It’s not as technical as Forza though, and the semi-simulation semi-arcade feel works to its advantage in this area. For instance, I love the way they’ve dumbed down car customization, since I don’t know too much about cars and the telemetry screens in Forza Motorsport 2 made me a little dizzy.
Customization is relatively plain and simple, yet quite effective and extensive. You could earn cash and buy parts to upgrade your car like I did; but if you’re a little more hardcore you can even fine-tune each part to improve the overall performance of your ride. If you need to gain that extra edge, you can opt to take your car into a wind tunnel and tweak its aerodynamics to help gain a little more speed, or grip.
One area where the game surpasses its predecessors is auto sculpting and car customization. Though the system in place is good, they’ve managed to mess it up by making cash too hard to get, and upgrades a little steeply priced. The way it works out is you’ve got to play a series of rather monotonous and uninspired Race Days to work your way up the ranks and earn cash for upgrades as you move along.
To earn big money, it isn’t simply enough to win a few races; you’ve got to ‘Dominate’ these events, which means you’ve got to win each and every race to make a good sum of money. Even after you do that, you only get enough dough to buy half a major upgrade, so eventually your car will feel extremely gimped unless you keep playing the same type of races over and over again.
There isn’t much variety or change of scenery compared to previous installments. Blame this on the fact that the game’s moved to the tracks, which restricts you to racing on similar-looking tracks over and over again through the lengthy and pointless career mode. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they’ve made navigating through the career race menu a real pain. This makes the career mode – which wasn’t good to begin with – even more unappealing.






