art of rally

Pros : Lots of cars with several iconic liveries from the 60s to the 90s Truly different rallies, not just copy & paste ones The freeroam option to play at your own pace The sounds of cars, captivating... Small details that bring life to the roads and surroundings (watch out for pedestrians) Synthwave musics (the 80s in force!) Cons : Handling, very complicated to find the right setup Some residual texture bugs A camera view closer to the ground would be appreciated No Monte-Carlo? Conclusion : A very pleasant rally game, quick to learn even if the driving is quite tricky despite the gameplay options.

There is a free demo of the game which is worth more than any review. However I will try to mention things that might be usefull even if someone has already played the demo. As a start there the full release has some improvements. I was not able to use my cheap controller in the demo but it is working in the full game. In the demo the tree tops sometimes obstructed the view to the car and now whenever the car goes behind a tree the tree-top becomes invisible. The list of cars is pretty decent. There are some unusual for a really game: BMW M1, Opel Kaddet(last generation), Ferrari 308 and even some exotic looking vehicles. The cars are being unlocked by playing the career mode which starts you with a couple of available vehicles and by racing you gradually unlock the rest. In custom rally mode more cars are available from the start but some still need to be unlocked in career. The vehicles cannot be upgraded but there are some basic setup options - stability control assistance, ABS assistance etc. With the Stability contro assistance at 100%(which is by default) the car tends to understeer prety badly so turning this down a bit made the hadnling much better. There is car damage a certain amount of which can be repaired at predefined stages of the rally. There are five locations - Finland, Sardinia, Japan, Germany, Norway. If some locations are locked behind completing career events I haven't seen them yet. I personally couldn't find that much of a difference in how the car handles when driving on another location/surface type. There are different whether conditions and times of day - fog, rain, morning, afternoon, sunset, night so it covers all the bases in that regard There is a free roam option where you can drive through the locations as much as you like(even offroad) and discover photo-shoot spots(just like in NFS 2015) and find collectibles. All in all for me Art of Rally is a fun arcade rally game with Micro Machines like point of view.

Game kind of popped up out of nowhere for me. Since I love Rally Racing I thought I'd give it a go. Boy has it been worth it! Excellently crafted game with a good soundtrach and engaging races! Could use a bit a polish, however I'm not sure on the size of the studio and how many devs were working on this. You can tell that whoever crafted it does love rally racing just as much! You honestly cannot go wrong in buying this game if you love rally racing. Only gripe I can have is that it's top down with no front cam or hood view. Not really a negative, but I know that can be make or break for some.

I haven't bought a game on its release day for many years, but today I made an exception with Art of Rally, only because it looked so damn fun! And it IS quite fun indeed! Art of Rally has kind of an arcade feel, but don't let the top-down view fool you - it's still a proper rally game that isn't as easy as it looks. Easy to learn, but hard to master, as the old cliche goes. You'll be spinning and hitting trees at first, but when you finally nail that perfect drift through a big curve, there's something extremely satisfying about it. I'm not entirely pleased with the driving physics; the gravity especially feels a bit off when my old Mini (or "the Meanie", as they can't use official names in the game) can make insane jumps and it just kind of floats through the air, but the semi-realistic handling at least feels good and most of all fun. There are lots of different cars and the few ones that I've tried so far have all felt a bit different, so that definitely makes things a bit more interesting. Also, you might already have noticed that Art of Rally looks absolutely gorgeous. Seriously. It's minimalistic and ridiculously colourful, but to me it nails the indie game look perfectly. There's a very nice photo mode and I'm totally going to snap some screenshots of some of the lovely views in the game. Normally the first thing that I'd do in a racing game would be to turn off the music, but the retro synthpop soundtrack somehow fits in too, and you can still hear the engine roaring underneath it. Or perhaps the other way around. The track design is top notch and it follows the simplistic trend, but some of the locations are still truly beautiful and they're all pretty fun to drive. Some random obstacles or small rocks on the side of the road might make things more exciting though. I still have a desire to play more realistic and serious rally sims after Art of Rally, but I already know that I'll be playing this a lot when I want something a bit more relaxing and fun.