The recent peak of the contrarian minimalist video game. it's weird that I never knew the differences between V engines until I played this game and didn't even have to touch any parts of the car
Perhaps that is the greatest virtue of Art of Rally, it makes you understand and become aware of the nuances of driving, the history of the rally summarized through this plastic model in the shape of a video game. It's arcade and it's simulation too, but nothing about to choose parts of the car and no driving action type mindless you just need precise math with your fingers and refined touch, just that.

Art of Rally begins with a Buddha rising from the ground to encourage players. It will take patience and determination to become a rally master, the Buddha says before disappearing into the earth. This encounter sets the tone for a truly special racing journey, one that leads to enjoyment and tranquility but only if players are willing to learn and overcome their rage. Which is initially easier said than done. Although the gorgeous, minimalistic aesthetic and unusually removed camera read as an arcade experience, one crash-riddled race will reveal the far more intricate, physics based mechanics that underlie the game.

Considering Art of Rally’s celebration of rally and evangelism for the sport, which it is very successful in conveying, it would be nice to provide beginners with any sort of tutorialization considering the difficulty of its mechanics. Granted, it offers free roam to practice and ghosts of top players to attempt to learn from, but this is rarely enough to clarify mistakes that players are making. Thankfully though, the game encourages players to simply progress through the campaign seasons and is uninterested in if they win them, dolling out unlockables for refraining to use restarts rather than for wins. And the joy comes from this slow progress, going from season to season becoming slightly more familiar with the courses, techniques, physics, and philosophy behind rally. Eventually players will find themselves winning more and in control, at which point Art of Rally is simply a delight to play. The final couple seasons of the campaign almost feel like a victory lap, offering players fun cars to match their increased skill.

This is not to say that there are not frustrations that persist until the end. The camera angle, while novel, makes reading the terrain difficult. This could have been solved by any sort of co-driver indicators, but those are fully absent as well. Add in some, at times, wonky collision and jump physics as well as occasion frame dips at inopportune times and the game can become infuriating. But that is not majority of the Art of Rally nor does it meaningfully diminish the highs of when you get in the groove, flying past the beautiful country side to the vibes of the perfect synthwave soundtrack. It becomes so easy to slip into the trance of the game yet it holds up to the alert competitiveness of time trials. Whatever players are looking for, Art of Rally’s journey will bring them someplace special if they are willing to persevere.

I don't think many people would argue that one of the main things a racing game needs to get right is the feel of the car, and art of rally gets this spot on and driving around each area in free roam is a great way to get to grips with the handling model.

It's a shame that main single player element kind of gets in the way of that. The game imparts a zen like attitude on you at the very start so finishing anywhere on the rostrum will unlock new cars, and not using all your restarts will guarantee new decals which is very much appreciative, but this is held back by progression through each tier becomes slower and slower as the years go on. Less zen, more tedium by attrition.

The courses themselves are fun to drive though, with enough differing elements on each tack to keep you on your toes - although even in this fantasy land, there are a few too many long straight-hairpin-long straight-hairpin etc. sections for my liking. However while the environments look great thanks to the art style, they only really differ in flora and fauna (or tanks in the case of the German courses) and as such they mostly lack an identity on their own. Added to that, the courses are all selected randomly for each 'season' which feels like a misstep that makes it a lot harder to learn the courses and how the different cars at your disposal work on them.

I'm probably sounding a bit harsh on the game but I think that's because I think there was something truly special that could have been done here. I hope we see another game in the genre from Funselektor which can iron out these kinks.

Looks and sounds good and the physics and gameplay work surprisingly well in the style they were going for it. But it still felt off somehow and it took me a few hours to pinpoint why:
The tracks are too wide and samey. You will almost always have a path that is 4 to 5 cars wide and it never changes during a stage which feels very unnatural. Art of Rally course design is more akin to a Hot Wheels track with different background and trees and not rally stages in individual countries with their own distinct features. The track width also makes the game play weirdly safe and unexciting, totally different from expectations for a rally hommage to the wildest era the sport has seen.
The career mode is also more of a glorified time attack playlist with hardly anything interesting going on in terms of progression or unlocks.
It's overall alright and if you are looking for a chill time attack racer to vibe with you can do worse.

𝟕,𝟒/𝟏𝟎
A minimalistic game with a nice, though not outstanding, picture.
This is something like a purely gameplay hardcore platformer where you have to jump right into the timings, it’s the same here, only from the world of races, you have to meditatively drive, not really accelerating, and turning into a perfect calm timing so as not to fly off to the side of the road.
The music is simple, retro style.

Subscribe on my Steam Curators page:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41977550/

Much like Absolute Drift, this a frustration game. You have to get good before the game is fun, keep that in mind.

As somewhat of a sequel, this game nailed everything I wanted to see. It took Absolute Drifts driving style and applied it to rally stages from around the world. A huge plus.

The cars on offer aren’t branded or anything like that, but the attention to detail and documenting of rallying culture / history is great from a little indie title. I see Lancia, Ford, VW etc all referenced.

The locations (and subsequent changes in track conditions) are beautifully done. Each location feeling unique (with the dual sense literally feeling unique in vibration patterns), true to it’s real life location and different from all the other tracks.

Overall a niche game for enthusiasts of psuedo procedurally generated tracks, rallying and mechanically challenging games.

[Verse 1]
Reluctantly crouched at the starting line
Engines pumping and thumping in time
The green light flashes, the flags go up
Churning and burning, they yearn for the cup
They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank
Fuel burning fast on an empty tank
Reckless and wild, they pour through the turns
Their prowess is potent and secretly stern
As they speed through the finish, the flags go down
The fans get up and they get out of town
The arena is empty except for one man
Still driving and striving as fast as he can
[Pre-Chorus]
The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
And long ago somebody left with the cup
But he's driving and striving and hugging the turns
And thinking of someone for whom he still burns

[Chorus]
He's going the distance
He's going for speed
She's all alone (All alone)
All alone in her time of need
Because he's racing and pacing and plotting the course
He's fighting and biting and riding on his horse
He's going the distance

[Post-Chorus]
Yah!

[Verse 2]
No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no wine
He's haunted by something he cannot define
Bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse
Assail him, impale him with monster-truck force
In his mind, he's still driving, still making the grade
She's hoping in time that her memories will fade
'Cause he's racing and pacing and plotting the course
He's fighting and biting and riding on his horse

[Pre-Chorus]
The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
And long ago somebody left with the cup
But he's striving and driving and hugging the turns
And thinking of someone for whom he still burns

[Chorus]
'Cause he's going the distance
He's going for speed
She's all alone (All alone)
All alone in her time of need
Because he's racing and pacing and plotting the course
He's fighting and biting and riding on his horse
He's racing and pacing and plotting the course
He's fighting and biting and riding on his horse
He's going the distance
He's going for speed
He's going the distance

[Outro]
Hey
Hey
Hey
Oh, hey
Hey
Oh no
So sad, alright
Oh no
Oh no
No, no

At it's best, Art of Rally is a glorious homage to the glory days of the motorsport. It sucked me in immedietly, with it's gorgeous aesthetic and fantastic physics/car handling forming an excellent base for a game. A Tribute that truly captures the madness and zen-like state of blasting a car down a road at the edge of control.

But the more I played AOR, and the further I was torn from that first hour of pure zen, the more the cracks show. The main issue is the stages. Rally games have always suffered with stages, because realistically you'd want about a Thousand Kilometres of Road in every game, which is untennable, But AOR really suffers in both quantity and quality.

There's about 30 unique stages in the game (and a lot of reverse versions). That might have been enough, but they are also all extremely short and there's maybe one good one in the entire game. And considering the career mode will have you go through about 25 courses in every class of car, repeats happen thick and fast and by the time you've even reached the group B cars, which are the most popular and a selling point of the game - I was already tired of them.

And the stage design shows some really baffling decisions - whilst each of the 5 location's aesthetic has been gloriously adapted, the nature of their roads has most certainly not been, and it's incredibly frustrating. Every location ends up feeling the same when in real life there's so much more variety and soul to the tracks themselves. Finland is a particular shame, as it's claustrophobic, tree lined roads in real life feel exactly like every other road in this entire game. Different coutries' rally stages are literally like mario worlds in real life and somehow the artsy videogame version makes them makes them all the same.

There's also a mind-boggling choice to keep the road surface at the same, incredibly wide width for every road in the entire game, and there's a severe lack of variety in terms of corner choice. One of the japan stages feels like it has 10 2nd-gear hairpin sweepers in a row and it's remarkably boring. How does an artsy, arcade rally videogame have less interesting roads than the ones outside my house?

Eventually, the stage design's blandness broke through my sheer love of the core aesthetic and feel. And it's a real shame. There's such a love of a lost era here, and it's just one thing away from working.

Looks simple but is actually a really nicely tuned driving game with a nice mellow soundtrack. Initially challenging as it's hard to monitor your speed and the undunlation of the track but once you get into it, nailing a drift is so satisfying and you genuinely feel a connection with how fast you're driving. Going through a stage smoothly is an excellent feeling.

So close to a 5 this one, just felt a bit baggy towards the end of the campaign with the 20-stage seasons. If possible I'd have had the same number of races but maybe one more short 'super-season' at the end; the Group A cars were just about doable for me in terms of speed but going past the limit one last time would have been a great way to polish things off - like the Lakeland stage/Stratos in Sega Rally.

I grew up playing the likes of Skidmarks, Overdrive and other awesome top-down racers on the Amiga.

If you showed me this game in 1995 I would have wet my pants, but even today the deep physics and minimalist graphics are a treat.

With so much love poured into the game it is hard not to love it back.

Until you overdo it, fly off the road and hit a tree.

No Forza rewind to cushion your delicate ego; this is the real deal: respect the road, feel and fear the speed kind of game.

Great stuff.

