Instead you get a clear view of the road ahead, no need for pace notes or directions and you can take in the beautiful landscapes around you. That works a treat because you are never left guessing the direction of your car and where the track will be going. Art of Rally does this by allowing a variety of camera angles and by keeping you in view with a circular binocular like hotspot should you disappear behind trees or buildings. Aside from WRC Powerslide, this isometric-like top down perspective hasn’t been used a lot in recent years and its because it is difficult to pull off. Here, they take the same view and place it in a vibrant alternative history of rally driving. That game took a slanted top down perspective and applied it a minimalist drift game. It looks cute but you’ll be spinning off in no time!Īrt of Rally comes from Funselecktor Labs Inc, who previously made the artistic Absolute Drift. Those feels carried with me over the many hours I’ve spent playing Art of Rally over the weekend as my appreciation and fondness for the game grew.
Secondly, this game feels challenging and special. Firstly, whomever did the lighting effects for this game is absolute legend. Art of Rally is consistently engaging and enjoyable the feeling of nailing a particularly tricky chicane, traversing a steep incline without ending up in a ditch, or sliding around a curve sideways is every bit as gratifying as it is in a major racing game release like DIRT, Forza, and the like.From the first moments you get out onto the winding roads of Art of Rally, you are are aware of two things. But it's the handling that keeps you coming back for more. Art of Rally looks great, its flat textures are strangely soothing to behold, despite the trackside objects (apart from silly spectators spilling onto the road) remaining static, and its UI is crisp and clean.
Minor graphical issues – like scenery clipping into animals and other objects, or shadows being drawn in at the last second – do nothing to dampen the mood, either.
You can't help but be pulled into the track snaking out ahead of you, the camera gently pulling away as you gather speed, and woozily zooming in when you're slowly rounding a sharp corner or sweeping bend. Art of Rally's exotic locations are uniformly attractive, whether it's the crisp snowy expanses of Norway the terracotta-hued plains of Kenya with its watching gazelle, elephants, zebras, and giraffes or the temples and bright-pink cherry blossoms of Japan. New cars and liveries are gradually unlocked as you make your way through the seasons of Career Mode, of which there are more than sixty individual rallies to tackle, punctuated by repairs.
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Free roam mode is a wonderfully meditative thing, taking in pretty, low-poly scenery, while tracking down tape cassettes, picturesque viewpoints, and the letters to the word 'RALLY' – all set to an upbeat synth soundtrack. Career Mode is but half the story, however, as Art of Rally's locations also extend to large free-roam environments, where all constraints are removed, and the only objective is to thrash your chosen car around while searching for collectibles. The behaviour of your car is noticeably different when driving across loose gravel as opposed to tarmac or dirt, and, despite appearances, Art of Rally is surprisingly intricate, demanding total concentration during its point-to-point races against the clock. As you progress through the seasons, the years roll by, and you'll move on to new groups of rally car, including the iconic Group B monsters of the 1980s, such as 'The Cozzie SR2' (1985 Ford RS200), 'Das Hammer V2' (1985 Audi Sport quattro S1), and the aptly named 'Il Monster' (a 1984 Lancia 037 Rally), before culminating in the modern rallying classics of the 1990s.Įach vehicle has unique handling and attributes to grapple with, across a variety of different surfaces in iconic rallying locations, like Norway, Finland, Sardinia, Japan, Germany, and Kenya. Inspired by a golden era of rally, Art of Rally's Career Mode begins in 1967, with analogue versions of classic rally cars appropriate to each time period, like 'The Meanie' (a 1965 Mini Cooper) and 'The Esky' (a 1968 Ford Escort).
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