Forza Motorsport 3 Review

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The Storefront is also supported by the brilliant scoreboards, which rank tuners, photographers and paint artists alongside track heroes according to their Storefront ratings. Scoreboards are where the sharp end of Forza competition will take place, and once again not a trick has been missed in the breadth and depth of their implementation, although the metrics used to calculate overall rankings are somewhat opaque. (It's also a shame that the terrific Time Trial challenges - hot laps with set combinations of car and track - are hidden away here, where offline players can't even reach them, rather than promoted as a main gameplay mode.)

Whatever feature you think you might want in a racing game, Forza Motorsport 3 has it - and if you don't want it, it doesn't matter, because you can ignore it in favour of something else you do want. We laughed at the overuse of the word "definitive" at the game's E3 debut this year, but it's absolutely deserved - this incredibly rounded piece of software has wiped the smirk of our face and replaced it with a warm, if humbled, grin.

But it is not perfect. Damage modelling is shallow and unconvincing. No-one has managed to put a predictable, bump-free difficulty curve into one of these sprawling sims, and Forza 3, despite a sterling effort, can't quite manage to smooth it out. Furthermore, despite the inclusion of drag racing and point-to-point tracks - including the magisterial Japanese mountain roads of Fujimi Kaido - and a few inventive race categories, the main career mode is still too short on variety relative to its extreme length.

The RenaultSport Twingo, unlikely hero of the F Class, and yes I am calling out you Yaris fans.

More seriously perhaps, the boasts of lavish content - 400 cars and 100 tracks - ring a little hollow when you realise how much of it has been recycled from Forza 2. You will very often experience a strong sense of deja vu as you take the same car round the same track that you did two years ago. And while the circuit selection is hard to fault - fleshing out all the old favourites with some exciting and interesting new additions, both fictional and real - the car catalogue covers all the expected bases without ever stirring the imagination, the passion, or the amused smiles that Gran Turismo's eccentric, encyclopaedic collections always have. It's copybook car love.

Finally, and most controversially, there is the look of the game. You would expect Forza 3 to boast staggeringly faithful and detailed car models, and it does, no doubt. But despite that, it's graphically sterile and bland, with few effects, poor environmental detail, and a relatively basic in-car view. In a side-by-side comparison with GRID or the thrilling showboating of Need for Speed: SHIFT, Forza 3 will leave you cold.

Drag racing is probably more interesting if you have a wheel with a clutch pedal.

There is, however, the best possible reason for that - and the longer you spend with the game, the less you care. Turn 10 has sacrificed flash for a faultless 60 frames a second, and understood that in simulation, what you feel is far more important than what you see. It has diverted all of the 360's resources to giving you the smoothest, most believable, most physically rewarding drive you've ever had. Who cares what the scenery or the tyre-smoke look like when your eyes are laser-focused on the next apex, when your fingers can feel the road surface? It was the right decision.