Traction - Downhill Rally (2020) - Every PC Rally Game
0Traction - Downhill Rally by F3four, 2020.
This is a small, reasonably unknown, yet fun rally game, available to buy on https://f3four.itch.io/traction-downhill-rally
It contains one car, a sort of hatchback/Audio Quattro mash-up and 4 tracks, with a downhill-style theme. There are short cuts you can take and the aim is to set the best time. There's a turbo boost/nitro to get the car going faster, but the game is tricky enough without boosting!
The game has a nice aesthetic, with the ground looking like crumpled paper. It's also reasonably fair; should you wreck your car you can continue from the previous checkpoint, with your timer reset to what it was when you hit the checkpoint. There's no co-driver though, so to get the best time you need to memorise the stages!
There are a few bugs though (at the time I made this video). The biggest being the game runs at 50fps, so you need to set screen refresh rate to 100hz or it'll judder. I've set refresh rate to 100hz and video capture rate to 50fps, so it's nice and smooth (mostly) here.
The other issue is that it only supports keyboard (too heavy/inaccurate for my liking) and PlayStation controllers. I'm actually using a PS2 controller via an adapter here! On my Xbox 360 pad the buttons and controls are mapped all over the place, in an unplayable way (e.g. start button = accelerate).
Finally, sometimes it says an error messages when trying to upload your stage time, but it doesn't happen every time.
Overall it's a nice little game, and if the bugs do get fixed and more stages/cars added, it could be up there near to titles like art of rally or Star Drift Evolution.The itch.io page has a list of planned features, so hopefully the developer will issue more updates at some point.
This is part of the Every PC Rally Game playlist, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYDobL0b26ugFuXASCIC9qmFb9_k4_fqU