At it's best, Art of Rally is a glorious homage to the glory days of the motorsport. It sucked me in immedietly, with it's gorgeous aesthetic and fantastic physics/car handling forming an excellent base for a game. A Tribute that truly captures the madness and zen-like state of blasting a car down a road at the edge of control.
But the more I played AOR, and the further I was torn from that first hour of pure zen, the more the cracks show. The main issue is the stages. Rally games have always suffered with stages, because realistically you'd want about a Thousand Kilometres of Road in every game, which is untennable, But AOR really suffers in both quantity and quality.
There's about 30 unique stages in the game (and a lot of reverse versions). That might have been enough, but they are also all extremely short and there's maybe one good one in the entire game. And considering the career mode will have you go through about 25 courses in every class of car, repeats happen thick and fast and by the time you've even reached the group B cars, which are the most popular and a selling point of the game - I was already tired of them.
And the stage design shows some really baffling decisions - whilst each of the 5 location's aesthetic has been gloriously adapted, the nature of their roads has most certainly not been, and it's incredibly frustrating. Every location ends up feeling the same when in real life there's so much more variety and soul to the tracks themselves. Finland is a particular shame, as it's claustrophobic, tree lined roads in real life feel exactly like every other road in this entire game. Different coutries' rally stages are literally like mario worlds in real life and somehow the artsy videogame version makes them makes them all the same.
There's also a mind-boggling choice to keep the road surface at the same, incredibly wide width for every road in the entire game, and there's a severe lack of variety in terms of corner choice. One of the japan stages feels like it has 10 2nd-gear hairpin sweepers in a row and it's remarkably boring. How does an artsy, arcade rally videogame have less interesting roads than the ones outside my house?
Eventually, the stage design's blandness broke through my sheer love of the core aesthetic and feel. And it's a real shame. There's such a love of a lost era here, and it's just one thing away from working.
But the more I played AOR, and the further I was torn from that first hour of pure zen, the more the cracks show. The main issue is the stages. Rally games have always suffered with stages, because realistically you'd want about a Thousand Kilometres of Road in every game, which is untennable, But AOR really suffers in both quantity and quality.
There's about 30 unique stages in the game (and a lot of reverse versions). That might have been enough, but they are also all extremely short and there's maybe one good one in the entire game. And considering the career mode will have you go through about 25 courses in every class of car, repeats happen thick and fast and by the time you've even reached the group B cars, which are the most popular and a selling point of the game - I was already tired of them.
And the stage design shows some really baffling decisions - whilst each of the 5 location's aesthetic has been gloriously adapted, the nature of their roads has most certainly not been, and it's incredibly frustrating. Every location ends up feeling the same when in real life there's so much more variety and soul to the tracks themselves. Finland is a particular shame, as it's claustrophobic, tree lined roads in real life feel exactly like every other road in this entire game. Different coutries' rally stages are literally like mario worlds in real life and somehow the artsy videogame version makes them makes them all the same.
There's also a mind-boggling choice to keep the road surface at the same, incredibly wide width for every road in the entire game, and there's a severe lack of variety in terms of corner choice. One of the japan stages feels like it has 10 2nd-gear hairpin sweepers in a row and it's remarkably boring. How does an artsy, arcade rally videogame have less interesting roads than the ones outside my house?
Eventually, the stage design's blandness broke through my sheer love of the core aesthetic and feel. And it's a real shame. There's such a love of a lost era here, and it's just one thing away from working.