Did you know that there are more Rolls Royces per square mile in Hong Kong than in any other city? No? How’s about that the BMW logo was designed to imitate a whirling aeroplane propeller, harking back to the manufacturer’s roots as a plane parts company. The car is the most recycled commodity in the world. The first car stereos were offered in 1926. Know any of that? Apart from the BMW fact I didn’t, but thanks to staring at Forza Motorsport 3’s (lengthy) loading screens, I now do. Can’t say that games don’t teach you something, eh?

Forza 3 has also taught me something. It’s taught me that, no matter how much you look forward to a game, and no matter how much it gets right, you can still find things to criticise. Don’t get me wrong here – the game is a fantastic and a true petrolhead’s dream. It has the cars, it has a fine selection of circuits, a pretty involving career offering and some great online functionality. It also, sadly, has a few little niggles and quibbles, each of which we will get to in good time.

Still, it all kicks off nicely enough. The career mode is undoubtedly the area to which most will turn first, and this time around it’s been given somewhat of a makeover compared to the last game’s effort, in which you got free reign to pick and choose any event you qualified for out of a menu system. This time around you are presented with a calendar, with each month having a set race in a main championship to compete in (starting with E and, with a bit of luck and a few wins growing through the ranks as the career progresses), the in-between periods of which you are offered a selection of three championships to pass the time.

These usually follow the same choice, which is one that offers you a new circuit or circuits to race on, one that you can do in the car you are currently sitting in and one that you’ll need to try out a new vehicle in. It’s a neat way of allowing the player to progress through a structured career whilst also making choices clear to him, and the way in which you can do pretty much anything in-between doing your main championship leads to much experimentation between classes and car types.

One thing the career doesn’t get quite correct, however, is the way it dishes out prize cars for your efforts. I hate to bring Gran Turismo into things as the argument as to which is better is old and rather dull, but in Polyphony’s effort the game drip-feeds you cars that are not particularly useful most of the time, which leads to you trading them in for cash and going your own way. It encourages the player to visit the garages and tuning shops and forge their own career out of their own choices.

Forza 3 does things differently, most of the time offering the player a car that would be particularly useful in at least a couple of classes of race as a reward for levelling up via gaining experience points. This means that effectively a player can go through his career barely buying anything and still getting the job done, and the fact that these prize cars can only be sold for 100 credits in-game means you have little resell value should you want to do something different. Sure, you could try selling it via the online Auction House, but with a minimum waiting time of a couple of hours and a packed list of other players’ cars, chances are you won’t get a bidder in any case.

In my case, the buying of cars only served one purpose for me: to jump me further up the power and class curve than I probably should have been at the particular point I was at in my career. Within three seasons I had an R1 Acura sitting in my garage, and as a result I was undertaking what could be argued as the game’s greatest challenges as my midweek tournaments in-between lower-powered championship races. Because the game had offered me no real reason to splash cash on cars around the level I was doing at that particular point by sending a whole pack of handy cars my way I was able to save enough moolah to splash it out on a car that was the equivalent of a rocket-powered roller skate, and the latter half of my career suffered somewhat until I unlocked and took part in the highest championship during the last season.

This quibble is, obviously, mostly down to my personal choice on what I wanted to do, but it did feel like the game wasn’t balanced quite properly along the way. What you can’t complain about though is that the handling – particularly with the driving aids turned off – is fantastically rewarding, and although never as tricky as some of the PC racing sims out there it is a skilful task in learning the characteristics of each vehicle and making the most out of them. From your early starter car (Fiesta Zetec for the win!) and their underpowered hustling through to the rather lurid selection of Corvettes, Porsches and Ferraris and on to the precision driving of the racing spec cars, there are plenty of different handling models on offer and each seem appropriate in context with the other vehicles presented.

In comparison with the second game the handling also feels a lot weightier and gives you a much better sense of the grip you are getting through the tyres. Cresting rises and flinging the car through corners now feels better than ever, with the car loading up appropriately and feeling genuine enough to allow the player to subconsciously learn how to handle whatever they are in. During one particular race with a GT Porsche I drifted gently through a corner and managed to flick the car to the left just in time to guide it perfectly through the next turn, at which point a watching chum remarked that it was a particularly skilful bit of driving. Thing was, though, that it wasn’t something I thought out and did – it was a process that was instinctively happening between my brain, the controller and the car. This is undoubtedly a good thing. There’s still the rather curious way in which the game sometimes throws you into what seems like a pre-programmed skid, but they are much less frequent than before.

Another thing that is most praiseworthy is the sheer amount of customisation options chucked into the game for players to tweak and mess around with. The paint tool alone offers the player thousands of different shapes, logos and et-cetera to place and combine, and with the online storefront for each player now a big part of proceedings chances are that you will be able to find a logo that doesn’t come in the shipped product online. Doing this enabled me to make a swanky Brawn GP Audi R8 livery, and with a bit of time and care people can produce some pretty amazing custom colour schemes that you can also buy.

