Real Racing 3

An eye-candy of a game for your portable iOS or Android device that comes for free. You could spend some money in upgrading or buying new cars, but you can really enjoy Real Racing 3 as it is without spending a dime.

Firemonkeys and Electronic Arts prove that a good freemium game can be released without making players feel like they need to pay to win. Real Racing 3 also shows how pretty mobile games can get nowadays, and that smartphones have become serious gaming platforms. A must buy, although the term isn’t applicable in this case.

Amazing visuals, great controls and superb car physics. You might hate the freemium model introduced in Real Racing 3. But if you decide to skip the game because of this, then you will miss out on the greatest mobile racer ever made for mobiles and tablets. Sure, you can always buy the cheapest pack which includes a nice BMW. After all that will only be a third of the price for Real Racing 2. Go ahead no one is looking. If not, then lock your credit card away and drop repairs until you get enough in-game currency to put some cars in your garage. After that there’s no turning back. You will be hooked.

Scaled down in some respects and expanded in others, Real Racing 3 might irk some old fans, but it's a remarkably giving free-to-play affair.

Expansive, gorgeous, hardcore, free: Real Racing 3 sets the new standard on mobile for racing games.

Free-to-play or not, Real Racing 3 is a fantastic game that no iOS gamer should be without. Especially if they have Game Center friends to compete with.

Behind its impressive visuals, there's a game with plenty of options, meant to stay for a long time on our devices. The free-to-play model might be controversial, but after all, it allows the player to decide whether keep on playing or not.

Real Racing 3 is the best driving simulator for iPhone, iPad and Android systems, period. The "free to play" model, though, might be too aggressive for some players, but the choice is up to you: play it for free, with patience, and you have a game that can squeeze in your everyday's routine. Or you can just open your wallet and cut some (pretty expensive) corners.

Multiplayer is sadly lacking in Real Racing 3, replaced with a half-way house system that promises to allow you to race against the ghost cars of your friends, but really only seems to collect their lap times rather than their actual laps. It's better than nothing, but still feels like a missed opportunity.

Real Racing 3 is a game that clearly shows Firemonkey's quality, with a production value that could be easily associated with console games. Unfortunately, choosing to go free to play ultimately generated some serious balancing issues and frustrations, reducing the overall value of the final product.

Real Racing 3’s good handily outweighs its bad. There’s plenty of variety in race types, more vehicles than you can shake a stick at, and even if it’s not ideal, old school racing fans can still have plenty of fun with the assists on.

If you're a free to play gamer used to the often basic games that litter the Top Free chart on the App Store, Real Racing 3 is going to knock your socks off.

‘Real Racing 3’ is all about the three R’s. Not the ones we learned at school (or as I’m increasingly discovering to my horror, I didn’t properly learn), but Real Cars, Real Tracks and Real People.

Real Racing 3 is graphically still very impressive with 46 beautiful cars at your fingertips. These all control greatly, but never achieve the finesse of an actual racing simulation. The choice to go with the freemium-model might frustrate, but can be handled when playing smartly. With time-shifted multiplayer, Firemonkeys makes a small step in the right direction. Unfortunately this seems to have happened at the expense of actual multiplayer, that shines in its absence along with a few other options. But even without these options Real Racing 3 is one of the better and prettiest racing-games for your tablet or mobile phone.

A great game with gorgeous looks spoiled by excessive in-app demands. [May 2013, p.86]

A fantastic tablet racing game, but one that greatly overestimates its own importance and value with slow progress and expensive in-app purchases. [May 2013, p.81]

Stunning graphics, good controls and an interesting multiplayer don’t save Real Racing 3 from the freemium impasse. At the same price of its predecessor, it would have been a masterpiece.

If you do not mind waiting 20 or 30 minutes to repair your car after a race or if you love the freemium formula with its sneaky purchases system, Real Racing 3 is simply the best racing-simulation game available today on App Store.

Real Racing 3 is a spectacle on iOS, but this is a case where the developers over promised, and under delivered.

With the beautiful graphics and large amount of content, Real Racing 3 could be one of the best games the smartphone has ever seen. However the microtransactions and long waiting times take away much of the fun.

This is a sensitive employment of free-to-play, but despite its presentation and name, Real Racing 3 remains an arcade game in sim clothing, and one hamstrung by its host format. Limitations that keep it firmly in the tail-lights of deeper console experiences.

There is a fantastic racing game core to Real Racing 3, but it is hiding behind a restricting free-to-play model. If there was a one-time purchase to eliminate upgrade times and increase the amount of cash earned per event, Real Racing 3 would be far more balanced and recommended without hesitation.

Real Racing 3 is a true 'Jekyll and Hyde' - one moment you're lost in the majesty of throbbing engines, squealing tyres and exhaust fumes as you tear your way around a track... and the next you're staring at a ticking timer, waiting for a chance to get back in to that dream-like head-space and delay the inevitable wait for a moment longer.

Whether the exact implementation of Real Racing 3's show-stopping freemium model is a question of greed or inexperience, we can't know - but we want to believe the latter. We also want to believe that between now and the game's global release on February 28th, greater consideration will be given to the long-term supporters of the series, and that a timer-free premium edition of the game will be released alongside this current incarnation. If that happens, we'll revisit our opinion of Real Racing 3 - and give it the accolades it would otherwise unquestionably deserve.

This mobile racer definitely shows some potential, but with the concept of pay-to-win in-app-purchases and some rough edges in the design motivation grinds to a stop.

Real Racing 3 is a brilliant game artificially constrained by some boneheaded business decisions.

A wonderful portable racing experience has been completely ruined by greedy micro transactions.

It may be a good quality racer but this is also one of the most offensively cynical video games we’ve ever played, and despite being ‘free’ also one of the most expensive.