After playing it for a couple of days, I have to admit I prefer Forza 2 by far over 3.
Pros:
- In car view. Yummy.
- New tracks. (Le Sarthe.. finally!)
- Better menu organisation (easier to go from race-screen to upgrades to setup)
Cons:
- Forza 2 rewards performance, Forza 3 rewards perseverence. Someone who tries a race several times and bounces off the barriers/cars and finishes last eventually gets the same rewards as someone who races it once superbly and wins..
- No real sense of achievement in winning races/championships. In F2, you win new cars, in F3 just money/XP. In F3 you get cars just by driving over and over..
- Having XP and credits just adds confusion.
- No way to retire from a race or championship? (Unless I'm missing something). WTF? If you want to continue season play, you have to finish every lap of every race, no matter how dull.
- Achievements for raising driver/car levels; but not for winning first race/championship?
- In F3, a lot of info is hidden from you which was immediately accessible in F2. The starting grid. The finishing positions and times. Your race time ranking. As far as I can see, there's no way to view the championship standings after the final race. 😱
- In the Setup screens, the text is tiiiny. And it auto-scrolls; making it more difficult to read. You can try to stop it by holding the thumbstick, but it keeps jumping. And the background is transparent, so sometimes you're trying to read tiny, moving, white text on a white background.. 🙄
It certainly seems to me they've tried to dumb the game down quite a bit; not deter the gamer by showing them poor results but just keep them moving onto the next race, and rewarding them if they keep doing so. In F2 there was a real sense of achievement when you won the race, then the championship, then all championships in the series.