REVIEW : art of rally (PC)
In recent years we have seen video games that entered through the eyes with photorealistic visuals or with a very original aesthetic sense. Games that had more body than the background, where the beautiful landscapes or the cuteness of their characters had all the importance, leaving aside the most important. art of rally enters through the eyes without remedy, at least to all those who like the minimalist, but it remains in our memory, not because of an image, but because of the sensations, it brings to the controls.
Funselektor’s second game after the indie surprise that was Absolute Drift is a title without too many tricks or many complications that pays homage to the rally in different ways: both in the sport itself – which here appears in a curious and funny fictional way – as above all of rally video games, paying more attention to V-Rally than to Dirt, and remembering the Spanish game World Rally Championship for perspective and the skills required of the player.
Rally playable perfection
In the art of rally, you play with an isometric perspective that allows us to anticipate the curves and uneven terrain that are to come while we are approaching them skidding at over a hundred kilometres per hour. But here we are not facing one of those arcades in which as soon as we arrive we are pressing the accelerator to the maximum and using the handbrake. On the contrary, we will start out being very fond of the brake, taking every curve with the nerves of the skin and flying down the mountain after taking too fast a slope that we had not seen.
This is because the title of the game refers to the art of driving, and like any artistic creation process, it is something that you learn with practice. The behaviour of the cars is not nearly as demanding as that of a simulator, but not as accessible as what many may think when reading “arcade”. It is in between. It is permissive: it allows you to go on a straight at 170 km / h and brake shortly before reaching a tight corner without the car going off, but at first, it will be impossible to take that curve without slowing down a lot. Little by little you are learning to calculate the times to use the left brake, the handbrake or to swerve to skid, and you catch the touch of the accelerator to exit the curves at full speed without burning the gearbox.
You don’t need game domination for your enjoyment either. You can play in the normal difficulty, with the damages in standard and without touching the options, an experience that, once you have done with the details of the control, is quite relaxing. But many will dare to increase the difficulty of the AI, to put the damage system to the maximum and fiddling with the adjustments of the turn and the brake assist system to favour the skid while at the same time the driving becomes more cumbersome.
History of rallies
The structure of the campaign is temporary, picking up a relatively fictitious and wacky story of the rally over the years that is told in tournament captions and car descriptions. It proposes us to complete rally seasons in six decades: the 60s, 70s and 80s, group B, group S and group A, moments in which the manufacture of the cars took giant steps that cause driving in one and another category differ markedly. In each category there are six seasons, most of them made up of four stages, although there are others with more and fewer stages, and even that include several consecutive seasons in the same block.
Throughout the race mode, we will run in 60 stages in Finland, Sardinia, Norway, Japan and Germany, but not all the tracks are at the same level: there are very interesting ones, with a very pronounced verticality, with dangerous curves that take us through of a town or with endless straights in the middle of a frozen lake; but others are lazier. The problem is that although the differences between the stages of one country and another are very clear, the routes of the same country are very similar visually and playable.
Visual and playable minimalism
Fortunately, you will have more opportunities to do so. On the one hand, there are the daily and weekly challenges with global leaderboards, where absolute control of each curve and the skidding of each vehicle will surely be necessary to appear in a slightly shameful position of the ranking. On the other hand, there is free driving, perfect for practising and relaxing. These are several completely open stages where we can get off the road without problems, set the time of day and simply try skidding or driving for no reason, collecting the letters “RALLY” scattered around the stage, looking for the cassette tapes and the points that They show us beautiful places, perfect to activate a photo mode quite complete.
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