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Platform: Xbox Genre: Racing Publisher: Activision Developer: Climax ESRB: E (Everyone) Released: Q4 2002 Support AE! Buy Games Here:
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Rally FusionScore: 6.8 / 10 |
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Pros: - Plenty of curvaceous, well-designed levels - Provides adequate challenge - Controls are responsive
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Cons: - License and Race of Champions mode is confusing early on - Graphics could have been better - Not enough cars
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Related Links: Review: Rally Fusion (Playstation 2)
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"If you are looking for a realistic Xbox rally car racing title packed with features, RF isn’t your best choice."
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Do you enjoy lots of mud slinging, plenty of curves, and heated competition? If you do, you’re probably one of two types of people: someone who likes watching women’s mud wrestling or a rally-car racing fan. Women’s mud wrestling fans can call the local strip joint to see when the next mud-wrestling extravaganza is scheduled, but for all you rally-car racing aficionados, Activision’s new rally-car racing title, Rally Fusion (RF) for the Xbox, is meant to appeal to you. But even though it can be a good ride at times, in the end RF makes a turn down Merely-Average Street and can’t come anywhere near the excitement that you’ll get from the other mud activity.
RF has a lot of revved-up features under its hood. There’s a bunch of different modes including Follow the Leader, Elimination, Relay, and Rallycross. Nine different environments including rain forests and deserts are here (yes, there’s even mud-filled tracks) and 30 drivers are ready to compete against you in the Race of Champions. The game’s levels are filled with plenty of twists, turns and curves that will keep your fingers on the trigger as you negotiate the accelerator and brakes. The tracks are designed well too, giving racers a good variety of different and contrasting races to motor through.
Another plus for RF is the game’s visuals. While they certainly won’t overly impress you, they are generally of a high-speed viscosity (although they may disappoint those expecting better graphics from the Xbox version of the game). RF’s vehicular graphics actually were just average at best, considering how spoiled Xbox racing gamers have been in this respect from past racing titles such as Project Gotham Racing and RalliSport Challenge.
Helping to accentuate RF’s attempt at providing a touch of realism is some graphical touches like mud that builds up on your car while you are racing and progressive damage such as broken windows or missing front hoods and doors if you happen to get a little too reckless on the track.
But as soon as the game seems to get off the starting line in promising shape, a few gaskets start popping which throws a wrench into any chance the game had of achieving A-list status that has been reserved for Xbox rally-car racers RalliSport Challenge and Colin McRae 3. To start, there is only a scant amount of cars available in the game, 19 in all. In today’s racing gaming world where Sega GT and Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (PS2) have multiple times that amount of cars, RF is a disappointment.
Even worse, RF forces you to race with particular cars for certain races in the Race of Champions, which can be a real drag when the car in question isn’t one you would have chosen if you had the choice. I can guess this was done to give you a much harder challenge while at the same time letting you taste the flavor of RF’s full range of motor machines, but it turns out backfiring when driving lesser-performing cars drains all the gas from your gaming fun.
RF’s biggest speed bump on its way past Mediocrity Street is the hard-to-figure-out license and Race of Champions mode. Because of its not-too-well-thought-out implementation, you may get confused early on figuring out what your next racing goals are and exactly what vehicles you’ll have at your disposal. It became increasingly frustrating in my early RF racing experiences trying to surmise where I was traveling next.
You know, there’s nothing more annoying to me on a family-driving excursion than to have my wife offer critiques or suggestions on my driving technique. Multiply that annoyance by about ten and you’ll get the feeling of how bothersome the remarks from your rally-car navigator can be. Yeah, buddy, I know rolling the car into that gully on the side of the track wasn’t exactly good for our chances of winning. You don’t have to rub it in with your smart-alecky remarks. That’s one little touch of reality that RF could have definitely done without.
The game’s controls are actually very responsive, but in the same way as driving my minivan; the brakes stop when you want them to and the accelerator ramps up speed when you want them to, but a little too stop-on-a-dime well for a rally-car racing game. You should be able to slide through turns as real rally-car racers can and as both RalliSport Challenge and Colin McRae 3 have established as part of their much more realistic control scheme. In RF it’s much too easy to get by on the tight stopping and accelerating controls while missing out on the mud-sliding fun that is rally-car racing.
The hardest obstacle a developer needs to hurtle when creating a new game in a well-established gaming genre is giving something new to the gamer that they haven’t seen before. In the case of RF, the developer does a nice job of creating a good rally-car racing game with solid graphics and controls. But ultimately it fails to deliver on the haven’t-seen-this-before features (and in fact falls a little short in the features it does provide) that would entice gamebuyers to choose RF over much better rally racing Xbox games RalliSport Challenge and Colin McRae 3.
If you are looking for a realistic Xbox rally car racing title packed with features, RF isn’t your best choice. RalliSport Challenge and Colin McRae 3 are much more a true-to-life representation of what rally car racing really is all about. Check out RF as a rental first before selecting your rally-car racing title for your Xbox.
- Lee Cieniawa (February 3, 2003)
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