V8 Supercars 3

It's big, huge, has loads of cars and tracks and vastly improved car handling. Is it all too good to be true?

'Compromise' dictates an awful lot in this world. In the case of this game, it's a balance between quality and quantity, with quantity being the big winner.

We counted 74 different types of cars and at least 50 tracks - double that figure to include track variations. There are 120 officially licensed championship series to race in, including both the Shell and HPDC Aussie V8s.

There are 35 different types of motorsport, including Monster Truck racing, karting and Formula 1. No other racing game comes close to shoveling in such a generous helping of motorsport.

The V8's are but a small part of the overall package in terms of cars, but we have scored nicely with our excellent local tracks. All are in the game except Melbourne, as the rights are held by the F1 racing body (Bernie) and they won't share. The Australian series (including NZ's Pukekoe) has been updated to include tracks absent from V8 Supercars 2, being: Queensland Raceway, Symmons Plains and the incredible Shanghai circuit. Bathurst, owners of the last game will be thrilled to know, has been completely remodelled and is vastly improved with none of the 'bugs' of the previous version that made a flying lap literally just that.

Aussie drivers can choose the Falcon BA or AU, or Commodore VY, VZ or VX series. All the real driver names and car liveries are included, which is consistent throughout the game. Hats off to Codemasters, hauling in so many big names can't have been cheap or easy. Lapping Glenn Seaton should be a right not a privilege for every Aussie.

Handling is much improved over the last game, but it's still an arcade racer that pales beside proper racing sims like GT Legends, rFactor or GTR. Driving isn't intuitive and feels weirdly unnatural, but it will let you throw the cars around with tail-happy abandon.

Out of the box the V8s come ready to race, but almost every other car needs to be 'unlocked'. You can do this via either the Pro Career, which moves through the available championships, with a brief warmup and qualifying before a short race. Or World Tour, which throws you straight onto the starting grid in an unfamiliar car on a usually unfamiliar track for a mad sprint race of as little as 2 laps.

Either format lets you move relatively quickly through the game, having a brief taste of each car before moving on.

Unfortunately, very little of the experience is any kind of fun. The short races mean you must abandon any notion of racing like a proper racing gentleman and instead biff and bash your way to the front in order to place high enough to progress to the next round. There is no other way. In most races you'll need to make up a dozen places on the first crazy corner, or hit the restart button and try again. Not fun. As you progress through the series the difficulty increases and it just gets worse. If you're in a tangle-prone open wheeler the likelihood of being able to successfully finish a race first time is in the order of 1 in 1000.

This almost critical flaw is magnified to hair-tearing proportions by the game's AI, which is absolutely the worst in a racing game since Namco's 1982 Pole Position.

Codemasters boast that the game can handle 21 opponent cars on-track. What that actually means is that every race has 21 reasons why you'll want to put your fist through your monitor. Opponents are utterly oblivious to your presence on the road. They will drift from side to side on straights, turn in front of you in corners, bang you from behind anytime at all and tap your rear three quarter as you take a perfect racing line through a corner at speed and send you spinning off. It's unbearably horrid and takes all the fun out of racing. It forces you to adapt your driving style to stay as far away from other cars as possible. Any half decent racing game of the last 20 years has AI that lets you mingle in packs and race like a proper racer, making the legend passes you bought the game for. Why V8 Supercars 3 is so bad in this respect is a mystery, particularly as its predecessor didn't have this problem at all.

That leaves multiplayer as the only way to play. Luckily for Codemasters, it's been handled well. The netcode is vastly improved from the last buggy game, we had no trouble with lag or warping during testing, and collision detection was noticeably superior to V8 Supercars 2.

Best of all are the racing rules. Now fools that try and cut corners or drive dangerously will be black flagged. Hooray for that.

This game is a heck of a mixed bag. Great for multiplay, or if there's a racing formula out there that's never before simulated, and you just must check it out. For straight up single player gaming though, what's the point of a racing game if 'racing' is impossible?


Editor's note: This review appears in the April 2006 issue of PC Authority. The review was written two weeks after the Atomic review was written and is published here as it more accurately reflects the reviewer's opinion of the game, with the benefit of additional play-time.