Forza Motorsport 2 was such an accomplished version of the serious road car racing genre popularised by Gran Turismo that there wasn’t anywhere too obvious to take it next. As almost the entire list of 2009 #1 shows, though, the imperative for game sequels is always strong. Not least when your inspiration on a different console has a sequel on the way. To developer Turn 10’s credit, they managed to find ways to refine their game further still, and upped their own peculiar aesthetic ante along the way.
The driving in Forza Motorsport 3 is smooth, complex, and massively adjustable. Racing other cars is enjoyable, but just the feeling of trying to go fast does a lot by itself. And not only do the game’s many cars feel noticeably different from each other, but each decision to take off anti-lock or traction control makes for its own feeling too (with associated scoring bonus).
All the possibilities create a matrix of experiences and little challenges. The generous new Dirt-style rewind system adds one more dimension still, though that one is left more in the hands of the player and their conscience without any limits or score effects. Collectively, it’s a lot of further depth added to the established slow, experience-based progression of this kind of CarPG (a progression made particularly explicit in the labelling of driver and car XP scales).
The compensating reverse to this complication is a tight new structure which does a lot more signposting of your path through the races and championships on offer. At frequent points you are offered a choice of three to add to your calendar, with the game eagerly telling you how your experience will differ with each – a chance to try new cars, or new tracks, or build more directly on what you’ve just been doing. The way it intersperses complete smaller championships with races from bigger ones is a nice touch too. It all does a nice job of maintaining the sense of abundance and choice that had been a genre hallmark since Gran Turismo 2 while greatly simplifying that process.
There is another area in which Forza Motorsport 3 outdoes Gran Turismo, and that is the sheer frumpiness of its presentation. There is being streamlined and clean, and then there is surgically extracting any sense of personality. In all of its vintage instructional voiceovers and carefully dispassionate instructions, it feels more like having wandered into a dull lecture than even the encyclopaedic approach of its inspiration.
Even the game’s achievements are mostly uninspiringly factual (Year 1, Year 2, Driver Level 1, Driver Level 2…). There is surely a very wide range of happy medium to be had between that and Dirt 2’s “Two Cups, One Girl”. The greyness doesn’t extend as badly to the races themselves at least, with their artful wheel close-up intros and their slightly ill-fitting rock music, but they never completely shake the tone. It’s enough to make me wonder if the commitment to radiating total seriousness at all times is rooted in some kind of insecurity. If so, it’s very much not a deserved one.
Top of the charts for week ending 24 October 2009:
1 Comment
1 Pingback