GT3 on Rally Wheels

Rallisport is the perfect mix of both arcade and simulation gameplay. For the most part, this is a top-notch game, with a lot of play time, a good learning curve, and high on fun factor. I myself prefer a more sim-based racing game, but I cannot fault the game for choosing its arcade/sim mixture.

The game is very similar to other racing games. You start out with a number of cars and tracks and can unlock many more as the game goes along. Use your time attack mode (racing alone, with ghost car options) to learn the tracks, and then go over to career mode to prove yourself. You can choose to start career mode in easy or normal difficulty level. Easy mode allows you to replay any race within the event, whereas in Normal mode you can only restart the event from the beginning. But completing the game in Normal mode unlocks more tracks and another mode, the ability to compete against the game designer's ghost cars. You can also compete in a single race for the unlocked tracks and can multiplayer up to 4 players on screen.

One thing Rallysport does very well is provide a good number of selectable options and features in the game. First, the game boasts a wide variety of camera angles (9 of them) to appeal to a wide variety of gamers. There are two first-person views and 7 third-person views (sorry, no in-car view). Within the third person views, you can choose from some that are near and some that are far, and also choose views that either have a stiffer or looser camera. Although my friend and I are traditionally first-person-view gamers when it comes to driving games, we both found the third person perspective to be far superior in this game. It just allows you to see around corners better and anticipate what's ahead. To add to this, you can also toggle on or off any of the camera views, so that you'll cycle through only the camera views that you want during game play. This is something I haven't seen many other games do. Another option you have is the choice of your Heads-up Display (HUD). In addition to the digital/analogue display of the tachometer and the mph/kph option, you can choose between pace notes and a mini-map. It's quite a different experience between the pace notes (icons that appear on top of your screen before a turn, obstacle, etc) verses a mini-map where you can see a limited amount of the road's map at all times. Using the mini-map can even allow you to turn off your copilot's voice, because you can now do all the navigating yourself. But, then you have to spend more of your attention on the map and less on the road. So there's a tradeoff. If you want a more realistic experience, use the pace notes in conjunction with your copilot's voice. Rallysport also provides a lot of options in the sound department. You can adjust levels of your copilot, environmental sounds, car sounds, and music. Some races you may want to hear your copilot, whereas other races you won't need him and would rather listen to music. There is one option that I would have liked to see more of, and that is the controls. There are only 3 different controller setups, with only one that utilizes the right analogue stick as acceleration/breaking. There should have been more controller setups available.

Overall there are 48 tracks in the game. Now granted some of those tracks are just a modification of another track and some are just the reversal of a previous track, but that's still an impressive number of tracks in the game. These 48 tracks are broken into 4 divisions of racing: Rally, Rallycross, Ice Racing, and Hill Climb, with the Rally courses having the most. Even the Rally courses are further divided up into "themes", having 6 tracks for a particular land type or area, i.e. Mediterranean vs. Pacific. One theme may stress tarmac while another may have a lot of sand and gravel. Some themes may tend to have more raining tracks while others may have more elevation changes. Etc. etc. You get the point. The Ice Racing and Rallycross tracks are shorter and closed-circuit, where you will race against 3 other competitors in the championship mode. But the Rally and Hill Climb races are just you against predetermined race times.

There are 28 different cars to choose from. The cars are modeled after real-life cars and you can view their stats in the car selection screen (including hp and weight). The cars start from the lowly 200 hp Beetle, to the insanely powerful 981hp Suzuki Grand Vitara (a.k.a the Pike's Peak car).

Positive aspects of the gameplay are: 1) Cars have responsive controls 2) Each car has it's own unique feel and control to it. 3) There is a good sense of speed. 4) Power-sliding and drifting are easily performed and easily controlled, as a rally game should be. 5) There is good response to partial acceleration and partial breaking, allowing you to fine control your drifting. 6) The automatic transmission feels a lot like a real automatic. When using automatic transmission, you car won't always downshift at the best points, leaving you with a little bit of a delay in acceleration when you're trying to get back up to speed. This is most evident in the hill climb races. But hey, the game should provide a little reward for those gamers who chose the manual transmission. 7) The game does allow for some tweaking of the car's setup, like stiffer/looser suspension, tighter/longer gear ratios. Nothing in-depth, but then again that goes along with the more arcade-like approach to the game. 8) There are a wide variety of road surfaces in the game and there are significant differences in the coefficients of friction between the surfaces. That ice racing is quite slippery.