Rally Arcade Classics is a £15.99 game that, at the very least, looks strikingly similar to Sega's seminal off-road racer, Sega Rally. With a gorgeous 90s Aesthetic dialled in, 40+ cars to unlock from across the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s and 48 stages to plough through now thanks to the 1.27 Chase & Precision update, there is a lot of bang for your buck here, but is it worth your time?
Gorgeous scenery, great-looking cars
Beginning the game, you have five modes ahead of you, including the initial requirement of working your way through a licensing area. With some 60 licenses to bag and 180 stars to earn, there is a mammoth task ahead of you before you even set foot in the tour, rally, chrono, arcade or events sections.
The early licenses require you to hit checkpoints as fast as possible to gain bronze (one star), silver (two stars), or gold (three stars) status against the clock. Alternatively, you might need to drift or perform some rally-related escapade to grab those stars. Each license stands on the shoulders of the previous, so gaining enough stars in C grade will unlock B, then A1, A2, and then ultimately S1 and S2 for the top-tier drivers.
There are a total of 508 in-game trophies (19 PSN ones too) and 1280 stars to collect throughout your journey, and those collectable stars can be used to unlock new difficulties and tracks or purchase new cars, which, although unlicensed and with no liveries, look recognisable as their real-life counterparts. There are a staggering 44 cars in total, ranging from small-engined front-wheel-drive runabouts to flat-out all-wheel-drive supercars; there is something for everyone, and the progression cycle is tough but exceedingly rewarding.
Starting in Finland, you have the cool, crisp, fresh environments composed of forests and lakes. Catalunya in Spain is a more mountainous region, with lush greenery and wetter, muddier conditions, whereas Greece is far drier, more of an arid and harsh environment with open vistas and dry surfaces to skid around. Lastly, Monte Carlo offers the most heavily varied and curated tracks with the tightest turns and hairpin-like corners.
Time of day and weather also play into how your races fare, with some really nice sunny and nighttime variations, slippery thunderstorms, and my most hated: foggy weather. The lighting and scenery are consistently nice-looking, but I noticed that your headlights don't cast shadows on anything other than solid brick walls, so a little bit of the realism feels lost when fanging it around courses at night.
Graphically hits the brief & is very challenging too
Rally Arcade Classics' arcade, tour, chronos and event modes are where the meat of the game resides once you have earned your stripes and gotten through the licensing phases.
Arcade alone contains 16 challenges that are dependent on your licensing situation and the cars or stars obtained, and gradually puts you through challenges with the level of car you have unlocked, going from the slowest beginner models up to the most rapid pro spec cars.
Tour mode contains six chapters, each packed with time attack, drift and versus challenges, and "rally" opens up the four main locales, each with six difficulty levels for pitting yourself in either regular cars or rally-specific models.
Chrono is a great mode to sink your teeth into and get to grips with all of the cars without needing to unlock any. I really enjoyed feeling the difference between the "Startos" (Stratos) and the "Kopper" (Cooper), "Wolf" (WV Golf), or "Paigot" (come on now), you get to toy with at the start. The faster cars include the Seilka, Collora, Esworld, Suforc and the wonderfully titled "Mr Bang Sti", which is plainly a Subaru Impreza.
Everything can seem quite daunting at first, but practice really does make perfect, as you punch it and keep trying to skim off those seconds across each stage. There is a handy bar at the top of the screen that indicates your progress against the clock, with a silver depleting bar showing you're total progress, green that you're ahead of time, or red that you're trailing behind.
One mistake can cost you the entire race, so you need to be in control of your vehicle and know the basics of drifting, and how to brake to take every type of corner or hazard that you'll encounter. Luckily, you have your trusty co-pilot barking out "easy left" or "hard right" for example. I found that generally you can floor it and take easy corners without breaking, medium corners require a single brake pump, and hard corners can be taken by either a series of feathered braking, or one swift handbrake turn. Using these basic rules, I managed to fire on all cylinders and conquer a lot of courses with ease, that was until I got to Monte Carlo, where the tight turns absolutely rocked me, and I had to strategise a lot more.
In one event, I remember finding myself 8 seconds behind the leader with just one last stage to go, so I floored it and made sure I paid attention to the split times given to me all the way around. I gradually clawed back "-2" per quarter and scraped through just 300ths of a second ahead of the previous leader. It's tense and engaging, especially if you have something to lose, so cranking up the difficulty and challenging yourself is where the endorphins really flow!
Weekly and monthly events also add a layer of freshness at regular intervals, pitting you against the world with a specific track, condition and car for you to compete with. I really like this as it gives players something to look forward to each week. It's unbelievable that this game is only £15.99, really.
No splitscreen or real multiplayer modes
Rally Arcade Classics contains so much content and offers enough real, engaging challenges that it's hard not to recommend. On top of all this, you also have an online leaderboard with really serves to ramp up your explosive passion when it comes to besting those other faceless players online. I repeatedly hit retry so that I could put my best times up against the world, and honestly, I managed to go from 1400-ish down to the top 200-300 within a matter of 3-4 attempts, but getting any better than the top 200's I found extremely challenging; there are some really good players out there already!
On that note, I would also have loved to see a proper online versus mode, or even split screen.
Sure, rally car races in real life only pit one car against another's time, and when it comes to video games, I would imagine this format makes for an easier, quicker project to design, create, and deploy because there is no need for fancy netcode or optimisation for multiple cars on track, but it's something that could have been fantastic.
Without multiplayer, it essentially boils down to ghost racing with no official liveries and notably no damage system either, which puts an extremely small dampener on things when we look at the bigger picture. We have to remember that this is not a £60 game, it's not even a £30 game, it's a steal at £15.99 with weekly/monthly updates to boot!
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