The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

PHYSICS

VEHICLES

TRACKS/EVENTS

• Rally tracks are done very well, filled with jumps, bumps and obstacles, but longer tracks often feel drawn-out, as if driving the same thing over and over again. Long stages are uncommon, but when they appear they can take in excess of 10 minutes to complete - simply too long for their own good.
• V-Rally Cross suffers from the same issue as Rally, but in a far more severe form. While tracks are again very fun and well-made, events are normally 6 laps, which begins to feel quite long. Championships are especially bad as they force a 4-lap, 6-lap, and another 6-lap race around the same course, often meaning it takes 15-20 minutes to move on.
• Hillclimb events, in part due to how fast they are, do not suffer from the same length problems as Rally. It's also the only category I haven't noticed any major issues with.
• Buggy events suffer from the repetition issue, but not as badly as V-Rally Cross. Unfortunately, the track design in this category isn't nearly as good as in the last three. Oftentimes, it seems geared towards a trial-and-error type of gameplay, where it's practically impossible to drive the tracks without crashing the first time. Here, restarts seem like an expectation rather than an option.
• Extreme-Khana doesn't live up to its name. It's gymkhana but worse. Tracks are visually cool, but while driving, they are deeply lacking. Jumps aren't placed very well, donutting sections that aren't clearly marked and are difficult to get around, and most importantly, the tracks sometimes change dynamically - they couldn't even make a real, static course.

CAREER

• Teams: You have a research crew which makes vehicle upgrades, a mechanic crew that repairs your car, and an agent that finds events. All of these can be upgraded up to level 20 as the career progresses.
• Vehicle unlocks: Vehicles are split into tiers. New tiers are unlocked by buying a car in the previous tier. This ends up being quite annoying as much of the time, you can't buy the car you want, even if you have enough money. To make matters worse, cars in higher tiers are not guaranteed to be better and are often worse.
• Upgrades: Vehicle upgrades unlock based on the amount of time you've spent driving said vehicle. This gets annoying as, again, you can't buy upgrades even if you can afford them. That said, upgraded vehicles feel very different to normal ones and are great to drive.

AI

GRAPHICS & PERFORMANCE

ONLINE

MISC

• Audio/music: Unremarkable audio for a racing game. The soundtrack is one song in the menu, which you should probably disable before it gets annoying.
• Tuning: Don't bother.
• Co-drivers: These guys aren't useful. They read the corners way too late. I turned them off.
• Penalties: The penalty system is obnoxious. Manual respawns can add 10 seconds on the time, which sucks after you've just crashed. Penalty-giving cones in Extreme-Khana are also horribly placed.
• Damage: Small taps might cause lots of damage, large crashes might not do anything. Inconsistency isn't great when it affects vehicle performance.
• Game crashes: It crashes randomly. Infrequently, but it happens.
• DLC: 4 DLC cars and a few miscellaneous DLC items exist, none of which I've bought or tested. There was no advertising for them in-game.
• Wallriding: Yep. Time trial freaks beware. If you don't know what this means, you can safely ignore it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• They hit the perfect sweet spot between arcade and sim physics
• Once you put in the time, the best cars fully upgraded are amazing to drive
• Much of the game has gorgeous graphics
• Sooo much fun

• The progression system is... complex, unpredictable, really weird and a lot of the time off putting.
• The menu system (picking a car/track) is annoying.
• Much of the game has gorgeous graphics
• Need to get the better cars to really enjoy the game, which takes time.