Forza Motorsport 3

Back to one of my old games here and one that I only started so I could complete the first Forza Horizon game. That was over 3 years ago now which is scary in itself.

Forza Motorsport 3 is a basic racing game, similar in layout and structure to Forza Motorsport 2… only much, much longer in terms of races. More on that later.

The game follows the standard Forza philosophy. You start with a measly amount of money, buy a moderately priced car then begin racing your ass off, earning more money and upgrading and buying new cars to compete in more races.

There is Season Mode that helps drive the monotony of this exercise where you race through years of world championships of progressive grades of car. This lasts 6 years and at the end of it, it really takes ages to get through the final world championship as it just keeps going and going.

The main plus points of a racing game are having a wide variety of track selection and cars. Forza 3 has lots of cars but there’s no real point to them as loads of them handle the same and it’s a case of excess not really offering much in terms of variety. And because of the number of races there are to do, it’s the same with the tracks. I lost count of the amount of laps I had to do around Silverstone for example, and all this did was tell me that the Silverstone GP circuit it one of the most boring race arenas there is.

Then there’s the AI. In some races you will be lapping the AI a lot and guess what. They have no concept of moving over to let the race leader through and will just act like you aren’t there. This hasn’t been coded into any game I’ve played with the exception of Project Cars where I attempted to simulate a full 24 hour race only to wake up and find I had been blue flagged and disqualified. I would find it acceptable in the Horizon series but not here.

Music wise, again it’s not something you would notice if you didn’t have to do 7,000 races but it’s a limited soundtrack. The one plus side is that you can turn the music off and listen to your own. And my word, some of the songs on the soundtrack are utter trash, attempts at being alternate and cool but only serve as being tropes for alternative music types.

At least the tracks all look the part and the quality of drive and handling of the cars is good but that’s about it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

There’s a whole raft of crap to do here but most of it actually comes quite quickly. Racing through season play will get a lot of stuff done including getting the relevant driver levels, car levels and completing stuff.

Unfortunately, there are some online requirements for buying and selling stuff and sharing designs. Two of these are likely unobtainable now as they shut down forzamotorsport.net and you had to upload a photo to the site. Another one for selling a tuning setup, vinyl or design is dodgy due to the intermittent nature of the servers as well. There are another 4 that require an online connection but thankfully none that require directly playing with other players.

Another two notable ones are for owning at least one car from every manufacturer (much better than buying every car in the game, thanks Forza 2) but again this will come with time, and more notably for performing a lap scoring over 100,000 drift points. This one took some guidance and practice and I hate drifting so I put it off forever but actually managed it on my second lap once I got used to being able to control the drift, which is infinitely easier here than in Forza 5.

Now for the last one. This is just stupid and it’s for completing every single event race in the game. Thankfully you can simulate the races and this still counts so I was able to watch some TV while the AI did a lot of the work for me. It takes a lot of time though and this is where all of my complaints about the game originate. You notice a lot of shit when you do a lot of races.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Let’s be honest, no one is going to play this game now, not with the amount of sequels currently out (we are on Motorsport 7 at the time of writing) and even if you did, you will be fed up with it before the end of that last achievement and it’s now impossible to complete anyway.

There’s a lot to be said about games with little to no content but games that rinse and repeat their same content over and over again? No. Just no. But thanks.