The Art of Rally aims to honor the golden age of rally racing. The game offers a whopping 72 stages, around 50 different cars, and 4 different game modes. Coming from the creator of critically acclaimed Absolute Drift, The Art of Rally has some great expectations to overcome. I, as a big fan of racing games, had the pleasure to play and review this game.

Gameplay

Let me start off by discussing what in my opinion is the most important part of any racing game: the gameplay. Whilst the different game modes are magnificent from the get-go and the concept of this game is fantastic, this game is difficult and almost frustrating to master. But stick with me, I’ll explain why that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Rally-driving truly is an art, requiring finesse, patience, and subtlety to master; skills I am not exactly known for. A few hours into the gameplay I felt like the worst driver on the planet, flipping my car many times and barely being able to drift through corners. The cars slide around corners with mostly no grip whatsoever and often over-, or understeer; I just did not find a way to keep them on track often.
About ten hours into this game I thought to myself “this game has potential, but wow these cars suck to drive”. I managed to win a championship, considered the saying “quit at the peak” and quit thinking that was the best I could do.
But I ended up coming back to this game over the next weeks and found myself steadily improving my driving. I started enjoying this game more and more. Eventually, I managed to keep the car on track more often than being flung into trees, rocks, or spectators, and my times kept improving. Through sheer persistence, I did even learn myself to toy around with the throttle and brakes; which is absolutely necessary to keep the damn car on the track. In the end, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with this game, playing it for a few hours until I get frustrated and quit again (maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, I should get that checked).
The difficulty of the Art of Rally resembles the difficulty of actual rally racing. Whilst that is frustrating sometimes, it makes the game have an amazing replay value due to the number of tracks to master. What I did really miss in this game was a navigator. I think that would have prevented a lot of crashes. In my opinion, a navigator makes a rally game feel so much more like a rally game, even if it’s just an onscreen arrow.

Game modes

I will definitely keep playing this game from time to time. One of the reasons why I’ll keep playing is definitely the utter brilliance that is the ‘free roam’ game mode. In free roam the creator really does mean free roam. You pick a map and you can stick to the roads and practice endlessly, sure. Another possibility is driving through the forests and exploring the map until it runs out. In free roam, there are many different things like photo spots and letters to find. Funselektor’s bus is hidden in every free roam map, which you have to ram. I found out what the bus looked like when I crashed and accidentally hit it. 
Career, time attack, and custom rally basically don’t need an introduction. They are exactly what you would expect. Career spans out over a great few years and classes, in which you drive through each of the 72 iconic stages from rally history with equally iconic cars. Time attack lets you pick a stage and a car and has you challenge all the players in the world that managed to set a time. Custom rally lets you pick the car class and the stages before driving that rally. I don’t count the online events as a different game mode, since it is basically the same as time-attack.

Visuals

The visuals take some getting used to when you first start this game. They are very boxy and squared off, with people in this game basically being little rectangular cuboids. But honestly, when playing this game you’ll soon forget the visuals due to the sheer speed of the game and the vast maps you are able to explore. The best part of the visuals is that even though they are very minimalistic, they still resemble the areas they aim to represent and it helps set the mood for each rally. For instance, Finland really feels like driving through the dense forests of Scandinavia, Sicily has some villages that truly feel Italian and Japan has visuals representing the famous Sakura trees in full blossom. Very cool what Funselektor managed to do with so little!

World

The world is the game’s strongest point in my opinion. The sheer amount of tracks in combination with the massive maps in free roam makes sure that there are many drives to enjoy and master. The maps have different road surfaces ranging from gravel to dirt and tarmac, which are of course different to drive on and make it really feel like a proper rally game. The world is very lively with people, cows, houses, tents, vans and different types of trees in it.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, The Art of Rally is difficult at first and the learning curve is quite steep. For fans of rally racing and people who are into obsessively practicing a track over and over to master it, this game is perfect. It truly feels like a great homage to the great Rallysport and even though it’s difficult, it’s a fun game. Funselektor Labs really seems to be knowing what they want to see in their games and the game really feels like it reflects exactly what they stand for as developers and artists. Their slogan for this game seems to be a fitting end to this review as well, even though the answer in my case is a definite ‘no’: will you master The Art of Rally?

8.5/10

Tested on PlayStation 5