Need for Speed: V-Rally 2

"Too flawed to warrant a recommendation."

Rallying is not the ideal motorsport to be translated into a game for the casual racing fan - it's too broken up, too dirty, the cars look decidedly underwhelming to the uninitiated, and ultimately, there's only one on the track if the game is done right. Of course, if you're a rally aficionado, a good game can well occupy you for months, but until Colin McRae Rally was released in 1998, there weren't many that captured the spirit of rallying and were fun to drive at the same time on any platform. This review of V-Rally 2 is heavy on comparison with Colin McRae; the two games were released less than a year apart, which means that they were largely developed simultaneously, and the differences between the two are interesting to explore.

At first glance, V-Rally 2 appears superior to Colin McRae. More cars (more bonus ones, too), more stages, more game modes, better graphics - visually, Colin McRae was on par with the first V-Rally - and a track editor. These are all valid observations and the game is mostly better for them but they don't come without controversial trade-offs. V-Rally 2 definitely looks the part with its relatively high resolution, detailed textures, vibrant colours, excellent car models and trackside animations yet all these features lose some of their appeal after you realise that the developers included them without sorting out the pop-up and frame-rate issues first. Admittedly, the frame-rate drops occur only in the Arcade and Trophy modes which you'll probably play through only once in order to unlock the bonus cars (it may cost you many a win in the process, though) but the pop-up is an issue even with only one car on the track, and it's bad enough to occasionally disorient you.

The bonus cars are definitely worth suffering through the head-to-head modes as you can earn yourself such gems as the Lancia Stratos, the Fiat 131 Abarth, and the Renault 8 Gordini. The beautifully modelled rally cars, each with an authentic paintjob and unique handling, are one of the best features of V-Rally 2. Thus, I was all the more disappointed to find out that the cars don't deform nearly as well as they look - visual damage modelling consists mostly of bending the existing textures, rather than replacing them with new, "broken" ones - and that a lot of them share the same engine noises, not even differing in pitch and/or filter settings. To have a 220HP Citroen Saxo sound the same as a 88HP Renault 8, almost 30 years its senior, is absurd and a serious oversight by the sound department. It's not the only one, unfortunately: the in-game sounds are bland and the nice gesture of having both a male and female co-pilot is marred by both of them sounding totally disinterested. This is a far cry from Colin McRae's roaring engines, disturbingly realistic sound effects, and the one and only Nicky Grist.

So far, the V-Rally 2 is lagging behind Colin McRae somewhat - but there is a Joker up its sleeve: the physics engine. I've read reviews that praise Colin McRae as the ultimate rally simulation and others that say that V-Rally 2 is an arcade racer (and some that do both at the same time), but anyone with some racing-game mileage behind them will be quick to dismiss any such nonsense as the game's physics engine is really quite advanced, encompassing everything from the standard ride height and spring stiffness to fine details like turbo lag. You'll notice right from the start that the gameplay in V-Rally 2 is much less erratic than in Colin McRae: you need to think ahead and drive more judiciously as simply dropping a gear and doing a full lock with the steering wheel won't save you here if you misjudge a turn. The cars behave very realistically on dry tarmac and snow (the racing line definitely applies on the former), less so in the rain and on gravel where they still tend to have too much grip - but even so they're a joy to drive once you come to master them. I rarely drove time trials in Colin McRae whereas in V-Rally 2, I often find myself driving through a stage five or six times even though I just meant to check how changing a setting would affect the handling of the car - a real credit to the programmers. The dual-analogue controller is essential, though I wish you didn't control 2/3 of the throttle with the final third of the stick's travel and that dead zone were adjustable.

A rally fan's dream, then - yes, if you weren't awoken from it each time you veered off-course. Or rather, would veer if the game let you. But as it is, there is an invisible tunnel around the track that for the most part begins less than a few feet off the edge of the track while occasionally, its walls seems to extend onto the road itself, often bringing you to a complete halt or even forcing you to reverse out of the trap. Lamp-posts and trees, on the other hand, aren't even objects, so whenever they're inside the tunnel you can safely drive right through them. Such faulty collision detection would border on unacceptable even in an arcade street racer, but the annoyance that it causes in a rally game together with the invisible tunnel must be experienced to be appreciated. If I could change only one thing about V-Rally 2, there would be no debate.

It's all further downhill from here, I'm afraid. While neither V-Rally 2 nor Colin McRae carry a WRC licence, the latter retains all of the spirit and then some of the terrible WRC Arcade but V-Rally 2 feels as if the designers were barely aware of motorsport fundamentals. For example, there is an "over/understeer" setting; racing game developers should know that either of these is the result of the chassis set-up, not something that you can adjust independently The ability to do partial damage repairs is another case in point and the fact that you can do them after each stage (of the mere three per rally) makes you a sloppier driver, too. Furthermore, the car set-up isn't included into the time limit which means that rally driver's eternal dilemma, namely damage repair vs. car set-up, isn't applicable anymore. It hardly matters, though, as most of the time, you'll either be finishing way ahead or way behind your competitors with little regard to your performance: the algorithms V-Rally 2 uses to compute your opponents' times are questionable at best. This is most obvious in the Trophy mode where you could be physically winning races yet falling behind the competition time-wise.

Most of the above problems aren't fatal but the sheer number of them makes for a less enjoyable experience of the game. Probably the single most disappointing aspect of the game is the lack of attention to detail, however. Colin McRae oozed class and though you can't judge a game on style alone, it made a world of difference to me. V-Rally's faults, such as inconsistent menu graphics and layout, and translation issues in the English version of the game mostly don't affect the gameplay but there are others that can drive you mad if you stumble upon them at the wrong moment, such as set-up settings that reset themselves every once in a while, pace notes which tend to be inconsistent, come too early or too late, and are sometimes just plain wrong - I could swear they got their "opens" and "tightens" samples mixed up on several stages - the absence of current standings list after each stage of a rally, and seriously confusing menus: I was actually ready to take the game back to the store because I thought that the controls were not customisable. Well, they are, but good luck finding the appropriate menu. One feature where the game does excel, however, is memory card management; there may be only one user slot available compared to Colin McRae's five but on the other hand, the game supports auto-saving which means that the car settings and times for each stage are always stored for future use (handy when the game occasionally freezes up). You can also merge your records with those from another memory card, which adds to the longevity of the game, as do the reportedly excellent 2- and 4-player modes and the track editor which, however, I found to be more trouble than it's worth.

From all that's been said, you could infer that the two games are almost complementary: the few areas that are lacking in Colin McRae are in turn the only strong points of V-Rally 2. Indeed, if you put the two together, you'd have the perfect rally game for the PlayStation. Codemasters must have kept an eye on the competition as Colin McRae 2.0, the final word in rally simulation not only for the PlayStation but the final word full stop, noticeably took cues from V-Rally 2. As it is, I wanted to like it and I'd love to recommend it, but the shortcomings simply outweigh the enjoyment to be had with the game. Even in an alternate universe without the two Codemasters' games, V-Rally's flaws would still drag the game down in the end.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 04/26/05