art of rally

5 second penalty to Ocon

rally

I feel like that if you want a game [b]just about driving one-on-one with the track and mastering this nontrivial act[/b], then [i]art of rally[/i] is a pretty good option. It eschews the grittiness of a lot of rally racers, on top of the pacenotes, but in turn you get a lot of stages that are quite beautiful (together with some collectathon free-roam maps), together with the developer's humorous and amusing touches. [hr][/hr] There are some caveats that might affect whether you want to pick it up, though. 1. The game eschews grittiness in favour of a lo-fi style, but this means that graphical issues become more pressing. In particular, [i]art of rally[/i] has some issues with pop-in, even on the highest settings, which is especially bad in the Sardinia stages, as the colour of crops' LOD model is a lot brighter than the full-detail model. 2. The campaign's season and rally generator doesn't [i]feel[/i] very random. You can easily get a situation where you, say, get Finland in two seasons in a row, and during the individual rallies you [b]very often[/b] have a situation where after driving a stage you drive its reverse variant immediately afterwards, sometimes in the same exact wea…

I've now "completed" art of rally after about 18 hours. Around 15 of those were spent playing through all the groups, from Group 2 all the way up to the final Group A, while the rest was mostly me driving around in free roam hunting collectibles for achievements. And I put "completed" in quotation marks because honestly, it feels more like the game starts now. **8.5/10 — Brilliant little rally game.** The game looks great in a really cozy way, the car handling is excellent, and the sound is top notch. The cars in particular sound fantastic. I actually turned the music off after a while, not because the music is bad — it's great — but because I wanted to hear the cars even more. The maps are also excellent, and there are plenty of them. I bought the Australia DLC pretty early on and thought that was a great addition as well. There are enough maps already, but I definitely wouldn't say no to more, even as paid DLC. Finishing all the groups took me around 15 hours and unlocked all the cars and liveries, but there's still a lot left for me to do. There are plenty of cars I haven't properly tried yet and I still have achievements to hunt down. One of my favorite things…

peak

Great fun