Looks and sounds good and the physics and gameplay work surprisingly well in the style they were going for it. But it still felt off somehow and it took me a few hours to pinpoint why:
The tracks are too wide and samey. You will almost always have a path that is 4 to 5 cars wide and it never changes during a stage which feels very unnatural. Art of Rally course design is more akin to a Hot Wheels track with different background and trees and not rally stages in individual countries with their own distinct features. The track width also makes the game play weirdly safe and unexciting, totally different from expectations for a rally hommage to the wildest era the sport has seen.
The career mode is also more of a glorified time attack playlist with hardly anything interesting going on in terms of progression or unlocks.
It's overall alright and if you are looking for a chill time attack racer to vibe with you can do worse.

Art of Rally is an arcade racing game developed by Funselektor and released on all possible platforms in 2020.

Art of rally takes you on a journey in the Golden Era of rally, from the 60s to the late 90s, giving you the possibility to experience a more casual rally game where you don't need to understand the pace notes since the tracks aren't as complex as in real life and the camera placement makes the pace notes useless.
When you first open the game and start your first stage, you will notice that the graphics are simplistic at first, but still very beautiful. Take in note that the weather can be modified from stage to stage, so you have still much to see.
The Carrer mode is pretty simple, you start from the earliest rally car group to the latest in randomised stages with adjustable difficulty and damage model settings.
The range of cars and tracks are amazing, at least for cars (every car acts and sounds almost different from each other), for tracks, the case is similar with Dirt Rally 2.0, there are different biomes, that's great... but only 7 different countries (not taking into account the released Australia DLC).
As I mentioned there is an adjustable difficulty and damage settings, but they're both pretty inconsistent at times. The damage model even at the highest setting is sometimes too forgiveable and in certain areas buggy (if going at a high speed near the fences on bridges and cliffs, you will probably get a terminal damage or near terminal damage just by scratching them). Also the damages only affects performance (where even a high damaged car can finish the race), the damages can't be seen on the car.
The penalty system is also pretty simple, 5 seconds for every invalid road cutting, going off track, falling in water,... which is too strict for some occasions and in some too forgiveable. What also can be done is to make falling in water or falling of high cliffs make your car get instant terminal damage or implement an unrecoverable car message in those occasions.
The game also still has some minor performance issues, not gamebreaking, but can still be annoying sometimes.
Apart from that there are just few minor issues that brakes the immersion, but where this game shines, apart from the visual and gameplay are crazy bicolored rectangular spectators. Every rally fan knows that especially in the Group B the crazy cars and drivers weren't the only thing that defined the 80s as the Golden Era of rally, but also the crazy spectators that sorrounded the track without almost any fences and if crazy enough they would wait on the track and evade the car in the last possible moment and this game tries to recreat that. The spectators aren't the best, there are some occasions when if they are near a house or cliff, they would jump on its roof (for houses) or summit (for bigger clifs). What I would also like is to have much much more spots where those spectators gather.

I didn't buy any DLC, but my suggestions as a DLC idea could be France or Monaco stages, Modern cars and maybe a Track Editor or Creator where players could make its own or edit the already given stages.

All in all, there is much that needs to be done, but this game offered something that only few rally games succeded with, and that is giving players fun, where no prior knowledge is needed to understand it. Even though my rating isn't that high, I suggest all fans of racing games, rally and cars to give this game a try and to see what an Indie company can deliver when they know what they're doing.

If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. Zenový adrenalin. Zdánlivý protimluv, ale zde to sedne. Stylizace, hudba, když se dostanete do "flow" a řežete zatáčky smykem, máloco umí být tak zenově relaxační a zároveň ve vás neustále tlakem na výkon, čas a výzvou vyvolávat adrenalin a tenzi. Jakkoli to nepopiratelně je rally pojata arkádově, tak na vyšší obtížnosti zjistíte, že jak profilem tratí, nastavováním vozů je to více simulační než by se na první pohled zdálo. Nejlepší (a díky široké škále obtížností a nastavení kdečeho) nejpřístupnější rally titul, který však i veteránům dokáže zatopit. A přitom zrelaxujete. Já vím, protimluv.

