V Rally 3

The usual time trial and race options are present, but the meat of the game is the V-Rally Career mode. You start off as a rookie driver, not signed on for a team. You are nowhere near competing at full 2.0L WRC level, but 1.6L rally teams will offer you the chance to drive a test for them. If you succeed at this, they will offer you a contract.

Once signed up you are thrown into the rally championship. the brilliant part of this is you are signed up to one of the lower teams, so can't realistically expect to win the championship in your first season. You are set a target to finish as high as possible and that is what you try to do. If you do your best you stand the chance of being offered a deal with a better team so you can attempt to work your way up into Peugeot/Subaru/Ford/etc. elite WRC teams.

This works really well as you find yourself really chuffed just to win a stage let alone a whole rally. There is much more enjoyment to be gained from this than simply jumping into a Ford Focus and flying around the courses on your way to cruising to the championship.

Nursing your battered VW Polo through to the final stage is much more of an accomplishment!

V-Rally 3 does contain some of the official team liveries, but only a few. It does not have any real drivers, but the nature of the career mode does not make this a problem. It's a simulation of the sport rather than a snapshot of the 2002 rally season....

The graphics are very good, I don't think the car models are as good as GT3 (the current benchmark), they look a little more boxy and not as sleek BUT you can lose plenty of bits from your car, they get very dirty, the wipers work and the animation of the driver and co-driver is good. Scenery is also good although the screen does seem to tear a bit at times, showing a dodgy framerate.

The service area shows your team fixing up your (usually battered) car and there are a few little animations between stages which flesh the game out a bit.

As mentioned before, V-Rally 3 is difficult. Initially going in a straight line is a big challenge, let alone attempting any decent sliding, but you can fiddle with steering, acceleration and braking to suit your style and this helps a lot. After a while I was negotiation corners a lot more smoothly and cutting my times. Still some way to go though!

V-Rally 3 has a couple of problems, firstly there are rocks. The age-old problem of clipping a pebble by the side of the road sending you spinning off and smashing your car up. Just daft. It's a shame the learning curve is so steep. It would be nice to get a bit of training or adjust skill levels a little bit.

This is a solid depiction of rallying and worth buying if you can put in the time to develop your skills. Colin McRae 3 is not far off now, and it'l be interesting to see how V-Rally 3 does against that, but VR3 is here first and its career mode is so absorbing it's well worth the money. Read more ›

As far as Rally games go, V-Rally 3 is by far the most involving racing game I've seen to date on any system. I'll get to why at the end of this review, but in the meantime I'll go through the various aspects of the game.

Graphics

Fantastic. Not photo realistic, but very clean, clear and crisp. The car looks fantastic, the landscape is rendered beautifully, the weather is modelled very well - all in all, it really is rather good. When you're in the pits you see inside the car, and several thousand polygons have been given over to that too - along with 3d mechanics working on the car at checkpoints. Damage to the car is represented very well too - pretty much all of the car can be either bent, broken or ripped off... during one particularly determined dash through a stage I was somewhat shocked to leave the "in car" view and see what a mess I had made of my previously showroom-shiny monster :-) More importantly, the framerate is very fast, and gives a great impression of speed.

Sound

What can you really say about sound with a game like this? Unfortunately my PS2 isn't wired into the pro-logic amp at the moment so I can't tell you what the surround is like, but normal engine noises, skids and so on sound absolutely fine. The engine pops and crackles with the best of them.

The co-driver is the first one I've encountered that has some intelligence. Upon careering the wrong way up a farm track he shouted "where do you think you're going!..." - and while leading the timesheets during a stage he shouted "keep it up - you're doing well!"... I know it's only scripted comments, but it really does affect you (usually causing you to try and show off - ending with the inevitable spectacular accidents).

Control

I've only played the game with the joypad at the moment. All control is completely configurable for sensitivity, although I've left it on the factory defaults. At first it seems a bit over-sensitive - you'll find yourself fishtailing around quite a lot, but after a while you learn not to steer too much, and everything becomes more natural. The car reacts as you would expect - not unlike Sega Rally on the tarmac stages. Snow and Ice are a hoot - it's a question of "when does this slip angle on the road become slower than pointing the right direction in the first place".

The Game

This is where most titles either win or lose. What's it like to actually play? I have to say that it is the most fun I've had in a very long time. V-Rally 3 is the first racing game I've personally played where there was a good career mode.

You start as a "newcomer" with invitations to test for several of the smaller rally teams. The outcome of those tests (via "email" on your in- game desktop computer) is contracts offered to you by various teams. As a driver you are evaluated by the teams based on your experience, speed, consistency and respect for you machinery. The teams are evaluated in terms of the car's performance, team morale, reliability and budget.

Once you have tested and signed a contract, you are assigned a "goal" by the team - their expectation of you. In my first season I was expected to finish in the "top 13" of my class that year... I finished 7th in the end (it would have been 5th but for a disaster on one corner of the rally of Great Britain). It really does show how such a small event can change your entire career...

Throughout the "year", depending on how the results are going you get e- mails from your team telling you how well/badly you are doing, and maybe invitations to test for other teams if you're doing well enough. You also get tips - as an example I was informed that Ford were upping their budget for the coming year... a month or so later (after a good result) they invited me to test for them. At the end of the season they offered me the contract - and after signing found out they had put full factory backing behind their car, which is now expected to be the most powerful and reliable in the field.

Where's the catch you may ask? My contract. I have to finish top 3 or I get fired.

Finally a game has a good career mode. Do well, and the top classes and cars are waiting for you. Do badly and you'll soon find yourself taking that drive with Skoda... but then that could always be the season to prove yourself :-)

All in all, V-Rally 3 is a wonderful and complete game. It's very polished, looks good, plays great, and the long-term appeal is fantastic. I expect I'll be getting in quite a lot of trouble for spending hours playing it over the coming months.

Jonathan Beckett
kafooey@yahoo.co.uk Read more ›