Introduction

RalliSport Challenge delivers an action-packed racing experience by combining four different types of Rally competition into one pulse-pounding game: Hill Climb, traditional Rally, RallyCross, and Ice Racing.

This variety of race types allows for gamers to experience traditional rally racing against the clock, as well as fierce, wheel-to-wheel grudge matches against computer opponents or over a network against friends. With 29 licensed cars (and several ‘bonus’ vehicles), 48 tracks, realistic AI opponents, and spectacular crashes with realistic car damage, RalliSport Challenge packs more fun and thrills into every race across a variety of terrain.

Installation

Even thought this is only a preview copy the installation went smoothly, but the only issue I noticed with this is that it was on 3 CD’s. This isn’t normally a problem because I know that games are getting larger in size lately, thus requiring more space. The one thing I did notice though when it was installing was quite a few .wav files being installed. After the installation had finished I noticed that the bulk of one whole CD was music files. Inside the folder is 14 songs and 451 MB worth. They seem to only be about 3 minutes long each song, but still having to wait while it installs huge wav files is a bit of a concern. That is the only minor annoyance.

Gameplay

The gameplay of this game offers you to have quite a few options of how you want to play it. You can jump straight in and get into instant action by choosing one of the 48 tracks around the world that the game has to offer, or you can start a career mode and work your way through the tracks. As expected there are certain tracks that are locked until you complete previous goals in the previous tracks, in this case achieving a certain number of points. Once you choose what path you are going to take you then have to choose what sort of Rally vehicle you are going to use to achieve these goals. There are 29 vehicles in the game from some well known manufacturers such as Audi, Citroen, Lancia, Ford, Subaru and Mitsubishi. With each car you are shown its different attributes so the choice of car is really down to what type of player you are – if you want improved acceleration or things like better handling.

Once you get into the game the idea is still get around the track as fast as you can without crashing your car. You do have a co driver in the car that tells you what is coming up. It will take a few goes to figure out what the co driver means by medium right turn and the like, but once you get that sorted out it is quite handy to know about that hairpin turn that is just over that small jump. The controls for the car can either by done by steering wheel, joystick/joy pad or keyboard. For this preview I used the keyboard because that is what I am use to and didn’t have a steering wheel at hand. The controls are the default for racing games of the cursor keys to move left, right, forwards and back and the space bar to brake.

Graphics & Sound

One thing I have to say that I was very impressed with is the graphics of the game. Some of the time you sit there and spend more time looking at the visuals that are going past you then you do the road. I have crashed a few times because I was looking at the scenery more than the road. In the paperwork that came with this preview build it says that they hadn’t optimized the game yet, but I didn’t get any slow down at all during the game. But on saying that there is a GeForce 4 Ti4600 under the hood with 1 Ghz of RAM to supplement it.

Overall the graphics are very well done. The interface could do with some improvement, but once again in the build notes they are aware of it and it is on their list of things that will be improved for the final release. At the end of the preview there will be screenshots from inside the game to show you how good the graphics are.

The sound is very well done, except for one thing. It is sometimes difficult to hear what the co driver says to you. Although you can set it so you have a mini map that shows you a brief description of what is up ahead it can be annoying sometimes to not quite hear what your co driver said and then see that hairpin turn. That is just a minor point though because the sounds are very well done for the game.

Overall

This is a very solid game and will appeal to the Rally Sport and racing fans out there. There are stunning graphics in the game and the performance I got from the game was excellent. Before the final release the game running will be optimized even more so even if you have a lower end system you should be able to get very good performance from the game.  The game will be released on the PC and also Xbox systems and is expect out for the Holiday season of 2002.

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