#DRIVE Rally Preview

Every now and then it’s nice to take a step back from the more serious sim-racing I fill my time with and drop into a title that aims to inject a little more arcade-style fun into proceedings. #DRIVE Rally aims to do just that. From its cartoonish art style to the various co-drivers quips as you race, there’s no denying that this is setting up for fun rather than frustration.

Developed by a small team from Poland, the game hearkens back to the arcade racers of the ‘90s. Take the driving of SEGA Rally Championship and blend it with a colourful cast of characters and locations, and you’re pretty much there in terms of what #DRIVE Rally offers. There are a couple of championships you can take part in each with its own respective co-driver telling you what’s coming up on the track. Sometimes though, your co-driver can be a little long in the tooth with their musings about things unrelated to the tree you’re barreling towards at 100mph, leaving you bereft of the information you need in order to avoid it. But for the most part, their outbursts are a fun reminder of where this game has taken inspiration from. There are also time trial races, where it’s you against the leaderboard — but there’s no direct multiplayer to speak of, not yet at least.

Currently, the game is set across four locations in different biomes covering your usual rally-style affair; dirt tracks through forests in Germany, through dunes of snow in Finland, red-tinged canyons of the U.S, and lastly, through the rainforests and plains of Southeast Asia. On these courses, you can take a plethora of different models of cars, each with their own preset variants. You can also customise your own variant of the cars, picking and choosing different parts from bumpers, hoods, exhausts, spoilers, and more.

The cars handle well and the different models each have slightly different characteristics in their handling so that they don’t feel like only the model changes over the same handling. The only real gripe is the lack of any feedback when you hit the handbrake; There’s no sliding noise from the tyres, or any additional rumble from the controller, it just feels like you’re going a little slower and slightly more sideways than usual.

The music evokes a sensation of nostalgia, feeling like it was ripped directly from the unreleased archives of some late nineties euro-dance act. I just wish there was more of it — the loop that plays repeats pretty quickly, and unfortunately ends up losing its spark and had me reaching for the options menu to mute it before too long.

But both of those minor gripes also point towards something I’ve noticed during my time with the game in that the developers are incredibly active in dealing with issues and improvements to the game as well as setting out what’s to come on their roadmap, including new locations and cars — having released multiple patches and other updates since I got hold of it.

Overall, #DRIVE Rally is scratching that ‘90s arcade rally racer itch, being easier to pick up and put down than trying to get an old copy of SEGA Rally running on some decrepit hardware, and should be on your radar if you find yourself reaching for a pound coin when you see a steering wheel and a seat in your local arcade...