An attempt to turn rally into a form of meditation that happens to also be a game—and with beautiful results. Rally is a motorsport and, as such, is made of very physical elements— fragile humans in hard helmets and full body protective gear get crammed inside small cars with large loud engines and grippy tires. And they carve paths over a variety of rugged terrain in all manner of weather conditions as fast as they can manage. And, hopefully, faster than all the other teams. Rally is a form of competition between human beings (which we take part in via machines we control). But the more fundamental conflict at the heart of rally is a struggle against the physical terrain itself: tires fighting against a brute geometry made of tarmac and gravel, dirt and mud, snow and ice.

The art of rally manages to distill this fundamental conflict of physical forces into a quiet yet intensely focused digital experience. The digital distillation is composed of almost abstract shapes, brilliant colors and simulated outdoor lighting, iceberg deep virtual physics, and patterns of controller inputs. And the game we are left with feels utterly incredible. The handling model and the way it changes with the terrain is something like a wonder of gamefeel.

The core offering is a career mode where the player competes in a sequence of tournaments organized chronologically through different years. The courses have their charm and are visually reminiscent of prototypical landscapes associated with a particular country. A minimalistic (and occasional whimsical) history of “the golden age” of rally is told as the player works their way through the years. This is not so detailed—and I at least would find it less interesting if it was— but it provides the right flavor. The career mode can be plenty challenging for newcomers and gets increasingly demanding as you move through the tournaments and unlock more powerful vehicles. Free roam locales present a way to get the feel for a vehicle, an area, and some tricky obstacles in a very low stakes environment. The time trial modes, online leaderboards, and daily challenges offer the pursuit of endless perfection for the aspirational player. At the end of the day though, the game is a set of courses and a collection of vehicles. And that’s a good thing. It’s a set of stunning tracks each of which offers a unique challenge and is essentially an opportunity to enter a state of flow as you attend to the carefully crafted virtual sensations. Which virtual sensations you experience depends on the track itself, the weather conditions, and which vehicle you choose. The feel resonates outward from the controller and is continuously created through the simple but demanding task of guiding your car through the track. It is something like an art. And a very demanding one. And one you can get utterly lost in for vast stretches of time as the excellent soundtrack fills the air. And, unlike the art of archery, the art of rally can be practiced in the comfort of your living room.

It feels like racing games have sometimes fallen out of the general conversation surrounding the medium of videogames (if they were ever a part of such conversation in the first place.). The idea behind the genre is simple, intuitive, familiar. Travel from point A to point B. Drive from here to there—as fast as you can. Maybe it all seems too simple to be worthy of discussion. But the devil’s in the details as they say—and, when you get the details right, all the magic is too. That’s what we can witness in the art of rally— the developer has nailed something small, something focused, but done it so well that it stands above many games with much loftier ambitions. And it might take something like the art of rally to get the less automotively enthused to see that this genre and the experience it can provide is very much worth talking about—something stripped down to the essentials, the sheer mechanics, something torn out of the usual commercial context and freed from pricey brand names and energy drink logos.

Just how exactly you get from point A to point B as quickly as possible is what makes these things special. And that can be hard to even see and harder still to describe—how it works, why it’s interesting, how exactly it stands out from others in the same genre. It takes time and experience to recognize the elegance of the systems, the interesting challenges the courses present, and the opportunity for mastery that they provide. Spend a few hours internalizing the art of rally’s controls and the basic handling and you start to get a glimpse of just how incredible this is. But there’s a sense that this is just the beginning.
Games like this can be enjoyed by anyone, but maybe can only be fully appreciated by the players who become true masters of this art. We might be able to approximate this sort of insight if we could just pretend this was the one cartridge we had all summer long. If I ever reach that higher plane of understanding, I may have much more to say or there will be nothing left to say at all.