There’s a very specific kind of memory that gets dredged up by the right kind of racing game, and #DRIVE Rally dredged mine up almost immediately. I was maybe eight or nine, glued to the telly watching the Lombard RAC Rally, utterly mesmerised by blokes chucking cars sideways down forest tracks in the pitch dark like it was nothing. I didn’t understand pace notes or tyre compounds or any of it. I just knew I wanted to do that one day, and apart from an hour’s Silverstone rallying experience a few years ago, I never really have, so any game that scratches that itch even slightly starts with a bit of goodwill in the bank.
#DRIVE Rally, from Polish developer Pixel Perfect Dude and published on console by PM Studios, cashes a decent chunk of that goodwill in, even if it never quite spends the lot. This is the follow up to Pixel Perfect Dude’s mobile hit #DRIVE, and after a long stint in Early Access on PC it’s finally made the jump to PS5 (Xbox and Switch owners get it too). It knows exactly what it’s trying to be: a bright, breezy, 90s-throwback rally game where the point-to-point stages matter more than the story, because there isn’t one.
That’s not a criticism in itself. Plenty of great arcade racers have got by on vibes alone, and #DRIVE Rally has vibes to spare. You pick a team, each with its own chattering co-driver, and set off across a string of fictional but clearly rally-inspired locations, everything from sun-baked desert roads to icy forest stages, in cars that look suspiciously like an Audi Sport quattro or a Renault 5 Maxi Turbo wearing a fake moustache. It’s cheerfully unlicensed and better for it. The colours pop, the dirt kicks up nicely, and there’s a genuine sense of speed even when you’re pootling along at what a real rally driver would consider a Sunday drive.
Where it lands, tonally, is somewhere between Assetto Corsa Rally (which is genuinely brilliant, go and play that too) and the Dirt series, but nowhere near as polished as either. It’s lighter than AC Rally by design and rougher round the edges than Dirt by circumstance. The handling model is where this is most obvious. It’s accessible almost to a fault, closer to Sega Rally all those years ago than anything with actual weight transfer to worry about. Give it half an hour and pretty much anyone can be sliding round hairpins and feeling like they know what they’re doing, which is a real skill on the developers’ part, but it does mean the driving never gets much deeper than that first impression. There’s a floaty-arcadey-pretending-to-be-Group-B-em-up going on here (it’ll catch on), and once you’ve clocked how forgiving it is, the challenge mostly evaporates.
The visual style is cool but basic. It leans into a flat-shaded, slightly toy-like look that suits the retro pitch well enough, and the lighting does some heavy lifting when the sun’s coming through the trees. But there’s not a huge amount going on underneath it, and a few hours in you start noticing the same rocks, the same fences, the same bit of scenery recycled down every other stage. The co-drivers, who should be doing a lot of the personality work here, end up being part of the problem rather than the solution. The pace notes are fine when they’re needed, but the actual character chatter repeats itself far too readily, and after enough events you’ll be reaching for the mute button rather than enjoying the company.
Repetition is the word that kept popping into my head, if I’m honest. The championship structure asks you to do broadly the same thing across every team, just with a different coat of paint and a marginally faster car, and #DRIVE Rally doesn’t do enough to disguise that. It’s the sort of game that’s a genuine joy for a weekend, less so as a long-term project. On PS5 specifically it runs smoothly enough day to day, though I did notice some scenery popping in a beat later than I’d like.
None of that stops it being good fun in short bursts. There’s real charm here, and if you’re the kind of person who just wants to chuck a colourful little car sideways for twenty minutes without thinking too hard about it, #DRIVE Rally will happily oblige. It’s not going to replace your Dirt or your Assetto Corsa Rally, but it’s not trying to. It’s trying to be the game equivalent of watching old rally footage and grinning, and on that measure, it mostly succeeds.
Reviewed on PS5
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