Colin McRae Rally 3 is the most recent title in what is probably the most respected and loved rally-racing franchise in gaming. Many other rally titles have come and gone, the Colin McRae series, with its incredible feeling of speed and spot-on realism has managed to entrench itself in the hearts and minds of console gamers. While this latest release in the series slips a little in some areas, overall it's a fantastic game that should have a spot in every gamer's collection.

Colin McRae Rally 3 is a rally game, plain and simple. It's just you and your co-driver (some call him a navigator) racing against the clock. Rally rarely offers up a head-to-head race, unless it's a special class of race (normally some sort of exhibition race), so for American gamers, it can be a strange concept. Once you get the idea, however, you will really start to enjoy the fact that you don't have to worry about other drivers on the track, you just have to race fast, hard and precise.

In Colin McRae Rally 3, you play the game as none other than Colin McRae himself, one of the world's greatest rally drivers. Colin races for Ford Motors, so in the world championship mode, your only vehicle option is going to be a tricked out Ford Focus. For those of you who could never imagine yourself in that little roller skate of a car, you have to see the rally version of the Focus to believe it. The racing Focus is fast and fun, and while you can't choose any other cars in championship mode, you'll have more than enough fun with this little car. If you do tire of the focus, you can switch the single race mode, which allows you to choose from any of the unlocked vehicles and available tracks. There's a good variety of vehicles to choose from, so it's always good fun to give them a shot, especially the super fast and slippery little guys.

Once you've started the championship, it's just you and your co-driver Nicky Grist against the clock. Rally races are judged by time, not finishing line positions, so it's a different style of gameplay altogether. When you hit the track, it's all yours, you can fly all over the road if you like, but you have to remember that slipping and sliding and driving madly will cost you precious seconds, which decreases your world ranking.

With all the slipping and sliding around tracks, you're going to damage the Focus. While a lot of the damage is seemingly cosmetic, you'll find that after some time, the damage becomes cumulative and significantly affects vehicle performance. Wreck the transmission, and you won't be able to get out of third gear. Smash up the axles, and you won't be pulling any tight turns any time soon. To help you deal with the vehicle damage, you've got a repair team who will show up on the second day of racing and attempt to fix whatever damage they can. This doesn't mean they'll fix it all, but they do generally return the car to a drivable state. You have to be careful on the first day of racing, since you won't get a repair crew until the second day, which can make later races on day one an exercise in frustration.

Speaking of the tracks, they are simply fantastic in their design. Tracks can run through mountain passes, dry deserts and even cities, each showing meticulous attention to detail. While it might seem a trivial detail, I like the fact that on some tracks, there are narrow or one-lane bridges you have to take sharp turns to get to and then cross, which you normally never see in other racing titles. These tracks are as true to world rally racing tracks as you'll ever find in a game.

The controls in Colin McRae Rally 3 are simple enough, triggers handle gas an brake, and the rest of the buttons can be set up (from a series of preset configurations) to handle shifting and the hand brake. The hand brake is almost important as the throttle, and you'll be using it quite a bit to ensure you slide through turns properly.

In general, the physics in the game are quite realistic, unlike most other racers, which are more arcade oriented. One of my big gripes with other rally titles is "rollover", where you take a turn too fast and the car rolls over. In far too many games, it's easy to roll the car over. Not so in Colin McRae, which actually has a sense of gravity that keeps your vehicle on the track. One glaring issue with the physics, however, is the excessive "float" the car suffers in gravel or hard packed dirt. Whenever you're racing on hardpack or gravel, it's nearly impossible to keep the car from slipping in just about every direction, and can be insanely frustrating. This one weakness I can forgive, since the rest of the game is so solid, and once you're racing on other types of terrain, the car displays a far more realistic sense of grip and traction.

One last note about the gameplay that you'll rarely hear mentioned is how good the automatic transmission is. In most racing games, you find yourself switching to manual transmission at some point so as to maximize engine power. Most developers just don't seem to care about tweaking the automatic transmission in their games so that they respond more appropriately to the situation at hand. In Colin Marie, however, the automatic is almost as good as a human player handling shifting. I'm not ashamed to admit that I mostly play using automatic because the transmission control is tuned so well (and I'm more concerned with staying on the track rather than messing with the gearshift) in this game.

