V-Rally 3

Review - Can the latest in the V-Rally series cut it in a crowded market?

Another month, another rally game. Driving around virtual back roads and dirt tracks seems to hold such an appeal to gamers that publishers cannot help themselves but to release rally games with the enthusiasm of conservationists freeing willies. This Chrimbo month sees Atari release the next instalment in the V-Rally series. This time round the series dispenses with any arcade leanings and pushes the gameplay towards a more sim-like experience (don't worry, there's no thought bubbles coming from your co-driver expressing a desire for companionship, food, and a hard sweeping left). So strap yourself in as we take a look and see whether or not you should aim yourself in the direction of V-Rally.

Unsurprisingly this is yet another console port, something which seems to be standard these days for any game that isn't an FPS or RTS title. The developers, Eden, claim to have ramped up the available detail levels and indeed you can put the screen resolution up rather high. The cars themselves are made up of a lot of polygons but as usual the washed out and low-res textures of the console versions have been reproduced here in all their underwhelming glory. There are a large number of particle and weather effects which are quite nice to look at. The way your motor gets all dirty or icy as the stage progresses is a nice touch with sun glare and weather effects all being modelled onto the car. The smudgy textures spoil the look somewhat but looking past the console heritage of the graphics there are some nice touches and attention to detail, such as wildlife gamely sprinting across the course. The sounds are also no more than adequate, but then we don't buy console ports for their looks, we do so for the gameplay.

While driving games may not be my most favoured genre I can powerslide round the Alps as well as the next man, but I found V-Rally 3 to be really rather tricky indeed. The handling is about as forgiving as the next man would be if you spilled Sambuca over his silk shirt and then did his bird. Keeping your car on the track is next to impossible when using a keyboard, the damn thing just jerks from one side of the narrow track to the other. Plugging in my new gamepad I faired somewhat better but was still generating more stress than grip.

After a few hours things settled down a bit and paying close attention to the upcoming road conditions and adjusting your car's settings accordingly helped me feel more in control of things, even if that was maybe an egocentric illusion. You can tweak the suspension, ride height, and stabilizers, and you can alter the gearbox ratio, differentials, and brake bias. My, it wouldn't be a rally game if you couldn't get underneath the bonnet for a quick fiddle, now would it?

V-Rally 3 is very concerned with the precision of your driving abilities and will not let you off with even minor mistakes. When you take into consideration the damage modelling, which is lovingly represented by the graphics engine while convincing you that your rally car is made of balsa wood, this game should only be approached by those who like the rally games on the simmy side. Which makes the instant car-righting key and the simple bar levels of the car tuning seem somewhat misplaced. A total lack of any racing options adds to the realisation that this game is not for the faint-hearted.

You see the whole game is centred around rallies. Rallies with lots of stages and the occasional repair break. You can tackle unlocked courses in a time attack mode but apart from that you can rally, or maybe you would like to rally? The rally mode is quite impressive and tries to do things differently. Mimicking the approach taken by TOCA Race Driver you have to get yourself a team by passing their driving test and then work with that team through a season, trying to score well and thereby improving the teams resources and hence the performance of your car. The interface for all this is simple in a consoley kind of way and the whole enterprise works quite well. The rallies themselves are also varied and take in Finland, France, Germany, England, Sweden and Africa. As your career progresses from season to season, you'll have the chance to drive all kinds of 1.6-liter front-wheel-drive cars and 2.0-liter four-wheel-drive cars for the different manufacturing teams, including Subaru, Mitsubishi and Ford.

So get to the very top and you can compete with some seriously beefy cars, but to be frank I had lost all interest before I reached this point. The handling frustrated the hell out of me and even after a good bit of playing I would pinball round the course with an all too frequent regularity. The complete lack of any multiplayer options was a bit of a shock and helped to lessen the value of the package. While there may well be a very accomplished rally sim hiding somewhere amongst the twists and turns I personally would prefer a rally game with more options, better graphics and a more seasonally generous helping of enjoyment.

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