At first glance, it may seem a bit odd to release SEGA Rally Online Arcade in the wake of the lumbering rally juggernaut, DiRT 3. With the latter game providing all the off-road thrills and spills that anyone could hope for, what room could there possibly be for an 800 point (around £6.80) arcade game? But although they're both rally games, SEGA Rally Online Arcade couldn't be more different to DiRT 3 if it tried. Well, OK, it could. It could feature rainbows, unicorns, and axe wielding clowns. But that would just be silly.
For starters, unlike its more realistic cousin, the tracks in SEGA Rally aren't based on real world locations. With a whopping five(!) on offer, you'll be racing through the African desert, skidding across a snow topped mountain, and barrelling through a tropical jungle, before pulling into a lay-by to trim the crusts off your cucumber sandwich in the peaceful English countryside. Free from the constraints that come with building tracks based on the real world, each course is nicely detailed, and importantly, easy to learn, with plenty of landmark objects making it easy to memorise exactly what corner's coming up, while nice little touches (in one, the space shuttle takes off in the background, just as you round a corner) distract you from your race.
Allow me - vroooom.
But perhaps most importantly for a rally game, these tracks also offer the full gamut of road surfaces, which makes your job that much more interesting. From mud to snow; barren tarmac to flooded roads and huge, corner filling puddles, there's plenty of things to splash through - and unlike other racing games, you'll never lose control of your car while doing it. In SEGA Rally Online Arcade, the physics have been toned down to make a game that's more about racing than it is wrestling your car into a straight line. Your car hugs the road as it takes the corners, and it's almost impossible to spin your car, with the game's more-arcadey-than-realistic handling meaning that, while there's a noticeable difference to how your car handles on snow, as compared to tarmac, it only means you have to struggle that little bit more with the steering, rather than ending up coming face to face with a brick wall.
So, it's so far, so good then - but where's the downside? Well, possibly the biggest problem with SEGA Rally Online Arcade is that there really isn't that much to do. Although it's a budget priced game, there's only a small selection of modes, and a tiny choice of tracks to race on (two of which are locked from the beginning). In Championship mode, you'll race across the three standard tracks back to back, as you zip from one checkpoint to the next before the timer ticks down. Competing with 22 opponents, it's up to you to overtake as many as you can before you finish the race, with your progress carrying over from one track to the next - finish in 18th after the first race, and you'll start in 18th in the second. The idea is to get to first place, and keep it till the end of the third race, at which point you'll move on to the fourth track, the aforementioned sleepy English Lakeside, where you'll face off against a ridiculously good opponent in a one on one race. And then.... well, that's pretty much it. Other modes include the standard Time Attack (racing against a staff ghost car), Quick Race, and the more original Classic Rally, which pits you one on one in a classic rally car against another, but it's a disappointingly sparse line-up, and one that won't hold your interest for anywhere near long enough.
At least the handling's good.
What's more frustrating is that, seemingly in an attempt to try and make up for the lack of content, the final race in Championship mode, and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Classic Rally and Time Attack modes are incredibly hard, meaning that anyone without the precision steering of a racing God is likely to find themselves rather out of their depth. And while there are plenty of cars to unlock, it's a shame that the game doesn't actually tell you how to go about unlocking them. At least with some sort of a hint as to what we have to do next, there'd be a bit more incentive to keep coming back. The achievements try to offer some form of variety, by at least asking you to do unusual things, such as trading paint with each opponent before going on to win a quick race, but it's not really enough. In fact, even the achievements seem to have been stacked to try and take advantage of the ridiculously tough AI, as you can only achieve many of them by playing on the game's unforgiving "Arcade" difficulty - which is a lot tougher than it sounds.
The general lack of content is made even more disappointing by the fact that everything we see here is recycled from 2007's SEGA Rally on the Xbox 360. And while it's true that SEGA Rally was a full price release, and featured more realistic handling, it had a much more in depth single player mode, a similar multiplayer mode, and is currently available (albeit pre-owned) for a fiver from GAME. Which almost renders this pointless.
With a friend in tow, and the AI safely shuffled away, you'll be able to squeeze some more fun out of the split-screen mode, and the online Xbox Live races, but in terms of the single player, there simply isn't enough of SEGA Rally Online Arcade to keep you coming back. With incredibly tough AI preventing you unlocking, and seeing everything there is to see in the game, it quickly becomes a frustrating experience, and one you'll likely find yourself giving up on. It's so disappointing, too, as the easy handling initially makes this a lot more accessible - but the AI only serves to shut out anyone but the most hardcore.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
