#DRIVE Rally Early Access Review / Preview

#DRIVE Rally takes the casual driving / drifting game #DRIVE to a new level. #DRIVE Rally features multiple distinct themes like snow, desert and forest with multiple tracks and many paths through each. It’s a delightful casual rally game that perfectly melds rally racing, accessible racing simulation and drifting into a neat package with a smooth FPS bow on-top.

The game is only in early access, so it gets better from here but what’s available now, in its current form, while not perfect yet, is a beautiful time waster that achieves what it sets out to do already. Let’s dig into it.

The Concept

#DRIVE Rally features two modes currently: championship and quick race. These are Rally time trials so you’re always alone (unless you have ghost mode on). In championship you earn cash and car parts but drive a fixed vehicle each race (that’s aligned to the map). In quick race you can choose your vehicle and add customizations, along with pick your map.

The team you choose to race for will determine the tracks you race on, with each having a unique theme associated with them. You’ll work your way map by map racing against local (NPC) and worldwide times. That’s about it. As you play more championship, you earn more money and parts which carry over into quick play.

The Controls / Driving

As a casual rally simulator it has extremely tight controls, depending on the quality of the vehicle. One of the nitpicks I have is the early game cars… suck. It takes about ten races in to get a vehicle that can actually drift, stick into turns and accelerate quickly. The earlier vehicles, while showcasing the distance in overall “vehicle quality” I would call it, do flaw up a beautiful gem a smidge.

The controls themselves, on mid-tier and higher cars, is fantastic. You’ve got to make key decisions on how you’ll approach a turn based on how fast you’re approaching it. Do you slow down and take it slow, do you try to use the hand break to drift or do you slam into the wall, lose your momentum but then take off straight?

Speaking of crashing, the game is forgiving in the best ways. There are time penalties for smashing into the barriers on the side of the road but some pieces of the road don’t give you a time penalty. You can go off the road and not be penalized either. This means you don’t have to run a track over and over to get a good time and makes the game easily accessible.

Graphics and Stability

The game’s voxelesq low-fi graphics show enough detail to pain beautiful pictures but remain chunky enough to give low-fi graphical vibe. Which is amazing as it lets the game at solid FPS rates even on devices like the steam deck. #DRIVE Rally really is a highly accessible rally game, which I love.

The game is stable, no crashes, no wrong inputs. I have had some trouble getting it to recognize my controller, but as an early access game having to restart a game to get a controller going isn’t the biggest concern.

To be fair, the co-driver ai needs some more tuning. The call outs can be inconsistent,

Overall

If you loved #DRIFT, then this is more of the same but better, a fusion of the Switch version + upgrades, on rally courses with more environmental concerns and less drifting. If you haven’t tried #DRIFT, it’s free on your phone and #DRIFT Rally is great completely standalone. If you want to get lost for a few minutes to a few hours driving around rally courses, then the game is a good fit.

The controls feel great, even if it’s not extreme level simulation like say a Gran Turismo. It still feels good, reliable and great feedback. Really great on keyboard and controller.

You can pick up #DRIVE Rally for PC at #DRIVE Rally on Steam.

Note we received a key from the developer.