No, not at all. It’s not a thing that bothers me.
Part of the learning curve here – and I imagine in real rally racing? – is learning to ignore the crowd and trusting everyone will get out of the way. Which they don’t, actually. The game totally cheats them out of the way using the magic of “nope, you didn’t really hit that guy!” technology. But I’m not buying it. I must have killed dozens of people in my Art of Rally career.
Also, I’m pretty sure some of the spectators have cow bells. Who brings cow bells to a rally race???
-Tom
By the way, @Mr_Bismarck, you’re a FOR SERIOUS videogame racer. What are your thoughts on the game’s driving model? I’m definitely on the casual side of FOR SERIOUS videogame racer spectrum, but I’d be curious to hear how you feel about the driving model and specifically how it differentiates the different cars. How do you feel it stands up alongside other mass-market rally games like Dirt 4 and WRC9?
-Tom
Everyone!
You’re not a rally fan if you don’t show up with a cowbell, horn or whistle. Here you can buy an official Subaru Rally cowbell!
Woah, I didn’t know about this game, although I had a couple fun hours with the dev’s previous driving game (top-down), Absolute Drift. Since it’s a good deal on Epic and I like a fairly casual driving game–and it looks beautiful–I’m giving it a try.
Tom, you definitely need to shed any presuppositions about what a Unity game looks like. Unity probably can’t quite pull off a highly detailed open-world game with a lot of visual effects (like an Assassin’s Creed or GTA kind of thing), but besides that, what a Unity game looks like is a matter of the vision and talent of the developers, not the engine.
I think it’s good!
There’s an amount of the sim-driving world who think you’re either a serious sim or you’re nothing and that’s not really me, so Art of Rally hits my personal points for a good driving game.
The best explanation of my feeling comes from the arcade mode in War Thunder warplanes. You’re flying with a mouse and keyboard rather than a joystick and the planes will do things that would snap their wings off in real life, but outside of that everything has a logical consistency - a Spitfire flies differently to a Focke Wulf 190, which flies differently to a P-47 and you have to fight your plane appropriately to beat the opposition.
That’s really what I find in Art of Rally - the cars handle differently depending on their raw power, engine placement, drivetrain and other elements that make sense to me even if they don’t nail the differences between a 911 and an M3 the way rFactor2 would and there are some car/track combos that just work better than others.
I need to get back into the game now that you can make your own liveries for the cars.
Me neither, but I do like being able to feel the effect of weight transfer on steering and that sort of thing, which this definitely has after a brief kanoodle. And yeah, the two starter cars felt drastically different (one rwd, one fwd)
I understand that there’s Toyota AE86 in the game. But is there a tofu delivery mission in the map of Japan? If there isn’t then I’m afraid the game isn’t all that faithful to one of the most important pieces of rally history.
Btw Tom, do you play this with a controller or you have a steering wheel for this?
I don’t think you can use the wheel for this. I’ve been controller exclusively and I think the other option is keyboard.
Yeah, I think the main difference between Assassin’s Creed and most of the games made with Unity is that Ubisoft has hundreds of people making art for the game. And when you have a big team like that, you’re also more likely to be making your own game engine as well.
My impression (as a game developer, but not a programmer and certainly not an engine programmer!) is that there are limits to Unity for games of that size and fidelity that even a large team couldn’t overcome. In fact, usually you have to create (or expand on) a custom engine so it can be optimized for precisely what your game needs it to do. Unity isn’t built for that. For the top end of AAA games like AC, God of War, GTA, probably Cyberpunk, it’s possible even Unreal is too generic to be adequately optimized (but don’t quote me on that).
Art of Rally penis cars confirmed.
Definitely a controller. I hooked up my wheel earlier this year to run through some driving games. Which was nice enough, but I decided it was too much bother to adjust back-and-forth between a wheel and a gamepad. So it’s been a gamepad for me, even in more “serious” games like Project Cars and WRC. How lame is that?
-Tom
You sold me on this @tomchick. Anyone know if the leaderboards are cross platform between Steam and Epic? With the Epic coupon the game is < $10
Don’t know. I have it on Epic as well. I bought it at launch with a $10 coupon. I tried it again after Tom’s review, but I still have a tough time with it, so don’t compare your times with mine! I mostly drive away from the track and get reset all the time. I’m still not sure how to drive with the camera so far away from the car.
I think you usually come out ahead when we have our leaderboard battles in racing games :-) We have had some great ones.
I’ve only tinkered around a bit, raced one rally in career mode and picked one stage in a time trial attack. I’m not sure how I feel. It has the charm that Tom mentions for sure, but like @Rock8man I have some trouble with the point of view. It’s difficult to me to feel when my car is losing control and read how fast to be going around turns.
I did improve though. In my time trial, the first time I was at the 95th percentile. Knocked it down to 90, 80, 75, 40 with many restarts thrown in. I imported my Steam friend list so some of you are sent some invites. @Rock8man, it didn’t look like you connected your Steam friend list to Epic so I sent a manual invitation to Rock8man on Epic. I hope that’s you.
I’m all over the Group 2 scoreboards on Steam, so if you can’t see me then I guess the scoreboards aren’t cross platform.
Do you have an epic account? You also weren’t on the list when I imported my Steam friends. If you do have an Epic account, it would be interesting to see if we were friends on Epic if I’d see your leaderboard scores. There don’t seem to be a ton of players on the Epic leaderboards, looks like less than 2000. Any idea how many Steam has? Because of the leaderboards I may refund it on Epic and get it on Steam when it gets cheap. I’ve got plenty of racing games I could play.
I do have an Epic account and my Steam account is tied to my Epic account, so I don’t know why it’s not showing up.
As for player numbers - in Noormarkku, Finland, for Group 2 I am in place 1,852 on the leaderboard and it says I’m in the top 15%…
Are you Mr Bismark on Epic too?
There are a lot more players on Steam then. When I was in the top 40% in Noormarkku, I was ranked 479