RalliSport Challenge 2 review

Appearing on the Xbox only a few months after launch title Project Gotham Racing the original RalliSport Challenge ended up being regarded by most merely as the console’s second best racer. But its quality shone through and it did well in the early days of the system. Some years on now the follow-up is finally ready. There’s been a lot of pressure on the developers to deliver something more than last time but without straying too far from the Sega Rally styling of the original.

Looks the part

When you first load up RalliSport 2 it immediately looks good for the developers. The graphics have definitely been spruced up. The cars are bolder and more detailed than those in the parent title and are easily distinguished for their makes and models. The graphics live up to expectations when you start throwing the cars around the track. They move smoothly in any of the chosen views (cockpit, bonnet, behind and above behind) and the frame rate never even hints at dropping. Throwing your car around the track too fast obviously results in leaving the track all too often and this is now handled quite cinematically. As the car goes spinning out of control off the track the camera pulls back and the whole scene is rendered differently to give a more cut scene style presentation. As you pull the car back to the track the camera closes back in to the chosen camera angle and the game returns to normal.

What’s the damage

Taking your car off course tends to result in damage occurring. Whereas some games scrimp on realism in this area RalliSport Challenge 2 goes all out for it. Roll the car and watch the doors fly open and the bumper hang off. Drive into a tree and watch the car crumple. If you do knock anything loose then it bangs around as you’re driving, which even makes its way onto the soundtrack. The damage isn’t only cosmetic as you see in the bottom right of the HUD. This shows the damage done to the various areas of the car. Too much damage to any one area and you might be walking to the finish line.

Amateurish

The single player game is divided into four championship seasons. The amateur season is the first and easiest and they get tougher and longer as you progress. The final season is only unlocked after completing the highest difficulty. The amateur season is fine to try and get to grips with the cars but you’re unlikely to loose a race even if you spend more time off the track than on. It’s not difficult to finish 30 seconds ahead of your nearest rival. As such there isn’t a great deal of gameplay in this season, expect to finish it within three hours. The other seasons do provide more of a challenge and your opponents become much less forgiving. Of course, if you find even these seasons to be too easy you can always take your game online.

Race the world

The Xbox Live multiplayer features of RalliSport Challenge 2 are tightly integrated into the main game. When you choose your profile in the single player game you can also choose your Live login. You are connected to the service at this point which provides an integrated experience. To play online you don’t need to go through various menu options to log in, you just choose multiplayer and set the game as you would normally. This sort of integration really makes the front end look slick. The menus are intuitive and easy and a lot of thought has clearly gone into making this look smart.

Sounding Off

The audio in RalliSport Challenge 2 lives up to the standards set by the graphics. The engines of the different cars all sound distinct and your co-pilot is clearly audible and understandable. As you drive around the course or stage you can use the engine to hear how you’re going but if you’d rather not you can use a custom soundtrack to take your mind off the sounds of your car being mangled against yet another tree.

Tracking

RalliSport Challenge 2 follows on from the original in terms of the variety of challenges provided. The game isn’t just about section rallying, you also have normal races, ice races and hill climbs. Hill climbs are basically uphill rally segments but with a pack of cars on the course at once. As you progress through the seasons you get a fair try at all of the race types and they are very different. It’s easier to keep your place in the pack races because you can block the cars behind you but the segment races are just time challenges so you’re on your own with the times of the other racers flashing up at checkpoints.

A Worthy Successor

RalliSport Challenge 2 is a fine evolution of the original game. It chooses not to innovate in the racing genre but smartens up its looks and sounds enough to look like an evolution. The challenge provided by the computer cars is nicely tuned to provide a progressive challenge as you become more comfortable with the game and the handling. There aren’t any substantial changes in how the game plays or in the races. There are more courses and cars and there’s online play of course but there’s nothing really that we haven’t seen before. RalliSport Challenge 2 is an excellently executed game but apart from the presentation, and online courses there’s nothing here to recommend it over the original. If you liked the original, and there are plenty of people who did, then this is more of the same in a slicker wrapper, if you didn’t then nothing’s really changed here.