Pocket Rally – Review
“Not another racing game!”, I hear you shout in the distance. Its true that racing games are quickly becoming a dime a dozen, on searching though there is a distinct lack of rally racing games. You guys can have a quick search to double check, I can wait. When a style of game becomes this big, it begins to branch off into different categories. Rally racing games is one of those branches, and the developers behind Pocket Rally have jumped at the chance to release a product in that niche market.
Pocket Rally is powered by the Unity engine, and makes a great first impression, you drive around a dirt track making sure to avoid the trees. The controls are reminiscent of the old sega arcade games, the steering is done by turning the whole phone this contributes to the natural physics in the game, by turning to hard you run the risk of spinning out of control. You get a collection of different types of missions, some are time attacks, while some pit you against other car. At the moment I have not changed track, different games and opponents but always on the same dirt road in a field.
Don’t be fooled by the description for this app “four tracks, including forward and reverse variants,” which I thought would mean you get eight tracks, but you don’t, you get two tracks and the reverse variant. I took me a couple of hours to work through the entire campaign, but after you have unlocked all there is (cars and the other track) there really is no point to continue playing. There really isn’t much to this game, once you have scratched the service you realise thats it. Theres no car customization, leader boards, downloadable content or additional tracks.
The whole production of the game feels like a throwback to the N64 or the dreamcast. The graphics are blocky, the trees are two dimensional and the overall look of the game feel cheap. I read that people feel Pocket Rally feels like a proof-of-concept demo for a good game, I have to agree with them. The controls are intuitive, physics are decent, and is better then a lot of games out there at the moment, but there is just nothing to it. The link for the game is below:
