gRally (2018) - Every PC Rally Game
0gRally by ghiboz, 2018.
This game was intended to be the next step on from Richard Burns Rally, developed by people behind RBR-Online.it. It's fair to say it's been a rocky road so far, although the game still gets sporadic, important updates.
First up: it's quite buggy. Launching the game shows a splash screen, but the menu loads in another window, meaning you have to hunt down the game! Once you've done that, you have access to a couple of cars (rear-wheel and front-wheel drive) and a number of tracks (a mix of hand-crafted and procedurally generated stages).
The next step is trying to get the game to run smoothly (I settled on all the graphics enabled, 60fps with G-SYNC), and tweaking the audio (out-of-the-box you can barely hear the co-driver or the gravel sound effect). Then there's tweaking controllers, which required me at one point to reinstall the whole game, as my G920 worked in the menus but not in the game at all!
When it all gels, the game itself does hang together quite well. I haven't had any game crashes whilst driving, although using the restart race button can cause the car to fly into the sky on some tracks! Also the handling can be very finickity, with the handbrake usually spinning you out completely, unless you counteract with bundles of counter-steer! You'll definitely want to look at changing to the "Forest" tyres when on a non-tarmac road.
The lighting and scenery ranges from "this looks nice/great" (especially the clouds/sun effects) to "why are all the trees flickering between low-and-high quality so often. I think this is down to some stages though being a bit buggier than others. The smoke effect behind the car only seems to render when quite close to the camera, unless you possibly go edit some .ini files somewhere.
The co-drivers (there are 2 Irish ones) both sound rather bored though! They also often tell you there's a very sharp bend as you're in mid-flight over a bump :-D
The car engine sound is a bit grating, and it seems to top out a bit early (though I'm running here with medium gear ratios, which is likely part of the issue). There's also a lack of skidding sound effects on gravel or tarmac, which makes things a bit tricky sometimes.
Overall, this game tends to get a bad rap; it is still Early Access but it's trying to achieve so much, yet doesn't quite get there at the moment. I feel it's worth a look if you're the sort of person who doesn't mind a lot of technical tweaking and modding though, and just like to try various rally simulation experiences. But don't expect it to be as friendly as a DiRT Rally game or even Richard Burns Rally, for that matter.
This is part of the Every PC Rally Game playlist, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYDobL0b26ugFuXASCIC9qmFb9_k4_fqU