#DRIVE Rally is a rally game developed and published by the indie team Pixel Perfect Dude. The game will be released in Early Access on Steam, GOG.com and the Epic Games Store on 25th September 2024.
Rally games are not just racing games, rally is pure passion! Thanks to a small Polish indie studio made up of Dariusz, Pawel, Damian and Lukasz, we have #DRIVE Rally. This studio is also famous for #DRIVE, a masterpiece on smartphones and Nintendo Switch that has been played by 25 million players worldwide.
Passionate is also who’s writing this review, I’m Fabrizio and I’ve loved rally games since childhood. Since SEGA Rally on arcade cabinets and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 on PSOne to Dirt 2.0, I love rally games. Even I hug more trees than prizes.
#DRIVE Rally: Let’s start engines
#DRIVE Rally is an addicting and simple arcade rally game. At the first start you have to choose between Championship or Quick Race. When playing Quick Race, you can choose the car, change its appearance and choose a track. To get a new car and new parts you need money, which can be earned by winning races.
The tracks are divided into 4 regions (Dry Crumbs, Holzberg, Revontuli and Vinh Vang). Each region has 24 tracks. The regions are inspired by places in the real world, and when you play Quick Race, your co-pilot will come from the region you choose, so if you choose Dry Crumbs, your co-pilot will be a real cowboy.
The Championship mode is a bit different. In this mode, you will choose one of the four teams available to you and you will be able to watch your team grow up. Each car has three different performance classes: CL, RS and XR, each class being more powerful than the other.
The championship is divided into four races for each car and class. Each time you complete all four races you will unlock a new car, when all the cars from one class are unlocked you will unlock a new car from the upper class. The car will also be available in Quick Race when you unlock it in Championship mode.
Left 2, Right square!
#DRIVE Rally is a good game thanks to its simplicity. The game is realised with a low-poly graphics, which combined with the art style and the arcade gameplay makes the game very fun.
Since there is no collision damage to encourage players to drive correctly, hitting fences and barriers gives a variable time penalty, cutting excessively gives a 3 second penalty.
Even though it is an arcade game, the handling of the cars changes depending on the surface, traction and class of the car. An XR 4WD car will have more grip on snow than a 2WD CL car.
The global leaderboard, which allows you to compare your time with other people playing the game, is a very addictive feature.
The photo mode has different settings and allows you to add stickers and frames, that’s awesome. Unfortunately, I have not found where the game saves photos taken with photomode, luckily there is an option to remove the UI so you can take screenshots using the Steam interface.
One flaw I found in the game is the lack of fine-tuning controls. If you want to play with a steering wheel, you will find the default dead zone very uncomfortable. Also, the quotes from the co-pilots are a little cringey.
Despite these shortcomings, the game is very good and runs very smoothly even on low-spec hardware (45-55 fps medium settings on the Iris Xe 96EU).
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