WARNING: This review is written from the viewpoint of a complete beginner. I have no experience with rally games or the rally sport in any way, shape or form. If you’re reading this and think to yourself “Huh, that’s just like me!” then take this to heart. If you’re an adept rally racer and you know your suspensions from your driveshafts, this review will probably read like blasphemy. However, you’ll be able to deduce that this game would be something for you. With that out of the way… The review.

I tried… Arceus as my witness, I tried. This game has glowing reviews across the board and for the life of me, I don’t understand why. It’s not that I’m bad at race games, I’m actually quite decent at games like Need for Speed Underground 2/Most Wanted.

But this…No.

The gameplay is annoying. Hyper-realism will probably please the fans of the genre but beginners like me get bombarded with stuff they can’t possibly comprehend. Seriously, you NEED to have a thorough understanding of rally racing before you even attempt this game.

While there are tutorials, they teach you nothing at all. They are just voice-overs that tell you about “weight shifting” or “over/understeering” while a simulation plays in the background. I expected that there would be a “Try this out” part after the explanation, but you just get catapulted back to the menu when it’s done. So either you grab a notepad to write all of this stuff down so you can study it before you hit the tracks, or you keep playing them over and over until something sticks.

The game modes consist of Rally, Hill Climb and Rallycross.

A game for the hard-core fans that leaves the beginners in the dirt.

Rally is exactly what it says on the can: it’s a Rally race. Basically, you have to complete a track as fast as you can without totaling your car. It’s just you vs the timer, no other racers in sight. If that sounds boring to you, then hold on because it gets worse. In most racing games, you get a kick-ass tune to listen to, to amp you up while you’re racing, to push you to go faster. Here? You get a co-pilot who constantly drones on in the same monotone voice:

“Left 6 into hairpin, don’t cut.”
“Right 4 into Left 3, after that, Right 1, don’t cut 100.”

Things like that ALL the time. Hell, I hit a rock on the side of the road, which caused the car to careen through the air, doing an aileron roll right off the cliff side, and still the dude went “Right 2 into hairpin right.” In the same tone of voice! The man has more ice in his veins than Mr. Freeze when he went on a holiday to the North Pole!

I don’t know what Hill Climb is, because I didn’t have enough money to buy a car for that type of races so… That’s just great. (Here you have to drive on a mountain with special cars that stick to the ground, it’s rather popular – Ed).

Rallycross is finally something that resembles a real race, but it still plays like crap. The opponents speed off as if Satan himself is coming for their souls, never making a mistake or spinning out so you’ll be driving by yourself again, but this time, you don’t have a co-pilot that keeps blabbing on about the corners (and no, you don’t get any music either).

So yeah, that aside, what do you love about racing games? The speed, right? Well screw you, if you’re new to the Rally genre, you’ll better stick to 2^nd gear, because otherwise, you’re crashing harder than Paris Hilton at a “Free Booze and Coke” party.

The cars themselves handle like bricks. Do you want to turn the corner? Okay, either you slow down to 1^st gear and drive like your grandma or you’re going to get a face full of guardrail. This could be because I don’t know how to handle rally cars, but I didn’t expect them to handle THAT differently from other cars I’ve raced with in games.

Luckily, there are a lot of cars to choose from, the range of them is rather amazing. From 1960 Rally classics to the current ones, there are a quite a few to pick to utterly bang up.

Graphically, the game really doesn’t impress either. While the cars are polished, the environments are not. The trees, the rocks, the “people” cheering at the side of the road, all of them look incredibly last gen. This is probably because you wouldn’t be able to pay attention to it because you’re speeding down the road, but if you’re like me and are moving along like a snail, you’ve got the time to stare at the trees. Well, you also get the chance to stare at them if you get enough of the slow speed, shift into 3^rd gear and go tree-diving at the next corner.

The crowd that cheers you on feels like they’re from even further back as well. When you crash into a crowd, they don’t dive out of the way or react in the slightest. Nope, they’re just a wall that instantly resets you back to the road the moment you come near it. So we haven’t evolved far from the cardboard cut-outs from the PS1 days.
On the topic of walls that reset you: You play by the game’s rules or you get the middle finger. For instance, I get to a hairpin turn on flat ground. I can easily cross the 1-meter wide dirt patch between the parts of the road, thus cutting off a few seconds. I try it and BAM, I get reset and a +15 second penalty to my timer. For crossing a 1 flipping meter wide dirt patch too early. Hyper realism, YAY!

Conclusion:

It may sound as if I’m taking a total dump on the game, but honestly, as a beginner, this is nuts. If you’re like me and haven’t touched a Rally game in your entire life, I’d only recommend it to you if you’re going to spend hours, upon hours, upon hours of mastering the game. By the time you can effortlessly drive your race car, you could go and apply to become a rally pilot yourself.

Fans of the genre will probably love the hyper-realism, the strict rules, the minimal tutorials, the cars, but quite frankly, I didn’t, at all. It was more frustrating than fun, and this is coming from someone who enjoys the Dark Souls franchise.

My personal score for this game is a 3/10, but seeing as I’m clearly not the demographic for this game, I’ll give it an additional 5 points, bumping it up to 8/10.

8/10