V-Rally 4 Review

V-Really good?

V-Rally 99 for N64 was my first rally game nearly 20 years ago, although Sega Rally had been a huge arcade favourite of mine. From a home perspective though, it was the game that has seen me play countless off-road games over the years.

It’s been a long time since a V-Rally game came out, but can Kyloton capture the arcade racing spirit of the originals?

Story:

The original couple of games didn’t have much in the way of a structured career mode, before V-Rally 3 (which was far more sim-focused) came along with a very detailed career mode. V-Rally 4 straddles the difference and sits somewhere in the middle.

The game starts off impressively, with a decent-enough tutorial and some guides through the various different gameplay mechanics, such as hiring mechanics and engineers to fix and upgrade your cars, the different disciplines of racing, and signing sponsor contracts to earn more cash. You then get to buy your first car and try to become the V-Rally champion. Unfortunately, from there on, everything falls apart. Completely. There’s no indication of how one gets to compete in the championship decider (wins? Number of events? Unlocking all the cars? I have no idea!).

There’s no guidance, and after about 10 more hours playing, with even some focused time on one of the disciplines, I seemed no closer to my goal. Events seemingly spawn in and out at random, and I have no idea whether there is any basis for completing them in an order or not. Effectively I got bored as a result of a complete feeling of aimlessness.

Gameplay:

V-Rally 4 also suffers from not really being anything like the originals. Many of the locations are very different, there’s not even an option to drive a Ford Escort, Mitsubishi Lancer or Subaru Impreza, and there’s no 4-player rally events where multiple cars are on the same course simultaneously. In fact, it’s a bit of an odd use for the license.

The one area where V-Rally does compare to the originals is the handling model. This in itself was never the best element of those games, which were very much in the arcade camp, but required braking, and were very skittish, with the car always moving around and requiring finesse to link up the bends. Get it right, and you felt like a hero drifting around bends. The problem was that it was always too easy to get it wrong and end up smashing into a wall or tree, and the same problem exists today. Whilst there is a quick reset, there’s no rewind feature, and so the game can get pretty frustrating, and many people will find the learning curve is just too steep for them.

The AI difficulty is also very mixed. The basic tier 1 Rally and Hillclimb cars seem perfectly capable of competing straight away, but the V-Rally Cross and Buggy cars are a clear step below the AI, meaning you either keep tweaking the difficulty between races via a slider (fiddly and annoying), or you ignore the events completely until you have a better car.