Divinity: Original Sin 2 was so wearying to play that I kept looking forward to unwinding with this relaxed, top down rally game. As you can see from these screenshots, it uses very simplified graphics and it’s meant to be played with just a game controller. Yet that doesn’t prevent it from being a reasonably decent rally game with plausible physics, good enough to win over fans of such games as the Dirt Rally series. It’s a short game and fairly easy for someone already experienced with rallying but I had a great time with it.

The career mode consists simply of a linear progression through the six classes of cars that are available: Group 2, Group 3, Group 4, Group B, Group S and finally Group A. The conceit here is that it supposedly takes place in a world in which Group B was never cancelled and so Group S consists of prototype designs that never existed in real life. You need to do well enough in each event to unlock the next one and completing a group similarly unlocks the next one. In addition there are free roam maps which allow you to practice using the available cars with collectibles to find. There are also online events and challenges but I never delved into them. There’s no money or anything and you unlock cars simply by winning specific seasons. The events supposedly have a limited number of restarts. I discovered though that you can actually restart as many times as you want. But if you finish a season with restarts remaining, you get to unlock bonus liveries for cars.

The game doesn’t have the license to use the real names of the cars and so uses fake, made-up names instead. But anyone who is interested in rallying will be able to recognize most if not all of the real cars they are based on. The locations available are Finland, Sardinia, Norway, Germany, Japan, Kenya and Indonesia with multiple stages set in each location. There are snow, fog, rain and night driving conditions depending on the locations. There’s no co-driver but that’s okay because the top-down perspective makes it usually easy to see what’s coming up ahead. However this view does mean that occasionally some objects, such as tree cover or buildings can block your view of your car. At such times, you get to see through the intervening objects but it’s not always reliable and it doesn’t let you see ahead of your car either. These situations are always kind of dicey but there aren’t too many of them and it’s a unique sort of challenge for driving games anyhow.

I was a bit lazy here and just played this at normal difficulty without messing with any of the default settings. This meant that I played it with automatic gears as I was leery of fiddling with buttons on the game controller. The physics feel way too slippery to me and the cars are too prone to flipping over when you take a corner too hard. The key skill to learn here seems to be to moderate your throttle which is harder to do on a controller than with pedals. However by only concentrating on driving cleanly without trying to do anything fancy, I found it rather straightforward to at least get a podium finish. After that, so long as you are consistent, you’ll usually win the event because the performance of each AI driver varies wildly depending on different surfaces and conditions. Quite often, you’ll also see in the rankings the AI being hit by random events like forgetting their pace notes and getting punctures, which helps you even more.

There is a damage model but in my experience the cars seem unrealistically resilient. It takes really high speed impacts to do anything more than cosmetic damage. But yes, once you damage parts like the suspension or the engine, you do notice the cars behaving differently. The feeling of each car roughly matches what I know from other rally games as well so that’s neat. It’s not a replacement for real sims but it’s a good enough cartoon representation of it and great fun to play. My favorite aspect is probably the colorful graphics. They’re so simple yet the boldness of the colors is both shocking and wonderful. It’s so serene to drive through what sometimes feels like an endless expanse of snow or experience the terror of driving through an Indonesia jungle. There are so many cute elements in the maps too like the cable cars and hot air balloons and little animals. Of course, there are maps that players are sure to hate as well, most likely the ones in Germany with the little tombstones lining the roads, forcing you to stay strictly in the middle.

I heard of this game through word of mouth and pretty much everyone who tried it had only nice things to say about it. To me it’s another one of those small, self-contained games that does only one thing yet does it really well. It’s a huge contrast to the massive sprawl that is Divinity 2 and was the perfect game to decompress with. It’s going to be a while before I start playing the new EA Sports WRC which I will get to eventually so it was good to tide myself over with this too.