3.5/5 ★ – hunkypet's review of V-Rally 4.

V-Rally 4, where to start. This game has as many pros as it does cons and makes it one hell of a hard recommendation. I had V-Rally on the PS1 and is quite possibly where my love with rally games started. That was a difficult game (or at least for me as a kid), cars were twitchy and kicked and screamed at every corner begging to be tamed and mastered. I’m glad to report V-Rally 4, the very surprising reboot of the series keeps its signature feel. This is its biggest strength and it’s biggest downfall in a genre where driving mechanics have become far more uniformed, V-Rally 4 sticks out as a game that truly feels unique, for better or worse. You’ll start and be tested. The game will push you to the limit and you’ll think about quitting, I even considered giving up within the first hour. The driving is loose, wild and slippy. It’s like driving on a permanent ice rink, until it clicks. When it does click, it is easily one of the greatest driving experiences I have had in a game. V-Rally 4 demands you to bend to its way of thinking. It’s an uphill battle, but once you have the hang of it you are rewarded with immensely deep and rewarding gameplay. Battling and trying to tame a classic Rally car like the Lancia Delta S4 is peak enjoyment for me. There are endless settings in the menu to tweak this and that, I didn’t touch any of these, i wouldn’t even know what they meant. The game constantly pushed my limits of risk and reward. Every time I felt like I had a grip on the driving, the next car would handle completely differently and I’d have to counter a whole new way of driving. The car rooster is strong in it’s a rally mode but fairly weak in its other disciplines. Rally’s are the games strongest discipline, the designers chose not to limit themselves to real life tracks and made completely fictional tracks that were expertly crafted and full of spectacle routes and vistas. My favourite location had to be Malaysia, stunning jungles open onto beachfront roads in the gorgeous sunlight, but equally impressive when you set it to nighttime and the fog is crawling in. The random track generator was a nice bonus keeping me occupied for long after I did the 4 stages per location. The V-Rally events are not a strong point, there is a handful of cars to choose from on a handful of fairly simplistic circuits, it’s a poor imitation of better games versions of closed circuit X game style events. Extreme-Khana events are fairly strong, you use hyper powered cars around extremely tight and cluttered tracks that use environments and objects as obstacles to pass in thrilling and intense races. Hillclimb was my second favourite discipline much like rally’s but with super powered cars descending and ascending hairpin turn after hairpin turn on open roads & finally buggy races had the potential to be really fun as they always ended up in chaos (in a good way) it’s just the tracks like V-Rally were very basic. The most frustrating thing with V-Rally 4 is it’s career mode, simply put it’s crap. It’s a real mess and a huge waste of potential. You start with an hour long tutorial, with a woman talking to you nonstop about what everything in the menus mean, it’s frustrating to say the least. Finally it opens up and it’s a mess, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. You have to employ a crew of mechanics, engineers and researchers and manage their wages on a week to week basis. You are bombarded with contracts and conditions to meet at all times, progression is slow as you earn little money and everything is pricey. It was clear it was gonna be a slog and I was up for it as the driving is so good but what tipped me over the edge was the AI’s wildly inconsistent difficulty. I could lead a stage of a rally by 20 seconds to then do a flawless run on the next event and then finish last place 40 seconds behind the leader, I dropped difficulty and found this still to be the case. I did some looking online and this is a common complaint, I decided to call it a day at that point. I decided to make my own fun, using the quick event option I set myself the challenge of going through every discipline, every location, every track using every car. This is where V-Rally really starts to show its budget, this mode is barebones, the random track generator is a god send but a time attack or a mission mode would have been nice, something to strive towards. With this style of jumping from race to race in Quick Event mode it really highlighted how long the game would take to load in between each race, 20-30 seconds, not very good. The presentation is a real mixed bag aswell. Speaking of waiting in between races while it loads, the style of menu they choose is god awful and frankly terrible looking. Some levels can look gorgeous while others look flat and lifeless, this would largely depend on the lighting and time of day you raced at. The lighting is a strong point, it really can change the whole feel and look of a race, though in night races the light reflection from headlights on the environments and other cars is shockingly bad, like a 2005 implementation of bloom. The car models are decent not amazing, they don’t sound great either. I found the HUD to be cluttered so I would clear it to just the progress notes so I would know what way to go. No music in races either, no problem on PlayStation as can play Spotify but the menus has one tragic song on loop that drove me mad, so that was disabled. Budget really starting show. On a closing note I will say - Playing V-Rally 4 no HUD with my music playing over the top, laser focused on the rally, It became cathartic. For me no genre can really match when you click with a Rally games mechanics and with V-Rally 4 it happens over and over because you have to master so many types of cars, the sense of accomplishment is unparalleled. I can easily say this has been my most relaxing and favourite gaming experience in a very long time. All in all it’s a really strange experience, it was slated upon release and has picked up something of a cult following and I have to say I agree. If you’ve taken the time to read this review you can tell I’m passionate about this game I’m fully aware of its problems, but If you’re a fan of driving games please look past this games many, many flaws and take it on its driving value and you will be overjoyed at what a diamond in the rough this is. Played on PS4 Pro