The year is 1995, it's Saturday morning and you are playing Sega Rally on your Saturn. You have the whole weekend ahead of you. No homework to do. Pure bliss. These were the heydays of the arcade racer, but at some point we lost our way. By the time the Xbox 360 had been released, driving games focused more on realism, car customisation, story and real life locations. Sure there are a lot of great and revolutionary racing games on the console. Grid brought the excellent rewind feature, Test Drive unlimited brought a beautiful open world Hawaiian island, Forza 2 created an almost perfect racing package, all of these changed the way we view racing games. In this regard, Sega Rally Revo stood out like a sore thumb. A pure arcade rally game, with no damage, no customisation, no real life tracks. It didn't go down well with reviewers and in my opinion has been severely misjudged. SRR is an excellent classic arcade racer and a must play for all retro arcade racing fans. For a start the racing is smooth and competitive. You take part in a selection of championships, 3 races for each event, against 5 AI opponents. The difficulty of these opponents cannot be changed and it does get really tough. The AI will attack you aggressively at corners and jump at you if you make even the smallest mistake. It's a hard but fair style of racing. There are times when you have managed to pick up speed and are ready to overtake the pack but the car in front of you swerves right into your path causing you to lose all momentum. At the same time, sometimes when you make a mistake the AI will come crashing into the back of you sending you flying forward and able to hold onto your position. It's both frustrating and incredibly satisfying at the same time. You have 6 sets of tracks, based of different locations and track types. Arctic has snow and volcano ash on the track, and the icy roads will have you skidding. Safari tracks are dusty which affects your vision. The Canyon tracks get very muddy with huge water puddles that slow you right down. Every track feels different in terms of the feedback from the road and it's a real nice feature which I much prefer to having a huge number of tracks that feel the same. Similarly, while there are not a huge number of cars in the game, each one handles differently and you will have favourites based on how they handle the terrain. As mentioned earlier, you are not bogged down by car customisation or autobraking. You have 2 options, auto or manual gears and a road or off-road set up. It keeps things simple and focuses the game on the fun part, racing. What makes the game really standout is the graphics and the deformable terrain. This game looks incredible. It's not something that I really pay attention to in games but even for a 2007 release, it's one of the best looking games on the console. The car models are nice and the lighting works well, but it's the tracks and the environment which really standout. This is probably due to the aforementioned deformable terrain. As you race around the circuits, the tracks themselves are affected by your racing lines. This could be simple like cutting lines in the snow to make it more compact and creating a harder more grippy surface for racers behind you, or more impressively changing the formation and area of puddles of water in the road as you carve through the mud. It really changes the tracks every single race and keeps things fresh and exciting. It looks beautiful too. I love getting my car all caked up in mud before driving through a puddle and washing it all off. Every time I play this game I enjoy it a bit more and I can't sing it's praises enough. So is it perfect? Well no. I can understand people being frustrated by its difficulty. A big crash can really mess you up for a whole race and the AI is brutal. The small number of tracks may be a turn off for some, but each race plays out differently each time so I have never found it an issue. One minor issue I have with the game is that you always start off at the back of the pack, no matter where you finished in the previous race, but this is mere nitpicking. I'm an official SRR fan boy now. There is nothing like it on the console and it is a must have for any 360 collector.