![]() ![]() Not sure how relevant this addition is: most of the times I never even used half of the repair points – in Dirt 4, for example, one bad collision could ruin your car and make it very difficult for you to perform. Collisions will result in damaging your car, and once every 2 stages you can use some repairs if needed. There’s also some silly tracks like this one in Germany where the road is bordered by tombstones on each side, making it perilous to even slightly touch the sides. If you venture a little too much out of bounds, your car will be put back automatically on track with some penalty (+5 seconds on your timer) – this is fair but sometimes it feels a little too stringent (a little too close to the track) as drifting a little too fast will easily send you far enough off the road. Instead, dirt tracks feel different than regular roads, but in a programmatic way: the surface properties will change but there’s no real visual cue that they differ apart from their colors and shades. Rally is all about bumps, uneven surfaces, and holes filled with puddles. When driving on dirt tracks, such roads and trails appear to be perfectly flat just like regular roads, which removes most of the fun. However, I do care a little more about the roads. But let’s not nitpick here, it’s fairly obvious that the tracks are just made to set the stage, not represent anything accurately. And Japanese mountains are a lot more rocky and dangerous than the hills pictured here. Don’t expect any dirt tracks, despite what Art of Rally depicts. Cherry blossoms means lots of tourists, and you can bet the Japanese will make their roads nice and new when they attract a lot of people. For example, in Japan, they keep making you drive in mountains filled with cherry blossoms, on DIRT TRACKS. ![]() ![]() The environment looks great, while they are certainly more fiction than accurate. Juts speaking from my 30 years of driving in video games and almost as much on actual roads in actual cars, you know. But hey, a lot of people seem to enjoy the way Art of Rally works, so I may be completely wrong. So I find myself fighting with the controls to keep my car on the road rather than focusing on making perfect curves and increasing my speed. It feels like cars a drifting way more than they should at the speed they are at. I am not sure it’s implemented very well, both on dirt tracks as well as regular roads. I don’t know what they were thinking there.ĭrifting is a key mechanic here, make no mistake. Swerving left or right will make the car drift in an uncontrollable way. Some cars drive ok, others like la wedge are simply horrible to handle. It also really depends on the car you pick. Driving takes practice, and you may end up in the trees more often than you’d like. Well, Art of Rally is certainly NOT in the arcade category. Now how is the driving? Is it just right? That’s always a tricky subject, somewhat subjective depending on what you expect from a game in general and if you like simulations more than arcade games. Actually, it would be useful when you drive really fast, but the devs decided not to include it. Because of the top-view approach, you can see all curves coming to you ahead of time, so there’s not really a need for a co-pilot to shout “5 left, 3 right” as you drive. Now, what kind of rally experience should you expect? Quite different from what you may be used to. As you win races of finish seasons you unlock new cars with different looks and characteristics. There’s no brands mentioned but the trained eye will recognize them very easily. Easy to advance even if you don’t have hours in front of you.Įach season represents a year in time and you get a selection of cars more or less fitting with what was available to race during that year. Most tracks are pretty short, between 2 to 5 minutes of continuous driving (no laps). It helps you focus on the core of the game, the driving, like the early 8-bit games which could not display much apart from the road.Īs you start playing, everything is organized by seasons and each season consists of a few rally tracks to complete. ![]() Menus are simple (black text on white without any kind of decoration), and all tracks use few main colors and almost no textures to depict the race and its environment. The whole game takes a very minimalist approach. And despite what the trailer might have suggested, it does not play at all like Dirt Rally or anything in the Dirt series for that matter. With Art of Rally, we get a surprising new take on a very popular racing genre. Yet they have completely disappeared by now. Ever wondered what happened to racing games viewed from above? They used to be huge hits back in the heydays of 2D (or even the very beginning of 3D games, the first GTA was viewed from above). ![]()
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