Meanwhile, the vehicle tuning options are about as detailed as anything offered to date. The wheel rim section alone offers over twenty different manufacturers, some of whom offer a couple of products. There are at least five or six different sections in engine tuning, each offering different manufacturers again. It’s like a Pandora’s box of car bits waiting for you to open it up and toy around, but thankfully if you’re not too bothered by the technical minutia and instead just want the best possible car for each championship, the game offers a quick tune option that will install the relevant parts to suit.

For those not too worried about career or tuning their cars to the nth degree, the game also offers a Free Play option in which you can either have your own single race against the AI, a free hotlap session around whichever track you wish or partake in a number of multiplayer modes. The hotlapping section is made all the more interesting by the seamless integration of leaderboards, which to any competitive young chap (that’s pretty much any of us) are like red rags to an enraged bull, pushing them on to find those extra few tenths in an attempt to leap up the rankings.

The multiplayer options are numerous, with matchmaking or private games between parties of friends offered as well as the option of topping up a field with AI should the need to arise. The matchmaking itself seemed okay and the racing was by-and-large reasonable enough although the ugly face of lag did rear its head on occasion, and jumping into a game with my mate and slinging a couple of high-powered sports cars around was easy as eating a gigantic pie is for Jay.

Underneath all of this are the little details that work toward making it a very accomplished racer indeed. Those who prefer their scores in terms of drift points rather than lap times ala Project Gotham will no doubt thoroughly enjoy the option via the D-pad of flicking over to a drift scorecard so you can tot up points by sliding your way around in a particularly leery manner. It’s another discipline entirely and one that only the leaderboards keep track of as there are no drift career championships sadly, but it’s still a neat little addition.

Slightly more controversial is the inclusion of a rewind button ala Codemaster’s GRID, which enables the player to press the back button and cycle backward for up to a couple of minutes so they can instantly correct any mistakes they have made. The purists might argue that this somehow dampens down the realism and such, but there are two main things going for it: you can’t use it online (obviously, unless you are a timelord), and it doesn’t have to be used in the single player either. I can tell you one thing, though: as much as you may not like the idea, you will suddenly love it when a mistake on lap 20 out of 21 costs you a good half-hour of hard graft and a couple of crucial car parts.

Looks-wise the game’s a bit of a mixed bag. The cars themselves look rather lovely from long-to-mid distance, but upon closer inspection some ugly low decal textures rear their heads. One would suggest that it doesn’t really matter when zipping along at 150mph whether you can read the Total logo on the Peugeot 908 properly, but when it comes to the game’s (excellent) photo mode it does lessen the quality a little when half the cars are a bit of a jagged, blurry mess. The circuits themselves are also rather graphically average, with the returning efforts looking pretty much like-for-like with their Forza 2 iterations.

The new circuits are an interesting collection, although some are more enjoyable than others to me simply due to personal taste. The Montserrat ribbons are particularly enjoyable to whiz around, mixing a tight, modern inside section with a sweeping cliffside segment outwardly, whilst the Sedona Raceway provides an up-hill-and-down-dale experience in the midst of some pretty red American desert. These are accompanied by the result of Turn 10 probably watching a few old Milli Miglia tapes and deciding they wanted to do a couple of similarly twisting monster circuits based in coastal Italy and mountainous Japan, but they prove rather frustrating to get to grips with and are particularly unsuited to the higher powered cars you obtain later in the game. Still, can’t fault them for effort, and there are sure to be people out there who will utterly adore them.

There’s so much more I could ramble about that I could probably fill up at least another thousand words – users having their own stores to sell their liveries, setups and such to others, car setups being tweakable to suit each circuit, drivers being able to be hired at a price to race an event for you – but it’s time to slam the hammer of judgement down on the game as a full. See, as a person who enjoys the more serious side of car racing, a lot of what Forza 3 does gets the big thumbs up. It’s got a heck of a lot of cars, plenty of circuits to race and an involving career mode, alongside some decent online functionality.

On the other hand, it still gets a good few things a bit wrong. The career mode is enjoyable, as mentioned, but it never really asks you to involve yourself as much as you’d want it to by giving you too many good cars too often. The graphical side of the game is not bad by any shape or form, but it doesn’t look noticeably different from the second game save for it running at a steady 60 FPS rather than 30. Perhaps in the grand scale of things these are minor niggles, but they are enough to stop Turn 10 getting a perfect UltraNinjas 10 in any case. Don’t get us wrong, though – Gran Turismo 5 has a very, very high standard to follow, and it will be interesting to see if they manage it.