art of rally

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 is how much the cars actually differ from each other. Even cars within the same group can require a different approach, and switching from two-wheel drive to four-wheel drive changes things considerably. With four-wheel drive you can often power your way through situations where you'd otherwise have to brake and carefully work your way through them. The weather matters too. Rain isn't just there to make the stage look pretty — you really have to adjust your driving or you'll be visiting the local forest very quickly. The learning curve is also really satisfying. You gradually start understanding how much speed you can carry, how to throw the car around, when you can get away with being aggressive and when the game is about to punish your confidence. There are a few things I don't like, though. The worst offender is definitely the fences around some parts of the tracks. Hitting them just doesn't look or feel right. The car is often brutally punished and brought almost to a complete stop when you'd expect a very different collision. It's probably the one thing in the game that genuinely feels like it isn't working as intended. The automatic reset system can also be frustrating. Go too far off the route and you'll be reset onto the track with a +5 second penalty, which is perfectly reasonable in theory. The problem is that the boundary sometimes feels completely random. One moment you're halfway across the countryside and the game doesn't care. The next you put your headlights slightly outside a tight hairpin and suddenly: nope, +5 seconds for you. Luckily it doesn't happen constantly, but when it does, it can definitely make your blood boil a little. Shortcuts are possible, but because you never quite know when the game will decide you've gone too far, they're often not worth the gamble. And then there's the anti-lag system on the Group A cars... In real life, anti-lag can sound absolutely epic. Here, every time I release the throttle it sounds like a drunk death metal drummer has been invited into the car to perform a three-second solo. Some people probably love it. I don't. 😂 It's especially strange because the rest of the game's audio is so good. Eventually my ears mostly got used to it, but considering how often you're off the throttle in rallying, our drunk drummer and I spent quite a lot of time together. I played with the standard difficulty settings for both AI and damage, and I actually made it through the entire game without using a single restart. That definitely doesn't mean I won every stage — far from it — but I did manage to finish every rally in first place overall. That difficulty suited me perfectly because I mainly wanted to work my way through the groups and unlock everything, but anyone looking for a tougher challenge might want to bump the difficulty up fairly early. Now I'm looking forward to going back to the earlier groups and seeing how much I've improved, trying more of the cars I've unlocked, and hammering out the remaining achievements. It's also just a surprisingly relaxing game. I played the whole thing with a controller and it felt fantastic. I'm normally not much of a controller guy — I can barely hold the damn thing — but for art of rally it just clicked. **8.5/10. Highly recommended.** Now excuse me, I have some Group 2 cars to throw sideways into a Finnish forest.

peak

Mi juego de coches favorito para jugar con mando. Un juego con alma, con referncias a Initial D y al mundo del rally. Y pensar que lo ha hecho un tio solo... Cómpralo si puedes.

very relaxing

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 weather condition. While you can always drive a time attack, a lot of focus and functionality is definitely centered on the rallies with this flawed generator, plus you need to play through the campaign to unlock cars and bonus liveries, and I can see someone getting frustrated by this.

Плюсы: - Классная графика - Классный музон и саунддизайн - Много разнообразных машинок - Классная атмосфера с вайбами ралли 90-х и чем то отдаленно напоминающая колин макрей - Хорошая оптимизация (~200 фпс на фулл хд на макс графике) Минусы: - Для меня главный минус это дизайн уровней. Очень много однообразных трасс и крутых поворотов на этих трассах. Нет ощущения что ты несешься вперед на высокой скорости - Низкая дальность прорисовки карты. Текстуры в виде деревьев и всего остального прогружаются прямо на ходу на максимальных настройках графики. Это раздражает - Далее, управление. Я играл на геймпаде, управление какое-то ватное, машины ощущаются тяжелыми, к физике надо привыкать. Почему то в той же гта 5 и то управление куда более отзывчивое. И вариация управлений на разных машинах там тоже больше. Не сказать что тут управление плохое, но и сильно много удовольствия от него я если честно не получил - Не очень хорошо нарисованные тени. Порой кажется что машина парит в воздухе, особенно на трассах с дождем Итог: 7/10. Кайфанул? Да. Сильно? Средне. Свою цену с 50% скидкой оправдывает? Да. Игра примерно на 15 часов в режиме сюжетного прохождения с редкими перезапусками

this fun as hell