avoiding. GT5 or F3? They’ll probably both be great, but on balance I’d say that GT5 will probably match or pip Forza 3 to the post in just about everything, graphics especially. The Polyphonic guys are sticklers for detail and GT was always a more varied driving game to start with, but the GT titles were never real sims despite the claims to the contrary. Putting the graphics aside, I think GT5 will still have the same slightly floaty and lightweight arcade handling it’s always had, leaving F3 to storm ahead among serious sim racers. There’s no doubt in my mind that Forza 3 should have been more than it is, but it delivers enough on the serious stuff to make that irrelevant.