Key Takeaways
- #DRIVE Rally offers a 90s style rally racing with easy controls and electrifying music.
- The game features distinct maps inspired by real-world locations and allows for car customization.
- Despite lacking a minimap and repetitive gameplay, #DRIVE Rally delivers a fun experience for players.
It’s not often that an indie game studio captures the essence of its vision and delivers on that concept with a satisfying punch while creating a game. Yet Pixel Perfect Dude accomplished this with their latest title, #DRIVE Rally.
Unlike heavy-hitting titles like Forza Horizon 5 or Rally Racing 2.0, #DRIVE Rally elegantly takes a step back and delivers an arcade-style rally racing experience, but is this boiled-down indie epic still a worthwhile experience for Rally fanatics? Stick around and I just might tell you.
No Need For Driver’s Ed
From the moment you hit the home screen, the game revs its engines with hard rock music accommodating the home screen, and in that moment, you know there are some adrenaline-fuelled moments just around the bend.
Surprisingly, #DRIVE Rally does not offer a basic tutorial for the players, leaving you to figure things out for yourself.
This could be seen as a bit of an onboarding issue, but it actually works a treat. Thanks to the easy-to-understand control bindings displayed on the screen as you drop into your first quick race or a championship, players are able to jump straight into the action without missing a beat.
Rally Across The Globe
Speaking of races and championships, the heart of #DRIVE Rally lies in its four distinct maps, each inspired by real-world environments.
The game’s championship mode, its core campaign, offers you a taste of rallying from around the globe, with terrains set in Germany, the U.S., Finland, and Southeast Asia.
Each map presents its own challenges, from the icy tracks of Finland to the roads of the States, adding a bit of flavor to the grind as you unlock new cars and upgrades.
The player also unlocks more versions of their cars as they progress in the championships, along with varying car parts that can be used to modify the look of their vehicles in the way they want.
Cel-Shaded Arcade Action
While #DRIVE doesn’t push the envelope in terms of realism or high fidelity, that seems to work in this game’s favor, as the cel-shaded charm shines through in each of the game’s distinct locations.
And this simple but effective look allows the team to focus on offering a wealth of customisation options to the vehicles on offer, making each whip you race around in feel unique, and allowing the game’s quirky charm to shine through.
It’s like a love letter to PS1 racers like Wipeout and Ridge Racer in the best way possible, but I will concede that, at times, it does flirt with the unwanted notion of becoming a stone’s throw away from a mobile racer. However, it just about falls on the right side of that divide for me.
One thing that stands out is how well #DRIVE RALLY performs on even entry-level hardware. On my testing of running the game on a GTX1650 and Ryzen 5 4600h, it was delivering 100-120FPS constantly, maintaining smooth visuals throughout on the highest graphic preset.
The latest release by Pixel Perfect Dude studios offers three different quality presents, called Mobile, Medium, and Ultra, with each one of them offering different graphic fidelity.
A Lack of Polish
#DRIVE Rally delivers what it promises, which is a fun, high-octane rally title that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Unfortunately, there are some areas in which it lacks as well. Despite the variety of maps and unlockable content, the overall experience left me reeling from a nauseating feeling of deja vu.
Due to the repetitive race types, biomes, and gameplay format, the initial noverty wore off quick and the fun arcade romp soon turned into a laborious chore, which did little to mix things up to alleviate this feeling.
At times, you will also feel the absence of a minimap present in the game’s HUD. While the game tries to compensate for it by giving audio cues, they more often than not end up being out of sync, leaving the player completely confused about the upcoming turns.
At its core, #DRIVE Rally is a fun, fast-paced throwback to arcade racing. While you might find it to be extremely fun at first, but will highly likely grow tired of it soon enough. On a positive note, this might just be the light and easy to pick up rally-racing game you have been wanting all this time.
Closing Comments
#DRIVE Rally by Pixel Perfect Dude delivers a fun arcade-style rally experience with electrifying music and easy to understand controls. It also features four maps taken from the following countries: Germany, the U.S., Finland, and SE Asia. Players can unlock and customize cars as they progress through championships, and the game runs smoothly even on low-end setups. While it offers an enjoyable ride, repetitive gameplay and out-of-sync audio cues (with no minimap) can make navigating tricky after a few hours.
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