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.

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

Following the usual FMV, you'll be greeted by a menu screen (complete with strangely relaxing sound effects). Here there are but two main options: a Quick Race mode, for up to four players, and the fully-blown Career Mode... which makes up the core of the game. There's also a "Challenge" section, which acts as a novelty a bit like it's namesake from Colin McRae Rally 2.0.

Single Race mode is a stripped-down affair, just choose from the impressive range of motors (16, if I recall) from either the 1.6L (Super 1600) or 2.0L (WRC) category and take to stages from one of the six featured countries, Finland, Sweden, France, Africa, England and Germany. The cars are of very good variety, only the Skoda Octavia and Suzuki Ignis are missing from the full range of WRC motors currently parading in the real-life championship.

Being an unofficial game which has not signed the major licences, V-Rally 3 cannot claim to have all the official liveries, however. It's worth a tiny bit of criticism, but given how well the rest of the game has been made, you can't complain. There's not really much of a problem at all -- the Peugeot, Ford and Toyota all have 100% official liveries, as do all the 1.6L cars. The Mitsubishi, Subaru and others have convincing 'replicas' of the WRC liveries, which is perfectly fine.

The Career Mode however is the most impressive part of V-Rally 3. It basically puts you into the position of a real rally driver competing in the World Rally Championship. Your aim is to win the 1.6L series, then to upgrade to the WRC championship and start winning there as well. But you'd best be warned, this is far from easy, and requires a special kind of committed gamer -- but it is essentially one of the most rewarding experiences you'll find in a vieogame, if you do succeed.

First you need to sign a contract, something usually done by checking your email for proposals from teams. You can then test for them and if you set a convincing time, the team is likely to hand you the keys to the car for the rest of the season. You'll be given a goal -- likely to be along the lines of "finish this year's series in the top ten." If you fail, you'll be dropped and will have to find a new team and contract.

If you fill the goal, you'll find your Inbox full of offers from high-spec teams wanting more of your developing talent. Oh yeah, and there's the option of renewing your contract with your existing team which will allow you to develop the car into something better and better.

In the 32-season career you can expect to experience the frustration of setting times seconds off your oponents and making some pretty daft mistakes under pressure which could eventually have you sacked from your team. But you'll also have the joy of fulfilling goals, the first win, and maybe even promotion into the premier league.

Mind you, it's the gameplay which is most vital here. It could take up to 5 seasons just to adjust to the game, so you'll need patience. Driving is far from easy -- you'll have experienced plenty of crashes, and plenty of bad results, but that'll be the making of a top V-Rally 3 gamer, being a hard simulation you may suffer a lot of frustration before you reach the top.

That's not to say V-Rally 3 isn't good. It's surely one of the best titles you'll find in it's genre. Easily better than the floaty-effect of WRC's driving, and miles ahead of Ubisoft's clumsy Pro Rally 2002. It just requires nerve, and if you don't have that, you'd best not bother with this title. It's one for those who want a game which will out-hardcore the opposition: a task V-Rally 3 will indeed occupy very well indeed.