The first Forza game on the Xbox was Microsoft answer to Sony’s GT. The game was critically acclaimed and had managed to sell good amount of copies. It was the birth of a monster franchise that will get better with every new release.
 

Now, with the third entry in the series will be soon in your hands, the big question is: is the game worth the money and the hype? That’s why I’m writing this review to give you a better resolution about the game.
 

The first car you will drive in the game is Audi R8, the purpose of the first race is to familiarize the players with the controls and to introduce the ability of rewinding the race, more like a tutorial if you prefer. After finishing the first race, you will buy your first car. From here, your journey in owning every car and winning every race begins.
 
 

The progress in the game is like what you would expect from a driving simulation game. You will win a race, buy new a car or upgrading your current car, then you will be moving to the next race and you will repeat this process over and over again. Doing the same thing over and over again will make the game boring, isn’t that so? Nope, not in Forza 3 at least. Every car in the game is so enjoyable to ride from your typical Honda Civic to your favorite Bugatti; that’s because of the near perfect controls and the great sense of speed in the game. Thanks for the great physics in the game, as you will feel the difference from a car to another. Especially, if you turned off all of the driving assists in the game.
 

In addition of getting money by winning a race, you will also get experience points, which will raise your car level and your’s level (Driver level) as well. When you do that, you will raise your reputation, which will bring you rewards and discounts.
 
 

The game career mode is broken up into a series of seasons. Each season consists of multiple championship races. There is a period of time (two weeks) between each championship race. So, you will have the opportunity in participating in one of three events to pass the time forward to the next championship race. The career mode is a lot of fun and offers a good amount of challenge, but it may get a bit repetitive at the end for some, as you will race on the same laps often while playing the career mode.

There are many things to do in Forza 3, so if you start to feel bored from driving in the game, you can customize your car with your favorite decals and colors. The new Livery Editor will open a lot of room for creativity, as you can design your own decals and post them on the new online storefront. Also, you can set the prices for your decal designs to sell them to other players for the game currency. There is a rating system which will help you in finding the best decals that has been designed by the community.
 
 

Tuning your cars play an important role in Forza 3. You can tune your car with various parts to improve the car performance and handling. But if you find tuning your cars a hard task, don’t panic. The game offers an automatic upgrade system before you enter a race, which will make your car competitive for the race you has planned to participate in.
 

Forza 3 look great and sexy, but not mind blowing. The cars look stunning with lots of details. Cockpit view adds more diversity to the game, but the cars interiors could look a bit better. The tracks look great with some nice vistas to see, but some tracks look better than the other. The developers seems to have lessened the visual effects to run the game at 60 FPS. As you will not see a lot of dust or smoke behind your car when you race on the sidetracks. The damage system in the game add more realism to the game, but sometimes it look fake and not accurate. But really who cares about this when the game is so much fun to play.
 
 

There has been a lot of talk about if Forza 3 will live up to the hype or not. In some areas the game has exceeded expectations while in other areas fell a bit short of expectations. Forza 3 is a driving simulation for everyone. Its scalable difficulty, accessibility and the near perfect controls make it the best driving game ever made and the best Xbox 360 exclusive in 2009.
 
 

Score: (9.5/10)
 
 

Now that the Demo version is available to everyone, we would like to put the microscope on one of the most important aspects in any racing simulation game, Damages & Crashes.

We all know that Forza is a racing simulation game and it’s far away from being anything near an arcade game so when we talk about crashes and damages systems we won’t compare the game with Burnout Paradise or anything like it.

After I played FORZAIII demo more than 10 times, something weird caught my attention in the damage system, and I will not hide that I felt a certain dissatisfaction with the size of development and improvement that happened since FORZAII.

FORZAII was characterized by the unique damage system it had at that time, but that was in 2007 and what was “unique” before is simply “Not enough” right now specially after we experienced games like GRID and DIRT 2 and they both offer a much deeper damage system than the one in FORZAIII demo, it’s obvious that FORZAIII improved so much in so many aspects, but I think they didn’t pay enough attentions to the damage system.

You can simply try to test the demo yourself, and I think you will probably notice the following:

- You crash head on into another car and all what you will see is paint scratches!
- You hit the rear right light in the car in front of you then the other one simply broke even you didn’t touch it.
- Any accident no matter how awful it is, can’t affect the length of the chassis.
- Lights sometimes survive a huge direct hit, while they may be broke in a silly indirect collision.

 
Well, don’t call me a GT5 fan, I think you better call me a disappointed FORZAIII fan who is affected by every minor fail in the game -not to mention that I didn’t notice any gear shifting animation- maybe it’s my fault because I thought the game will be just PERFECT, but simply it isn’t, and I can say that GT5 “Destructio Derby” footage are not that bad after all!

FORZAII Demo Damage footage back in 2007, I don’t think that FORZAIII improved alot!

 
FORZAIII Damage footage: