Usually I'm the kind of person who love shitposty non-serious "review" videos like this, but unexpectedly I'm just left with emptiness and disappointment as the video ends. Maybe I was expecting too much, it's kind of hard to find any review being positive about this game; maybe the game is really that bad, maybe the game is actually fine but everyone use AAA standards on a AA game (rare to see these days). I don't know why I'm so sad seeing how uncharitable most racing game players are towards this game, granted it's one of the most toxic community in gaming but still. Sorry for the rant.
First of all, just as a heads-up: this video can legally be considered "ancient", I don't know why it's become as popular as it has, and I'm especially confused as to what lead to this comment in the first place. Either way, allow me to justify your rant with a rant in exchange. Hopefully that clears up at least my own perspective, here, a few years later: As a game on its own, it's bland as hell, which - in my opinion - is about the worst possible thing a racing game - heck, any game of any sort - can be. The closest I come to feeling an emotion when I think of the time I had this installed (from a definitely-legal source) is the sweet, succulent schadenfreude of "yeah, this feels about right for the type of hill the average GTP member is willing to die on - an uninspired racing SIM (it's important to always put the word SIM in ALL-CAPS to flex on the filthy arcade-liking casuals) that wears a legacy nameplate in the hopes of tricking people into buying it". That, and the two times I laughed at the "edgy opponents" line - a genuine one the first time I read it, and then the fake one when I read it out for the video. To start from somewhere: the "team management" aspect. In case I didn't get the point across in the video, it's the exact same thing as every other racing game that's ever tried to do "GRID but more involved". You hire a mechanic, you get a static stat boost. Which is.. fine, I guess? The problem is that the process isn't fun, the menu is a fucking nightmare, and there's no gameplay to it once you're set. Which is particularly frustrating in hindsight when things like Mechanics from Motorsport Manager and Scientists from Jurassic World Evolution 2 exist in this reality nowadays. Or, if you will, V-Rally 3. We'll get to that. The tracks, then? It's the exact same blend of generic rally stages and rallycross arenas you've seen in any rally game post the original DIRT. Forgettable, the lot of them. The one potential exception is the one I showcased towards the end. As for the advertised "random stages" or whatever they advertised it as? No. Just no. Best case what you've got is Liveroutes from GRID 2 with none of the technical wizardry that makes them work. One day, a level designer sat down with the 3d models of each of the some-amount-of-square-kilometers maps they'd made for the rally mode, plonked down a start and end point, played Snake on that, rinse and repeat about 20 times each, turned it in, collected their paycheck, went home and, presumably, had sex with their partner. In some ways, I respect not doing any one bit more than the design doc tells them to. In other ways, that's just damning the design doc (which must surely exist somewhere) even further. I would've taken a poor man's version of the GT5 track generator over this any day. Said "poor man's version of the GT5 track creator" doesn't even have to be as thoroughly decent as the one in DIRT 4, I could easily make do with less than that. Just.. It'd help if they were actually *random* to start with. This feels like it's treading a grey area lined with the text "false advertising". The car is vaguely in contact with the road in much the same way as I'm vaguely in contact with sanity at this point. This isn't a comment on how SIM or arcade it is, because that hasn't been a particular concern of mine since I got a life about 12 years ago. It's a comment on how it never feels like you have any sort of control. Which is fine for a rally game, if not exactly what you want - as long as said "moments from disaster" feeling comes from piloting multi-ton death traps down gravel roads at some hundreds of kilometers an hour. It's less fine if something feels off when you're just teetering about at low speeds. And, just to return to a point I alluded to, both in the video and online back in the day: they call it V-Rally. V-Rally may be many things, but I'd argue its greatest legacy was that it was always experimenting with something. The original maybe less so, but VR2 had a full-blown track creator tool that, while it didn't let you plop down trackside objects, the course was limited only by your imagination. It's a track editor that, to this day, I'd argue only the more recent TrackMania titles, the dedicated Track Path Editor app for GT6 and, sure, let's throw in the EventLabs from Forza Horizon as well, truly beat. V-Rally 3 had a full-blown career mode with drivers switching teams between seasons, changing the power dynamics of the entire field. One season Ford may be dominant, but then they made a stupid signing and dropped to the back of the pack. Okay, it's not as complex as I make it sound - the AI is somewhat hopeless in terms of consistent pace and if you can just score well enough to get a lot of funding, the invincible car will inevitably come, but there are ideas in there that would be worth experimenting with. Especially if a future game decides it needs to do a lot of unnecessary team management thi- wait a second.. The only thing V-Rally 4 (and it's spiritual predecessor, FlatOut 4) experiments with is "how little game can we make and still somehow score 70% on Steam's All Reviews metric?" (329 user reviews lol) And then, there's the DLC. Do not get me started on the DLC. €5 (when not on sale) for a single car - that you can use in a single discipline - and is far from guaranteed to have more than one paintjob. This isn't acceptable now, and it sure as shit wasn't acceptable five years ago. Remember how people clowned on NFS Heat's McLaren F1 for also being ~€5, despite that one having the ability to change colour, customisation parts to mix and match being an F1 road car, F1 LM, F1 GTR and F1 Longtail, as well as a bunch of new races and some cosmetic thingamabobs that.. yeah, admittedly, I also didn't care much about the cosmetics, but still? How is the NFS Heat McLaren unreasonable and this isn't? Is it just because this is a SIM racer by Daddy KT? It is, isn't it!? All of that is but a slice of how I feel about this game. It so perfectly - yet effortlessly - symbolises just about everything that's been wrong with racing games since about 2010. But oh no, it's a SIM rally racer, it can't be bad, surely you're just wrong and have only ever played Colin McRae Rally (they genuinely thought that was a good argument to my "you can't just call it the same name and expect it to not bite you in the ass" speech. I had to fucking handhold them through the history of the Need For Speed Identity Crisis for *one* of them to get it. I'm amazed more of these people haven't set themselves on fire yet.) I called it a scam in the video. That was my honest, unfiltered opinion of the game then, and it's my honest, unfiltered opinion of the game to this day. Not because it isn't AAA - but because it's a AA title priced and desperately trying to masquerade as a AAAA. And if you want to be perceived as a AAA(A) game, you really shouldn't be surprised when people are expecting a AAA(A) game and levelling AAA(A) criticism at you. I mean absolutely no ill will towards any individual developer when I say this, but, not unlike how the intro segment to the video is probably more effort than was (allowed to be?) put into this game by the developers, this comment (or at least these two combined) is probably the most anyone's been able to actually give a real damn about it. Ever. Which, frankly, is way the fuck more than it deserves. Over and out.
@@rallymorten I appreciate the clarification. Somewhat made me glad that I left my initial comment. I have no idea those kind of -delusional- people that calls this game a SIM exists, definitely agree that this game is minimal effort galore riddled with disgusting monetization surrounding it. I just had somewhat of a mental shock when I posted my original comment, I said it's _"hard to find any review being positive about this game"_ but surprisingly I found one right before I watch your video; it was uploaded to youtube 3 years ago, 2 years after the game came out. Seeing the contrast between your reaction in this video vs this other guy who streamed the game for 40+ minutes, laughing and seemingly having a genuinely good time throughout, was astonishing to say the least. Not really sure which part of the marketing nor the game itself tries to masquerade the game as AAA though. Just like Gravel™, everything just screams _"man, this is so low budget"_ even from a glance. I genuinely think their only real sin is the egregious day 1 DLCs with horrendous prices. Not to be a consoomer or an apologist of games being worse than their predecessor, but clearly racing games are just a pain to make in the current game industry climate with standards that older games never had to deal with; good sounds and good car models along with licensing are just resource pit of hell, indies can't revive the genre thanks to this limitation and AAA are too focused on nickle and diming players while putting in the bare minimum of effort (hence why I'm real lenient on these AA racing games, guess my standards are too low). I never played this game and most likely never will, but what I want to say can easily be summed up to [at least it's not the utter piece of trash that is Grid 2019].
True, game development absolutely is hell, hence the "I mean absolutely no ill will towards any individual developer" part of my reply. My point, as poignantly as I can put it, is that any one part of the Nacon/KT machine could've just *not* bought the dead-for-15-years-at-the-time V-Rally IP, slapped it onto this game with no concern for what people expect given the title, sold egregiously overpriced DLC.. you get my point. If they'd just called it, idunno, "KT-Rally" and otherwise been honest about what to expect, that would've probably been fine, I wouldn't have been (as) vocal about it being BS at any point, and it probably would've sold just as.. some amount of numbers, I guess? All of the above, of course, also being the case for FlatOut 4 and Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. They're pulling this same sort of trick for a third time as I type this comment. If there are people out there who genuinely love and have fun with this game, I'm happy for them. Really, I am. I'm just not one of those people. I'm one of those people who resent it for everything it stands for, on top of IMO not even being a "decent" AA game on its own merit. There's a reason I use clips of deleted scenes from the Ratchet & Clank movie whenever I refer to this or GRID 2019 in videos these days.
Meh, the career really pissed me off, but I really enjoyed the racing. It's probably the most fun I've had in a rally game since Rallisport Challenge. The thing that sets this apart from other SiMuLaTiOn rally games, is that you can rip the handbrake and go full send around pretty much every corner in this game. However I ended up paying $10 for the switch version, and I don't think it's worth much more than that because the campaign is genuinely terrible.
Usually I'm the kind of person who love shitposty non-serious "review" videos like this, but unexpectedly I'm just left with emptiness and disappointment as the video ends.
Maybe I was expecting too much, it's kind of hard to find any review being positive about this game; maybe the game is really that bad, maybe the game is actually fine but everyone use AAA standards on a AA game (rare to see these days).
I don't know why I'm so sad seeing how uncharitable most racing game players are towards this game, granted it's one of the most toxic community in gaming but still.
Sorry for the rant.
First of all, just as a heads-up: this video can legally be considered "ancient", I don't know why it's become as popular as it has, and I'm especially confused as to what lead to this comment in the first place.
Either way, allow me to justify your rant with a rant in exchange. Hopefully that clears up at least my own perspective, here, a few years later:
As a game on its own, it's bland as hell, which - in my opinion - is about the worst possible thing a racing game - heck, any game of any sort - can be.
The closest I come to feeling an emotion when I think of the time I had this installed (from a definitely-legal source) is the sweet, succulent schadenfreude of "yeah, this feels about right for the type of hill the average GTP member is willing to die on - an uninspired racing SIM (it's important to always put the word SIM in ALL-CAPS to flex on the filthy arcade-liking casuals) that wears a legacy nameplate in the hopes of tricking people into buying it".
That, and the two times I laughed at the "edgy opponents" line - a genuine one the first time I read it, and then the fake one when I read it out for the video.
To start from somewhere: the "team management" aspect.
In case I didn't get the point across in the video, it's the exact same thing as every other racing game that's ever tried to do "GRID but more involved". You hire a mechanic, you get a static stat boost. Which is.. fine, I guess?
The problem is that the process isn't fun, the menu is a fucking nightmare, and there's no gameplay to it once you're set. Which is particularly frustrating in hindsight when things like Mechanics from Motorsport Manager and Scientists from Jurassic World Evolution 2 exist in this reality nowadays. Or, if you will, V-Rally 3. We'll get to that.
The tracks, then? It's the exact same blend of generic rally stages and rallycross arenas you've seen in any rally game post the original DIRT. Forgettable, the lot of them. The one potential exception is the one I showcased towards the end.
As for the advertised "random stages" or whatever they advertised it as?
No. Just no.
Best case what you've got is Liveroutes from GRID 2 with none of the technical wizardry that makes them work.
One day, a level designer sat down with the 3d models of each of the some-amount-of-square-kilometers maps they'd made for the rally mode, plonked down a start and end point, played Snake on that, rinse and repeat about 20 times each, turned it in, collected their paycheck, went home and, presumably, had sex with their partner.
In some ways, I respect not doing any one bit more than the design doc tells them to. In other ways, that's just damning the design doc (which must surely exist somewhere) even further. I would've taken a poor man's version of the GT5 track generator over this any day. Said "poor man's version of the GT5 track creator" doesn't even have to be as thoroughly decent as the one in DIRT 4, I could easily make do with less than that. Just.. It'd help if they were actually *random* to start with. This feels like it's treading a grey area lined with the text "false advertising".
The car is vaguely in contact with the road in much the same way as I'm vaguely in contact with sanity at this point.
This isn't a comment on how SIM or arcade it is, because that hasn't been a particular concern of mine since I got a life about 12 years ago. It's a comment on how it never feels like you have any sort of control. Which is fine for a rally game, if not exactly what you want - as long as said "moments from disaster" feeling comes from piloting multi-ton death traps down gravel roads at some hundreds of kilometers an hour. It's less fine if something feels off when you're just teetering about at low speeds.
And, just to return to a point I alluded to, both in the video and online back in the day: they call it V-Rally.
V-Rally may be many things, but I'd argue its greatest legacy was that it was always experimenting with something.
The original maybe less so, but VR2 had a full-blown track creator tool that, while it didn't let you plop down trackside objects, the course was limited only by your imagination. It's a track editor that, to this day, I'd argue only the more recent TrackMania titles, the dedicated Track Path Editor app for GT6 and, sure, let's throw in the EventLabs from Forza Horizon as well, truly beat.
V-Rally 3 had a full-blown career mode with drivers switching teams between seasons, changing the power dynamics of the entire field. One season Ford may be dominant, but then they made a stupid signing and dropped to the back of the pack. Okay, it's not as complex as I make it sound - the AI is somewhat hopeless in terms of consistent pace and if you can just score well enough to get a lot of funding, the invincible car will inevitably come, but there are ideas in there that would be worth experimenting with. Especially if a future game decides it needs to do a lot of unnecessary team management thi- wait a second..
The only thing V-Rally 4 (and it's spiritual predecessor, FlatOut 4) experiments with is "how little game can we make and still somehow score 70% on Steam's All Reviews metric?" (329 user reviews lol)
And then, there's the DLC.
Do not get me started on the DLC.
€5 (when not on sale) for a single car - that you can use in a single discipline - and is far from guaranteed to have more than one paintjob. This isn't acceptable now, and it sure as shit wasn't acceptable five years ago. Remember how people clowned on NFS Heat's McLaren F1 for also being ~€5, despite that one having the ability to change colour, customisation parts to mix and match being an F1 road car, F1 LM, F1 GTR and F1 Longtail, as well as a bunch of new races and some cosmetic thingamabobs that.. yeah, admittedly, I also didn't care much about the cosmetics, but still?
How is the NFS Heat McLaren unreasonable and this isn't?
Is it just because this is a SIM racer by Daddy KT?
It is, isn't it!?
All of that is but a slice of how I feel about this game. It so perfectly - yet effortlessly - symbolises just about everything that's been wrong with racing games since about 2010. But oh no, it's a SIM rally racer, it can't be bad, surely you're just wrong and have only ever played Colin McRae Rally (they genuinely thought that was a good argument to my "you can't just call it the same name and expect it to not bite you in the ass" speech. I had to fucking handhold them through the history of the Need For Speed Identity Crisis for *one* of them to get it. I'm amazed more of these people haven't set themselves on fire yet.)
I called it a scam in the video. That was my honest, unfiltered opinion of the game then, and it's my honest, unfiltered opinion of the game to this day. Not because it isn't AAA - but because it's a AA title priced and desperately trying to masquerade as a AAAA. And if you want to be perceived as a AAA(A) game, you really shouldn't be surprised when people are expecting a AAA(A) game and levelling AAA(A) criticism at you.
I mean absolutely no ill will towards any individual developer when I say this, but, not unlike how the intro segment to the video is probably more effort than was (allowed to be?) put into this game by the developers, this comment (or at least these two combined) is probably the most anyone's been able to actually give a real damn about it. Ever. Which, frankly, is way the fuck more than it deserves.
Over and out.
@@rallymorten I appreciate the clarification. Somewhat made me glad that I left my initial comment.
I have no idea those kind of -delusional- people that calls this game a SIM exists, definitely agree that this game is minimal effort galore riddled with disgusting monetization surrounding it.
I just had somewhat of a mental shock when I posted my original comment, I said it's _"hard to find any review being positive about this game"_ but surprisingly I found one right before I watch your video; it was uploaded to youtube 3 years ago, 2 years after the game came out. Seeing the contrast between your reaction in this video vs this other guy who streamed the game for 40+ minutes, laughing and seemingly having a genuinely good time throughout, was astonishing to say the least.
Not really sure which part of the marketing nor the game itself tries to masquerade the game as AAA though. Just like Gravel™, everything just screams _"man, this is so low budget"_ even from a glance. I genuinely think their only real sin is the egregious day 1 DLCs with horrendous prices. Not to be a consoomer or an apologist of games being worse than their predecessor, but clearly racing games are just a pain to make in the current game industry climate with standards that older games never had to deal with; good sounds and good car models along with licensing are just resource pit of hell, indies can't revive the genre thanks to this limitation and AAA are too focused on nickle and diming players while putting in the bare minimum of effort (hence why I'm real lenient on these AA racing games, guess my standards are too low).
I never played this game and most likely never will, but what I want to say can easily be summed up to [at least it's not the utter piece of trash that is Grid 2019].
True, game development absolutely is hell, hence the "I mean absolutely no ill will towards any individual developer" part of my reply.
My point, as poignantly as I can put it, is that any one part of the Nacon/KT machine could've just *not* bought the dead-for-15-years-at-the-time V-Rally IP, slapped it onto this game with no concern for what people expect given the title, sold egregiously overpriced DLC.. you get my point.
If they'd just called it, idunno, "KT-Rally" and otherwise been honest about what to expect, that would've probably been fine, I wouldn't have been (as) vocal about it being BS at any point, and it probably would've sold just as.. some amount of numbers, I guess?
All of the above, of course, also being the case for FlatOut 4 and Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. They're pulling this same sort of trick for a third time as I type this comment.
If there are people out there who genuinely love and have fun with this game, I'm happy for them. Really, I am.
I'm just not one of those people. I'm one of those people who resent it for everything it stands for, on top of IMO not even being a "decent" AA game on its own merit. There's a reason I use clips of deleted scenes from the Ratchet & Clank movie whenever I refer to this or GRID 2019 in videos these days.
theres nothing to be praised ,i enjoyed the game for a few hours,but its very forgettable,if i want this id rather play dirt 3-4
Even further back, back in 1999, you could take the Ford GT40 and rally that in Gran Turismo 2
rally in grand turismo games is ehhhh
Once u get the game completely it’s cracked n good for amv‘s
Meh, the career really pissed me off, but I really enjoyed the racing. It's probably the most fun I've had in a rally game since Rallisport Challenge. The thing that sets this apart from other SiMuLaTiOn rally games, is that you can rip the handbrake and go full send around pretty much every corner in this game. However I ended up paying $10 for the switch version, and I don't think it's worth much more than that because the campaign is genuinely terrible.