An attempt to turn rally into a form of meditation that happens to also be a game—and with beautiful results. Rally is a motorsport and, as such, is made of very physical elements— fragile humans in hard helmets and full body protective gear get crammed inside small cars with large loud engines and grippy tires. And they carve paths over a variety of rugged terrain in all manner of weather conditions as fast as they can manage. And, hopefully, faster than all the other teams. Rally is a form of competition between human beings (which we take part in via machines we control). But the more fundamental conflict at the heart of rally is a struggle against the physical terrain itself: tires fighting against a brute geometry made of tarmac and gravel, dirt and mud, snow and ice.

The art of rally manages to distill this fundamental conflict of physical forces into a quiet yet intensely focused digital experience. The digital distillation is composed of almost abstract shapes, brilliant colors and simulated outdoor lighting, iceberg deep virtual physics, and patterns of controller inputs. And the game we are left with feels utterly incredible. The handling model and the way it changes with the terrain is something like a wonder of gamefeel.

The core offering is a career mode where the player competes in a sequence of tournaments organized chronologically through different years. The courses have their charm and are visually reminiscent of prototypical landscapes associated with a particular country. A minimalistic (and occasional whimsical) history of “the golden age” of rally is told as the player works their way through the years. This is not so detailed—and I at least would find it less interesting if it was— but it provides the right flavor. The career mode can be plenty challenging for newcomers and gets increasingly demanding as you move through the tournaments and unlock more powerful vehicles. Free roam locales present a way to get the feel for a vehicle, an area, and some tricky obstacles in a very low stakes environment. The time trial modes, online leaderboards, and daily challenges offer the pursuit of endless perfection for the aspirational player. At the end of the day though, the game is a set of courses and a collection of vehicles. And that’s a good thing. It’s a set of stunning tracks each of which offers a unique challenge and is essentially an opportunity to enter a state of flow as you attend to the carefully crafted virtual sensations. Which virtual sensations you experience depends on the track itself, the weather conditions, and which vehicle you choose. The feel resonates outward from the controller and is continuously created through the simple but demanding task of guiding your car through the track. It is something like an art. And a very demanding one. And one you can get utterly lost in for vast stretches of time as the excellent soundtrack fills the air. And, unlike the art of archery, the art of rally can be practiced in the comfort of your living room.

It feels like racing games have sometimes fallen out of the general conversation surrounding the medium of videogames (if they were ever a part of such conversation in the first place.). The idea behind the genre is simple, intuitive, familiar. Travel from point A to point B. Drive from here to there—as fast as you can. Maybe it all seems too simple to be worthy of discussion. But the devil’s in the details as they say—and, when you get the details right, all the magic is too. That’s what we can witness in the art of rally— the developer has nailed something small, something focused, but done it so well that it stands above many games with much loftier ambitions. And it might take something like the art of rally to get the less automotively enthused to see that this genre and the experience it can provide is very much worth talking about—something stripped down to the essentials, the sheer mechanics, something torn out of the usual commercial context and freed from pricey brand names and energy drink logos.

Just how exactly you get from point A to point B as quickly as possible is what makes these things special. And that can be hard to even see and harder still to describe—how it works, why it’s interesting, how exactly it stands out from others in the same genre. It takes time and experience to recognize the elegance of the systems, the interesting challenges the courses present, and the opportunity for mastery that they provide. Spend a few hours internalizing the art of rally’s controls and the basic handling and you start to get a glimpse of just how incredible this is. But there’s a sense that this is just the beginning.
Games like this can be enjoyed by anyone, but maybe can only be fully appreciated by the players who become true masters of this art. We might be able to approximate this sort of insight if we could just pretend this was the one cartridge we had all summer long. If I ever reach that higher plane of understanding, I may have much more to say or there will be nothing left to say at all.

i finlandesi sono dei pazzi furiosi e sono un dono che qualche dio caotico ci ha concesso con nostro grande bucio di culo.
questo è un gioco che riesce a trasmettere l'amore e lo sbullonamento dei folli per il rugby (rally) a chi come il medesimo non se ne sbatte nemmeno un millimetro di minchia, e penso che sia un pregio riuscire ad essere così sinceri e appassionati e contemporaneamente semplici e trasparenti. te piace sgasare clicca su sta macchina nun te piace de sgasa e allora ci clicchi lo stesso e dopo trenta ore di guida tra i tornanti giapponesi penserai ah però non è così male scatafasciarsi tra le verdi valli degli antichi samurai della famiglia stronzugawa, ah però forse ho imparato come fare a sleppare tra le curve strette dei paesini dei maledetti sardi, ah guarda questa macchina fa un suono che mi piace di più di quella che ho comandato prima. insomma dio cane stai vivendo una situazione di apprendimento informale che tu lo voglia o no come con i gatti hai il verme nel cervello e hai imparato dei fan fackts inutilissimi che ti porterai nella tomba, bravo coglione, gioca a questo stracazzo di gioco dai, simulatore dei miei coglioni (scusate mi sono stancato di scrivere)