Colin McRae Rally 3 focus’s on being an authentic simulation of the sport and requires and all new level practice to perfect. The vehicle handling and characteristics are authentic and the game features full vehicle damage affects which all in someway will have an overall effect on your vehicle and its behaviour. Colin McRae Rally 3 puts players in the driving seat of a 2002 Ford Focus RS WRC Rally car with the one simple instruction: You are Colin McRae, and win Ford the world rally Championship.

Pit your Wits in Championship mode, at the beginning of championship mode you take on a 3 year contract with the Ford Rallye team with the single objective to gain the ultimate prize for you and the team, The World Rally Championship. Throughout the championship you will encounter eight international rallies: Japan, Spain, USA, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Australia and finally the UK all with different surfaces to master and contend with such as tarmac, gravel and dirt and as always you will encounter unpredictable weather conditions.

Weather can be your friend or foe and make all the difference in you quest for those valuable championship points, remember in championships ever second counts. The visualisation of the weather conditions is simply incredible; you need to witness the rain falling from your in-car view to believe it as the rain explodes onto the windscreen and streaks up and over the roof, “simply stunning”

Graphically is where I was impressed and also least impressed with Colin McRae Rally 3, Codemasters and the Colin McRae series have always pushed the limits of the Playstation and along with the TOCA series of games were one of the few developers/publishers to truly show the potential of the Playstation, unfortunately that is not necessarily the case here on the Xbox.

Colin McRae Rally 3 would be and is an awesome looking PS2 game, yet on the Xbox fails to deliver the highly detailed and vast locations as seen in previous games such as Rallisport Challenge. The vehicles in the game are however all highly detailed and accurate recreations of there real life counterparts and are each made up of up to 14,000 pixels, each of the cars are fully detailed models with individual components such as the engine bay, interior, chassis right down to the brake disc’s all being painstakingly and individually recreated.

Colin McRae Rally 3 is let down visually mostly by simple things such as repetitive flat walls of trees appearing in the distance, flat 2d static crowds of people randomly scattered throughout stages and at times especially in two player mode Colin McRae Rally 3 suffers from some serious pop up issues and slow down, so bad is the pop up and slow down in two player at times it becomes tricky to see which direction the track actually goes.

Colin McRae Rally 3 does however feature vehicle damage, and unless you drive slow enough to drive Miss Daisy you’ll soon experience the collision damage featured. Damage ranges from simple dent’s to bumpers hanging off, doors flying off or simply flapping open, sparks from the vehicle body as you grind along the edge of a wall or rock, loosing a tyre and even the bonnet flying open over the windscreen, as damage takes it’s toll on the car the vehicles performance is hindered accordingly and repairs can’t be made till you reach service so take care cause it’s a long walk back to the pits!!!!

Although not a perfect title Colin McRae Rally 3 does recreate the world of a Rally driver exceptionally well, overall the game is not as visually impressive as the Microsoft title Rallisport Challenge yet is a much more realistic driving experience.

Featured Cars

• Citroen Saxo Kit Car
• Citroen 2CV Sahara
• Citroen Xsara Kit Car
• Fiat Punto Rally Car
• Lancia 037
• Ford Focus RS WRC 2002
• Puma Rally Car
• 1986 RS200
• MG ZR Rally Car
• Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 7
• Subaru Impreza WRX (44S)
• Subaru Impreza 22B Sti
• Plus Additional Bonus cars to be unlocked and discovered.....

Countries Featured:

• Japan
• Spain
• USA
• Sweden
• Finland
• Greece
• Austrlia
• UK

Colin McRae Rally 3 Official Web Site: