Did you spend hours and a lot of coins in shopping mall arcades behind the steering wheel of Sega Rally ? Do you miss those days ? Then Sega Rally Online Arcade is for you ! Plus it’s available on the South African marketplace, bonus !
Duplicating the arcade felling accurately is a double-edged sword. On the one side it is great in short bursts and doesn’t take the racing too seriously. The cars slide around the course in an over the top fashion and there is not a lot of difference in the cars available.
On the other hand, Darren, the game does not have a lot of content to offer. Most of the racing is done on 5 tracks with a handful of cars. This does not offer hours of progression and unlocking for the obsessive gamer but there is enough challenge for most.
Starting off you get a basic choice of rally cars and there are a couple of cars to unlock that does offer some variation, but the game doesn’t give the player any hints on how to go about it. It is a major oversight as you just have no idea what is required to get access to the locked vehicles. The internet is your friend though and even then there are some speculation on some of the unlocks.
The tracks cover a nice variety of scenery, from a jungle to snow, cramming all the rally variations in a very tight package. The roads are very forgiving as there are ample space to power slide around the corners, which you will be doing a lot. The physics is all out arcade and a lot of fun if you like racing but don’t want the serious simulation or worry about damaging your car. Just step on the accelerator and try to win the race.
Reminiscent of the arcades all races use checkpoints that need to be reached, with the clock counting down. Designed to make you pump more coins into the machine in the arcades, it doesn’t really affect gameplay but is a nice reminder of the game’s roots.
Single player mode provides you with a couple of different approaches to racing. The main race has you start in 22nd place. You have 4 races to reach first place, granting you access to a one-on-one race on a special lakeside track. There is also straight up single race against 5 other cars and ghost races to take on developers or friends times. Lastly there are classic races where you take control of rally cars from days gone by.
Online is where the game comes to life, as with most games. Racing against the AI can quickly become boring, add in some human opponents and it’s a different beast altogether. Online takes place in standard 6 player races, with AI filling spots if there is not enough players, so each race is always full. There are a lot of really good people out there already so prepare to fight hard if you want to get anywhere near the podium.
Sega Rally Online Arcade pays perfect homage the old days of hanging out in shopping malls and provides a great action packed racing game for 800MSP, just don’t take it too serious.
