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Colin McRae 3 Review
Mark Simons
13/06/2003
Now PC gamers can pretend to be the flying Scotsman, see if it'll be any good here.
Ever since it first burst onto the market Codemasters Colin McRae series has consitently provided some of the best rallying action around. So it may not boast all of the official licenses and real life courses, but it more than makes up for this with the simple trick of being a damn good game.
The console versions of Colin McRae have been out for a bit, here is our PS2 review, if you'd like to familiarise yourself with it, the PC version sticks closely to this template but with some additional spit and polish from the folks at Codemasters, or is it the PC hardware, one of the two. For those of you not familiar with the game we'll give you a quick run down.
Essentially you are Colin McRae, the main part of the game is the Championship mode where you and Co Driver Nicky Grist work together to be the world's best rally drivers. The season takes you all over the world, America, Australia through Japan and around European from the snows of Sweeden, through beautiful Finland, muddy England, dusty Greece, twisty Spain and a few others besides. Scenery looks good, and with a reasonable spec PC will fly past with no slowdown and a good draw distance. The rain effect demonstrated in the Japanese stages looks absolutely stunning, water droplets moving errily realistically over your windscreen. Each level naturally features some distracting scenery specific to the country, huge canyons filled with boulders in America, fields and quaint rual villages for England for example, you get the idea.
The championship takes you through these stages, not all of them in one season, and after doing three stages a day over a weekend you finish up with a super special stage which is a head to head race with another car â“ although this being rallying you're separated by a wall, so no running your close rival off the road... After you reach a service point your car gets reparid, although oddly this is done automatically, in the previous games you had a certain amount of time to fix things and sometimes you would have tough choices over what not to repair. Much of a loss, but given that this is all about imersing you in the rally role, although you could say you're just leaving it to your mechanics.
We do wish that this game had the option for making use of some of the new features avaliable on high end graphics cards, all of the lovely new shiny DirectX 9 lighting and things like that. However the game was started way before they came to market and to be honest, it looks good enough now, and by the time the next game is released we're sure it will look jaw dropping. The car is the real star here though, and where the PC version has the edge on the consoles. With higher a resolution the detail on the car is more easily discernable. You can make out the three dimensional door handles, the ariels on top look like thin bits of wire rather than jaggedy bobly things, and you can even see where your tire is burst. Reflection effects are that little bit more visible as well, which is always good. Coupled with one of the best damage models around making your car feel like a solid, or not so solid by the end of a hard stage, piece of machinery.
We would have really liked the blurring effect that is deployed so well in Toca Race Driver to be used here as a bit of TV style focusing and motion blur would probably be all that's required to make Colin McRae 3 look the absolute daddy. But that's just us.
Sound is of the highest order as well, with lots of different sounds for all the various types of surface you'll be sliding around sounding good. The gameplay importance is the subtle, almost unconcious way you get to know where each wheel of your car is, and you can hear when one side, or the front left wheel, for example, is on a different surface to the rest. This affects how you turn and what sort of compensation you should be making for the change in grip. All very well done essentially, even better if you've got a nice surround set up on your computer.
We should quickly talk about the gameplay, but there's not much to say other than this is one of the best rally experiences you can have outside of getting in a real car and making it muddy. The in-car headcam view is a thing of genius and coupled with the damage, graphics, sound and excellent handling that is easy to pick up, but hard to become world class at, you have a very compelling experience.
