Getting behind the wheel in #DRIVE Rally, I was immediately captivated by its simplicity. This isn’t a racer that needs you to pay attention to every little detail about your car. Nor does it need you to gauge perfect braking distances and racing lines when you’re hitting tight corners or hairpins. You just engage your handbrake just about enough to make your wheels take the turn without losing too much momentum, and then floor it to try and make up for the speed you lost over the course of the maneuver.
There’s a case to be made for that kind of racer. It’s fun, and the art style on offer takes you back to a time when this was all a racer could do. It’s plug-and-play at its best, and the lack of a learning curve is probably among its most welcoming features. There isn’t even a minimap to let you know what’s coming. Instead, you’re going to have to rely on your co-driver’s inputs, anticipating turns based on what they’re telling you, and shaking off crashes that would total your ride in the real world, bolstered by their reassuring words that you’re doing a half-decent job despite the impact.
The cel-shaded graphics support that kind of insanity, working well to present #DRIVE Rally as a title that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The graffiti-like menus and UI, the minimalistic HUD, and the lack of complex textures are all factors that let you focus on what matters the most in this one: the road and your ability to maintain your dominance over it. That isn’t to say that this is an ugly-looking game, far from it. But it also isn’t going to win any prizes on the visual front. They’re there to service the illusion of roads that are designed to test your reflexes more than your driving chops, and that’s the end of it.
The races themselves are not too challenging to be inaccessible, but they’re decidedly biased towards you, the player. Generous time frames let you dominate local leaderboards, progressing through championship stages with impunity to unlock a bunch of new cars and wads of cash in the process. If rally driving were as simple as the races I’ve taken on in this one, I’d be quite a rich man by now. Alas, this one isn’t a reflection of the sport, and it doesn’t need to be.
"If you finish a race in one of the game’s many regions as part of a Championship, you’ve seen more or less everything that the region has to offer, barring a few surprises."
What it needs to be is fun, and it manages to do that reasonably well. At least for the first hour or so of playing it. Your co-drivers vary from region to region, and are a fun bunch up until you exhaust all of their available lines. They then become a symbol of the repetitiveness that creeps into every aspect of the experience. If you finish a race in one of the game’s many regions as part of a Championship, you’ve seen more or less everything that the region has to offer, barring a few surprises. I’m not going to forget barely avoiding a collision with a speeding train as I zoomed past a crossing anytime soon. But those surprises are too few and far between to make things interesting once the novelty wears off.
There’s a bit of humor in the mix, with your co-drivers often dropping quips about the situation. One of them even tells you that you’re driving with the consistency of a solid brick, for crying out loud. That one made me hit pause to chuckle to myself before I dove back into a race that felt like I’d done it a thousand times before, although it was only my third event in that particular region. I would have loved to see more variety in each region between races, but that simply isn’t a part of this one.
Of course, the Free Roam and Quick Race modes are there to break up the monotony, but they suffer from precisely the same problem. The former tasks you with finding all the letters of a specific word in a map that ditches fixed race tracks for a sort of racing sandbox, but it wasn’t enough to keep me invested in it long enough to spell out the word ‘pretzel’. Quick races are fun, but they’re also just more of the same thing that’s already on offer in Championships.
"The default controls were a tad too sensitive for my liking, and things don’t really get better from there despite a bit of tweaking."
The Party mode is something that I can see being a fun way to pass an evening if you’ve got a few buddies to pass your controller to. You decide on a track, and each of you picks a car from all the ones you’ve managed to unlock up until that point. You could also choose to spend some of your in-game cash on unlocking new rides if you really like one that isn’t available to you. Each of you then takes a turn racing through the selected track, trying to achieve a time that the others can’t beat. It could be a nice way to enjoy your downtime and spend a lazy evening with something fun to do, but serious competitors are going to find more to enjoy in other titles.
The default controls were a tad too sensitive for my liking, and things don’t really get better from there despite a bit of tweaking. You’re going to be relying on your handbrake a lot in this one, and the lack of a rewind feature is quite frustrating when you face an inevitable crash that adds seconds to an otherwise perfect run through a tricky track. The game ran fairly well on a base PS5, although there was a lot of pop-in that proved very distracting, and I did encounter a single crash during my time with this one.
The audio isn’t much to write home about either. It’s serviceable enough to get the job done, but don’t expect to hear accurately reproduced engine sounds here. The soundtrack did stand out, though, and is probably my favorite part about #DRIVE Rally. I did find my co-drivers voices to be muffled when routing the audio through my TV’s soundbar, but using a good pair of headphones addressed that concern fairly well.
"If you’re in the market for an arcade racer that’s aimed at more casual players, this one might be up your alley."
With all that’s been said, you’ve probably guessed that #DRIVE Rally isn’t something I can recommend if you’re a racing enthusiast. But if you’re in the market for an arcade racer that’s aimed at more casual players, this one might be up your alley. It’s a great option for young players and is probably going to keep them entertained for more than a few hours. Its asking price justifies what’s on offer, and picking it up on sale should make it even more attractive as an option.
However, it’s not something I can see many players returning to once they’re done with it, unless they’re specifically looking for something to pass a few hours with. Its repetitive nature takes away from the fun you could have if it had more variety in each region, and the gameplay loop doesn’t do too much to switch things up, even when you try racing in other regions. This one works best as a fun distraction, and is probably something you’d revisit when you wait on a more exciting title to download in the background, but that’s about it.
This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.
Pleasing visuals, an accessible learning curve, great music.
Repetitive races, lack of a rewind feature, distracting pop-in.
