Rally Arcade Classics is a throwback to late 90's / early 2000's rally games. It's simple and arcade-y with era-appropriate visuals. It's easy to fall in love with it. There is a huge amount of content, too, with tons and tons of event types, lots of classic rally car look-a-likes (no official licenses, of course), and dozens of courses spread around the world. There is enough content to keep you busy for dozens upon dozens of hours.
Will you actually ever get to see very much of that content, though, is the real question. You see, for whatever reason the developers decided to lock all of the content away and make you slowly unlock it in the most grindy horrible setup I've seen in a while. Each event you can enter gives you a maximum of three stars for gold medals, and all of your stars add up to a total that unlocks more events. OK, that's fine. Except it isn't. The game is insanely ridiculously difficult. Sure, you can get a bronze in every event - for one star - without much trouble, but that isn't really enough to make any progress. The problem is that the time requirements to earn silver, and especially gold, are insane. The difficulty curve here is all right angles.
To get gold medals you have to be perfect. Absolutely perfect. Absolutely 100% make zero mistakes and hold down the throttle basically all the time perfect. That is, if the car you're using is actually capable to hitting those times to begin with. Golds in a lot of events are essentially impossible until you unlock literally the best car in the class, which requires grinding events for tiny money payouts in order to save up to buy the good stuff. And even when you have a good car, and can manage to actually make progress, the sheer amount of stars it takes to unlock the next level is way, way, way too high.
It is such a frustrating hair pulling obnoxious grind. They could cut the star requirements in half and let you get to new content faster and the game would improve immensely. Similarly, they could add 3-seconds (at least) to every gold medal time to make them easier to get - so you could get them by being 95% perfect instead of 100% perfect - and the game would be way more fun.
Instead it's just frustrating. The courses are full of little edges and obstacles that poke out into the track just waiting to grab you. If you hit anything in this game, absolutely anything at all, you come to a dead stop. Run over. Restart. No point in even trying to continue on since it's impossible to get a gold at that point. I suppose this is accurate to the time period of games they were shooting for, but goddamn, give us a break.
The game's saving grace is that the events are generally pretty short. Or, at least they're short for the first few classes of cars but I have no freaking idea what the last half of the game is like because I need 500 million more stars to see any of it. But at least in the first half the events are only anywhere from 15-seconds to 2-minutes long. There are time trials and one-on-one races and events where you start at the back and have to pass the rest of the field, those sort of things. Because the events are short, restarting over and over and over and over and over to get your one perfect run in isn't quite as rage inducing as it potentially could have been.
The game definitely has that addictive "one more try" feeling to it where you keep running the same event over and over to finally get a gold. Your previous best run appears as a ghost car on track so it's easy to see where you can improve run after run. When you finally hit everything perfect and post a good time it's incredibly satisfying. I have to say, however, that that brief feeling of satisfaction isn't nearly enough to outweigh the anger and frustration you feel the other 90% of the time. Or when you finally feel like you're making progress only to see the next milestone is a bazillion stars away and you just feel overwhelmed and beaten down and don't really want to bother anymore.
It's a shame they borked the progression so horribly badly here, because the actual gameplay feels pretty much perfect. It really feels so damned good. It's arcadey and fun and easy to control. It's genuinely fantastic. You feel like a driving god perfectly sliding around corners and maintaining top speed and hitting all of your marks. But then it turns out your perfect run actually sucked since your car can't go fast enough because the required times are total bullshit and the progression sucks.
I'll repeat that Rally Arcade Classics is the best worst rally game in ages. It's got tons of content and feels great to play, but the difficulty is insane and progression is completely and utterly busted and ruins the whole thing. It's $20, which is genuinely pretty good considering the sheer amount of stuff in the game, but it's a frustrating grind to see even half of it and frankly isn't really worth the suffering. Simple changes could greatly improve the game, but thus far the developers seem to have no interest in adjusting any of it. As such, I can't really recommend it.
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