Games worth discovering

Why I love rally racing games the best

5K View2023-11-14

Rally racing fans have been eating well this year: We’ve had the surprisingly good Rally Adventure DLC for Forza Horizon 5 and the thundering return of Codemasters in the excellent WRC at new publisher EA Sports. On top of those, we’ll soon be able to play Funselektor Labs’ elegant Art of Rally on mobile devices. While I’ve had the chance to check out several other great racing games this year, like F1 Manager 2023, The Crew: Motorfest, and Forza Motorsport, my heart belongs to the open road of rally racing, and I’ll always return to its simple, anarchic ethos of plowing down dangerous roads in some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes.

Like any professionalized sport, rally racing has developed some confusing rules over the years, but at its core, it remains extremely simple: Given a pretty normal car of certain specifications, you must drive over a course of road as quickly as you can, ideally without tumbling into a ravine or being dashed to pieces against a rock. Sometimes these roads are paved, but they frequently aren’t, and you may have to contend with extreme weather—snow, rain, searing heat—depending on which rally you’re driving in.

Rally racing involves a single car at a time, there’s no starting grid and no scrum to fight your way through in this sport. It’s just you and your car versus the road, and of course the clock. The roads are formidable opponents too. This year’s Rally Sweden took place in the wintry forests of Umeå in the northeast, while Rally Italia was held on the rugged gravel roads that crisscross the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

There’s a frantic, moment-to-moment survival aspect to rally racing. Bumping along over mountain roads that are sometimes barely improvements on goat trails, it’s skill and muscle memory that make the difference between successfully navigating a hairpin turn and careening over the edge. An odd dip or bump in the road can throw off your traction and smash your car against the sheer rocks heading up the side of a mountain.

Another terrific homemade aspect of rally is the codriver’s job of reading out pace notes. GPS navigation? What, you mean easy mode for tiny babies? Nah, mate, you’ve got a guy with a notebook, and you’d best listen carefully to everything he shouts at you because you’re going to want to know that you can’t cut that left turn coming up in about two seconds.

All racing is dangerous, but rally driving has a specific, do-it-yourself daredevil quality to it. You’re doing all this in something like a Ford Focus or Subaru Impreza—hatchback styles you’re likely to see in a random Target parking lot. For pro rally events, of course, these cars are outfitted and tuned for the purpose, and games like WRC give you the chance to go under the hood and make the kinds of replacements and adjustments you need to stand a chance in these brutal competitions.

That's all well and good, but it's not what I come to rally games for. I want that elusive feeling of being right at the edge of controlling my car, just a hair's breadth away from completely losing it at all times. For this, I find that some of the more casual rally games are almost as good: Forza Horizon's Rally Adventure is an absolute blast to play, and I love the zen approach the Art of Rally takes in boiling rally down to its very essence, stripping away everything but the car and the always-winding road.

If all this sounds interesting, I'd suggest checking out the games I've mentioned here:

Art of Rally is a perfect entry point for anyone curious about rally
Forza Horizon 5: Rally Adventure is a casual rally experience that provides a good introduction to the format, with pace notes
WRC provides something closer to a hardcore sim, with a season and team to manage as well as the most technically demanding driving

If you're a big rally fan, I'd love to hear about your favorite game experiences, but I'm also keen to hear about what you love about other types of racing as well. Hit up the comments to let me know!