Your enjoyment of NASCAR Heat 3 (and 2, for that matter)
largely comes down to your acceptance of the fact that these are streamlined
arcade-style racing games and not NASCAR simulators. If you want a challenging
NASCAR sim, NASCAR Heat 3 will not in any way satisfy you. On the other hand,
if you just want to tear around familiar tracks with your favorite driver in a
game of 190MPH bumper cars, well then NASCAR Heat 3 can be a lot of fun. It
still definitely has tons of problems that you'll wish were fixed even if you
do accept it as an arcade racer, but the core thrill of driving door to door
with 39 other cars is well done here and almost makes up for the laundry list
of issues. As a simple and fun pick up and play NASCAR experience NASCAR Heat 3
is worth a look, but you'll be disappointed if you're expecting anything more.
Continue reading our full NASCAR Heat 3 review for all of the details.
Game Details
- Publisher: 704 Games
- Developer: Monster Games
- ESRB Rating: "E10" for Everyone 10+
- Genre: Racing
- Pros: Tons of content; dirt racing is fun; solid controls; fun arcade style gameplay
- Cons: Awful damage model; basically 190MPH bumper cars; so-so career mode
- MSRP: $50
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Gameplay modes include quick race, local split screen
multiplayer, online 40-player multiplayer, challenge mode where you re-create
real world moments, championship mode where you play a single season (you can
alter the length) to go after a championship, and career mode. Career mode is
similar to last year's where you start out as a hot seat driver and bounce
around between different teams for a season before getting your own full-time
ride in each series, which means it takes several seasons of racing before you actually
get to the Monster Energy Cup Series for real. I didn't really like this setup
last year, and I'm not crazy about it now.
New in NASCAR Heat 3, however, is that you can choose to
make your own team, which makes things a bit more interesting but comes with
its own set of flaws. When you make your own team you have to buy chassis and
hire employees and use your race winnings to fix up the car each week. You
start out with pretty crappy cars and not particularly skilled employees, but
you can pay to improve the cars as well as train the employees and by
mid-season you're able to be surprisingly competitive. And by the end of each
season, at least for the dirt, Trucks, and XFINITY series, you'll be blowing
the doors off of the other teams because you'll have tons of money to throw at
the car and can just buy better performance and easily win (kind of like Petty
did back in the day en-route to 200 victories ...). The Monster Energy Cup,
thankfully, is a little more balanced.
The result of all this, though, is that the career mode
still ends up being kind of a boring grind. Whether you make your own team or
sign with an established team and all you have to do is drive, the career ends
up the same way. You start with slow crappy cars and end up with fast awesome
cars that provide no challenge. Making your own team doesn't have very much
depth and it's all just too simple and easy and not satisfying. I like just
doing the Championship Mode instead because you can skip the grind.
As I mentioned above, the gameplay is decidedly arcade-y,
which is good or bad depending on what you're looking for. The cars are just
glued to the track for the most part and you can make some pretty impressive
and seemingly impossible saves if you do manage to get the car loose. Even
turning off stability assistance in the options only really results in having
to be slightly more mindful entering turns and getting on the gas on exit.
Making contact with other cars is also ridiculously unsatisfying because it is
wildly inconsistent in what it takes to actually wreck someone, but also
because the A.I. cars have an insanely unnatural ability to almost immediately
straighten out and continue racing like nothing happened. It's like you're
playing bumper cars out there but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is a
little telling, though, that even the game seemingly doesn't know how to deal
with all of the inconsistency as playing with yellow flags on is a crapshoot
where you never know what will actually bring a flag out. I've barely scraped
the wall and caused a yellow flag and in another race multiple cars flipped and
flew through the air with no flags in sight.
I also tested out the damage model and it is hilariously bad
to the point you're better off just turning it off. The cars can take a lot of
pounding before their performance is really changed, you see, and since the
A.I. cars have an uncanny ability to straighten back out and not really crash,
having damage on is fairly pointless and only really affects you. You can slam
into walls at 200MPH and intentionally try to do damage and the game just
shrugs it off like nothing happened. You can cause major damage through
multiple targeted impacts, but it takes a ton and things that absolutely would
destroy a car in real life are just minor dings here. I'll say it again, these
NASCAR Heat games are just straight up arcade racers, and that's fine.
With all of that said, I gotta say that I've still had a
lot of fun with NASCAR Heat 3. My favorite way to play has always been to start
at the back and fight my way to the front, and that is just as fun as ever. The A.I. seems to be improved this year as getting into the
top ten is a breeze but passing the next nine guys is much more of a struggle,
just like it is in real life. The racing gameplay in general seems improved a
bit over last year, too, as it seems like multiple lines are effective and the
A.I. actually uses different lines rather than just running around in a double
file pack all race long. There are still some wonky things, though, like the
A.I. will all pit at the same time which just causes chaos and you can get a
huge advantage by pitting a couple of laps earlier than you really need to.
Also, the longer a race goes, the easier it is to win against the A.I. and even
on the "Hard" difficulty setting I could lap the field a few times
over on fairly reasonably long (25% length or so) distances. It is still fun,
but it all comes back to the gameplay being a little easy and mindless.
I also want to give a shout out to the dirt racing in NASCAR
Heat 3 as it is more fun than it initially seems even if it is just as
inconsistent and unrealistic as everything else. In real dirt racing the cars
get sideways and slide around corners and bump and bang and that is a huge part
of the appeal, but the A.I. cars here almost never get sideways and if they do
it scares the rest of the field so they all slow down like a wreck is
happening. The strange thing is that getting loose and sliding or slowing down
and taking corners more carefully both result in almost the exact same lap
times here, so it's all a little wonky. It's definitely fun, though, and has a
unique feel compared to the normal racing in the other series that will keep
you coming back now and again for a change of pace.
The presentation has also seen some slight improvements in
NASCAR Heat 3 over last year. Well, other than the front end loading screens
and menus looking almost exactly the same and the options literally being the
same, the presentation has improved. During races the lighting and shadows are
more realistic looking and everything looks better. The skyboxes seem to have
been given special attention as there are some very pretty skies this time
around, though the daytime races seem to all be taking place at 10 A.M. since
the lighting is kind of more dim than you'd expect, which is kind of weird. I
don't have any framerate complaints, though it isn't 100% stable. The sound
also is slightly better with improved engine sounds so racing in a pack no
longer sounds like a bunch of tinny bumblebees in an echo-y room.
NASCAR Heat 3 only makes marginal improvements over the
previous games, but it is an improvement overall and that means that it is the
best NASCAR Heat yet and the best the sport has seen in a while even if the
result isn't quite what fans have been hoping for. It's a simple easy
arcade-style racer, not a sim, and as long as you can embrace that you can have
a fair bit of fun with NASCAR Heat 3. As long as you aren't looking for
absolute authenticity, NASCAR Heat 3 is a fun time and offers enough content to
make it worth a look.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