With a few notable exceptions, the Codemasters has created a graphical triumph with Colin McRae Rally 3. Almost everything looks great, from the reflections on the vehicles to the swishing of trees and shrubs as you drive through them, it's all beautiful to behold. One thing everyone should try: when racing the snowy tracks, switch to the in-car view and watch snowflakes stick to the windshield, which then are brushed away by the windshield wipers. It's really one of the best weather effects I've seen in an Xbox game to date.

I mentioned that there are some exceptions to the graphical beauty of this game, and those come into play in two places: the terrain and the crowds. Crowds are nothing more than two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. If you drive up towards an onlooker, you'll see they appear about one-inch thick, and don't ever move when you come near them. The game prevents you from colliding with them by throwing you back on the track the minute you get hear a pedestrian. The tracks, while they have amazing graphical touches such as trees, shrubs, buildings and even passing trains, the texturing is a little on the light side. Not only that, but your vehicle doesn't really interact with the terrain that much. For example, on a gravel/dirt track, you'd expect the car to throw some gravel around and leave tracks in the dirt, but it never does.

My yardstick for a game's graphics is the in-car view, which has to be good for me to really enjoy a game, since that's how I prefer to play them. While any game can look good from the third-person perspective, it takes a special game to be playable from the cockpit view. I have to say, when it comes to in-car gameplay, Colin McRae does more than satisfy, it amazes. Each cockpit view is customized to the vehicle, right down to the location of the gearshift, steering wheel and even window stickers. I can play this game for hours in the cockpit view and never get tired of it.

Finally, let me wrap up this section by mentioning how great the game's menus look. Designed to appear like graphics you might see in a televised European sports show, they go beyond simply being functional and move into the realm of truly stylish. Most menu elements offer some form of animation that helps capture your attention without being the least bit annoying.

Let me get this out in the open right now, there's no in-game music except when you're in the game menus. While this may seem weird to most players accustomed to other styles of racing, it fits rally games to a "t". After all, you need to be able to hear how your engine is responding while also listening to your co-driver's directions. Audio cues are what this game is about; so don't concern yourself with the lack of a soundtrack while racing, as your ears will be busy listening to other things.

Most of the in-game sound revolves around your car and your co-driver, Nicky. The car sounds are very realistic, from the whine of an engine pushed to far to the thump of your car bouncing off a tree, they really are impressive. For the voice work, Codemasters used Nicky Grist, the real-world co-driver for Colin McRae, so you can be sure his verbal cues are as realistic as possible. Unlike other more arcade-style rally games, Nicky maintains a professional demeanor the entire time, never making any sort of obnoxious comments about your driving or spouting any other useless commentary.

Colin McRae Rally 3 is an open-ended game. Even if you finish the entire season, there's nothing stopping you from replaying the whole series to attempt to beat your times. Combine that with the option to play single races with any available car, and you're sure to be enjoying this game for a long time to come.

If you've got some friends who enjoy a good rally, rest assured the multiplayer mode in Colin McRae will make you glad you purchased this game. Up to four players can enjoy the multiplayer mode in either split screen or "alternating" mode. The alternating mode, as the name implies, allows one person to race the course in full screen, then the next player tries, and the next, until finally all four players have finished the track. These multiplayer options ensure you'll get some extended life out of the game.

It's unfortunate that Codemasters didn't make Colin McRae Rally 3 an online-enabled tile (no Xbox Live nor PS2 Online support). It really would have been nice to at least be able to compare your times with other real-world racers with online enabled record keeping. Perhaps we'll see this in a future version, should Codemasters develop a sequel. While this lack of online capabilities isn't necessary to the replayability of the game, it sure wouldn't have hurt it.

As you can tell by the glowing terminology used in this review, Colin McRae Rally 3 is an all around winner that should be in the game collection of any racing fan. The gorgeous graphics, real-world tracks and sound physics model make it a blast to play, and great fun over the long haul. You can't go wrong with this game. While I still enjoy Codemasters' other recent racing title, Pro Race Driver, a bit more, Colin McRae Rally 3 is still a great game that I'm sure you'll enjoy.